Are there a lot Gmail users who get their address wrong, more than any other service?

12.12.2022/07.13

Kurt and I have very different brains, if you read this thread that I jumped in on. I am sure he is right on how things should work. Get me talking about spacing and spelling, and I’d be in the same boat. Or the use of the word billion. I have my ideas on all […]

Dear Gmail user: your industry has worn me down

11.06.2021/06.07

After three messages I decided I would answer one of those Gmail users asking about advertorial. And from now on I’m just going to copy and paste this to anyone else asking, ‘Why won’t you answer me?’ Dear [redacted]: Sorry, this is why I haven’t answered you (and this is not because of you, but […]

Time to stop entertaining advertorial enquiries from Gmail

04.06.2021/01.06

Last month, I Tweeted that I would stop replying to advertorial queries sent to us from Gmail, since over 99 per cent of them result in no deal whatsoever. In fact, that 99 is an underestimate. One of the early (say mid-1990s to the mid-2000s) rules of the ’net was that if you didn’t […]

Computing in 2021: Gmail’s advertorial spammers, Facebook bots, and Twitter fatigue

25.03.2021/10.40

I’m not entirely sure I need to block out the email addresses here since they’re likely to be burner Gmail accounts, but I’ll give these spammers the courtesy they don’t deserve. As shown below, they’ve been coming for over a year; there’s a chance I may have even received them in 2019. […]

Two big reasons not to use Gmail

03.10.2020/09.14

I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works. If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 27, 2020 PS.: This was the image linked […]

Huawei without Google: isn’t that a good thing?

21.05.2019/08.39

I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing? First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own […]

I don’t do paid blog posts here (so don’t ask)

11.12.2017/00.00

I know we all get these emails from time to time, but they still annoy me. If ‘Peter’ had visited this blog, he would know that every single post since 2006 has been my own, unpaid, unsponsored thoughts. Why would I change that now? You may say it’s a fair question, and […]

When it comes to mass surveillance, forget speciﬁcity

26.06.2014/11.45

Be careful what you say on social media in Britain. English law permits mass surveillance of the big social media platforms, according to Charles Farr, the director-general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, in a statement published last week responding to a case brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil […]

History has already shown us the better way, so why ape an outmoded market leader?

05.02.2012/23.56

A friend had his Gmail hacked, and, much like an Atlantic article I read in the print edition a few months ago, the hackers deleted his entire mailbox. Google says these hacks only happen a few thousand times daily. I’m concerned for him because he has to deal with the Google forums, and we […]