LEAVING GMAIL
As mentioned in my previous bulletin, one of my first goals for this year was leaving the "free" email ecosystem that sells to or leverages our information for advertisers. I had always been bothered by the Google that became an advertisement agency and imminent weapons manufacturer, but it must be said that there was indeed a time when Google was largely ad-free and entirely concerned with indexing the Internet -- while noble, only a temporary goal. Google of course expanded its utilities for the exchange of information. I still have my gmail from 2005, even though I don't use it for anything of importance.
I registered my riglow at riglow dot com email with its domain around 2011, when I made use of "Google Apps", a free service available when purchasing a domain with Google, prior even to Google Domains' beta launch around 2015. I owned a Chromebook which I used heavily while attending university. It had everything I needed, was lightweight, and only $300, and still only just slightly pre-dated the high-bandwidth rich media bloat of the current internet.
After all this time, Google is most certainly not the same organisation it once was. Its priorities of course have nothing to do with the connection of people to each other or streams of information, but mostly the categorisation of people into advertisement demographics, development of technology without a purpose (AI), and, again, the aforementioned and imminent weapons development. The Google that prided itself on its motto of "Don't Be Evil" is long gone. With this in mind, I started to value my privacy much more in the age of "Free Means YOU Are For Sale." It has brought me to the point where I will most certainly pay more to maintain privacy of things as little as my shopping habits. I benefitted from having the ability to turn off embedded advertisements in gmail by virtue of having a grandfathered Workspace account. There's early adopters of every kind, but it rarely now means that you get free services people must otherwise pay to receive.
So, I spent some time doing my research in hopes that I would find an email host which would also springboard me towards learning how to provision and maintain my own email server. Along the way, I realised there would be much to learn about all these various email hosts that are often best learned by experience. Many services on the surface look identical: describing storage capacity, optional custom domains, anti-virus, and malware and spam protection. It appears that most services reveal the more important logistical things during the sign-up process in the terms and conditions. My suggestion for anyone who also feels confused by all these seeming clones is to skip right to the T-and-C and look for things like contractually obligated uptime, maintenance periods, encryption, storage and usage of what personal or financial data you submit, and service support obligations. Whether you're talking to real people is all the more important these days.
Recommended to me by my girlfriend, I eventually settled on Tuta, previously called Tutanota. Tuta is based in Germany, so they abide by their countries own consumer protection and data privacy laws instead of the scrapheap of such protections structured by the United States mostly to benefit business instead of people. There are a few logistical things that matter regarding its location in Germany. Support and maintenance is based on their timezone. Most email services will schedule maintenance during business offhours. As an example, Friday at 8pm is 1pm central time. This does mean that their maintenance could occur during the onhours of American-based users. In the description of their obligated maintenance, they mention that maintenance will only occur largely unannounced if it will take less than 3 hours. For my personal email, this is not a major problem for me. Additionally, knowing the operations of onsite network technicians upgrading, replacing, and maintaining switches, they largely operate with redundancies in place so as to cause the least interruptions possible. It's never perfect, mind you... but Tuta will always alert you of extended downtime in advance.
Tuta also boasts end-to-end encryption and has mobile applications you can download to your smartphone if you so dare to own such a vector. Close friends will know I own a Punkt MP02, a "designer" barphone with tactile buttons designed for voice-first and lightweight SMS communications. It has Blackberry security, meaning it scans every physical electronic for its signature, to detect physical tampering, and has Pigeon integrated, a Signal messaging service. I hope we see more devices of this nature in the coming years. I bought my phone second-hand and it still holds its charge for about 10 days on standby with good signal. I charge my phone once a week. I rarely use it, but that's the point. I don't want a constant stream of advertisements beamed straight to my location. The Internet just isn't the same landscape when having SMS for Twitter meant I could send a group tweet to my friends asking if they want to link for pizza and I wouldn't get adverts for Domino's and Papa John's immediately after doing so. We would usually burn cruise to Jewel and grab a frozen pizza, anyway.
There is one more detail which stood out to me regarding their terms as it relates to updates of the Terms and Conditions. If there is a change to the Terms and Conditions which are considered substantial enough change to the service and such that you are no longer interested as a result of that change, you may be entitled to a refund for what duration remains in your contract. To this end, I assume there is a conversation between one and Tuta to have regarding both the substantiality of the change and what reasons it may appear to a user are significant enough to undermine the agreement. I recently canceled my Office 365 subscription because it would have defaulted an upgrade which included Copilot that requires opting-out instead of renewing the existing product without increasing the fee and adding services. In such a case, Microsoft's shady practice significantly altered my perspective of the company's trajectory in addition to the useless computing I was supposedly being "offered" despite that being automatic and requiring intervention to prevent. Such an instance indicated two different products, however, and I could have continued using M$ for the same price without Copilot. There could be any reason someone might discontinue using a product, including leadership or ethical changes within the company. It is nice to know that Tuta emphasises that an agreement may change due to a change in terms and that you are not obligated to pay for a terminated contract simply because it has an extended duration and you already paid for it. If Tuta and you both believe "it" is no longer the same "it" you once bought, then you get your money back.
So, this is all to say... I'm leaving Gmail behind. I can be reached at the same email as ever, the aforementioned email in this post, for anything you might like to discuss or to just say hello. For any friends reading this, I'd love to receive an email from you. I'd prefer to send a letter in some ways... but email is faster, as you know. For any acquaintances or "fans", I suppose you are free to email me, but I don't respond positively to fan behaviour (even from friends!). If you'd like to consider Tuta, check out this referral link that will take you right to the page describing their services which, you will notice, are built first on security and privacy: https://app.tuta.com/signup?ref=cEVZOVhxOFE. If it intrigues you, you'll get a month free with that referral key. They'll also credit my account 25% of your first month's payment... something to the tune of 75 cents. So, thank you in advance.
My next technology goal for 2025 will be turning this into a static site that I create and maintain myself, without the use of Blogger. How could the Internet look if we really designed it for us instead of as superhighways for advertisers and the gluttony of high-definition media items? I will be thinking about how to make a website that really is a part of me and not just an easy off-the-shelf platform that is also absorbing and leveraging your data. If you happen to check-in before I make a full post about it, you will likely already see the difference in appearance once I get this thing rolling. It will likely coincide with the domain changing to match my email.
Thank you for taking the time to read and connect with me.
I registered my riglow at riglow dot com email with its domain around 2011, when I made use of "Google Apps", a free service available when purchasing a domain with Google, prior even to Google Domains' beta launch around 2015. I owned a Chromebook which I used heavily while attending university. It had everything I needed, was lightweight, and only $300, and still only just slightly pre-dated the high-bandwidth rich media bloat of the current internet.
After all this time, Google is most certainly not the same organisation it once was. Its priorities of course have nothing to do with the connection of people to each other or streams of information, but mostly the categorisation of people into advertisement demographics, development of technology without a purpose (AI), and, again, the aforementioned and imminent weapons development. The Google that prided itself on its motto of "Don't Be Evil" is long gone. With this in mind, I started to value my privacy much more in the age of "Free Means YOU Are For Sale." It has brought me to the point where I will most certainly pay more to maintain privacy of things as little as my shopping habits. I benefitted from having the ability to turn off embedded advertisements in gmail by virtue of having a grandfathered Workspace account. There's early adopters of every kind, but it rarely now means that you get free services people must otherwise pay to receive.
So, I spent some time doing my research in hopes that I would find an email host which would also springboard me towards learning how to provision and maintain my own email server. Along the way, I realised there would be much to learn about all these various email hosts that are often best learned by experience. Many services on the surface look identical: describing storage capacity, optional custom domains, anti-virus, and malware and spam protection. It appears that most services reveal the more important logistical things during the sign-up process in the terms and conditions. My suggestion for anyone who also feels confused by all these seeming clones is to skip right to the T-and-C and look for things like contractually obligated uptime, maintenance periods, encryption, storage and usage of what personal or financial data you submit, and service support obligations. Whether you're talking to real people is all the more important these days.
Recommended to me by my girlfriend, I eventually settled on Tuta, previously called Tutanota. Tuta is based in Germany, so they abide by their countries own consumer protection and data privacy laws instead of the scrapheap of such protections structured by the United States mostly to benefit business instead of people. There are a few logistical things that matter regarding its location in Germany. Support and maintenance is based on their timezone. Most email services will schedule maintenance during business offhours. As an example, Friday at 8pm is 1pm central time. This does mean that their maintenance could occur during the onhours of American-based users. In the description of their obligated maintenance, they mention that maintenance will only occur largely unannounced if it will take less than 3 hours. For my personal email, this is not a major problem for me. Additionally, knowing the operations of onsite network technicians upgrading, replacing, and maintaining switches, they largely operate with redundancies in place so as to cause the least interruptions possible. It's never perfect, mind you... but Tuta will always alert you of extended downtime in advance.
Tuta also boasts end-to-end encryption and has mobile applications you can download to your smartphone if you so dare to own such a vector. Close friends will know I own a Punkt MP02, a "designer" barphone with tactile buttons designed for voice-first and lightweight SMS communications. It has Blackberry security, meaning it scans every physical electronic for its signature, to detect physical tampering, and has Pigeon integrated, a Signal messaging service. I hope we see more devices of this nature in the coming years. I bought my phone second-hand and it still holds its charge for about 10 days on standby with good signal. I charge my phone once a week. I rarely use it, but that's the point. I don't want a constant stream of advertisements beamed straight to my location. The Internet just isn't the same landscape when having SMS for Twitter meant I could send a group tweet to my friends asking if they want to link for pizza and I wouldn't get adverts for Domino's and Papa John's immediately after doing so. We would usually burn cruise to Jewel and grab a frozen pizza, anyway.
There is one more detail which stood out to me regarding their terms as it relates to updates of the Terms and Conditions. If there is a change to the Terms and Conditions which are considered substantial enough change to the service and such that you are no longer interested as a result of that change, you may be entitled to a refund for what duration remains in your contract. To this end, I assume there is a conversation between one and Tuta to have regarding both the substantiality of the change and what reasons it may appear to a user are significant enough to undermine the agreement. I recently canceled my Office 365 subscription because it would have defaulted an upgrade which included Copilot that requires opting-out instead of renewing the existing product without increasing the fee and adding services. In such a case, Microsoft's shady practice significantly altered my perspective of the company's trajectory in addition to the useless computing I was supposedly being "offered" despite that being automatic and requiring intervention to prevent. Such an instance indicated two different products, however, and I could have continued using M$ for the same price without Copilot. There could be any reason someone might discontinue using a product, including leadership or ethical changes within the company. It is nice to know that Tuta emphasises that an agreement may change due to a change in terms and that you are not obligated to pay for a terminated contract simply because it has an extended duration and you already paid for it. If Tuta and you both believe "it" is no longer the same "it" you once bought, then you get your money back.
So, this is all to say... I'm leaving Gmail behind. I can be reached at the same email as ever, the aforementioned email in this post, for anything you might like to discuss or to just say hello. For any friends reading this, I'd love to receive an email from you. I'd prefer to send a letter in some ways... but email is faster, as you know. For any acquaintances or "fans", I suppose you are free to email me, but I don't respond positively to fan behaviour (even from friends!). If you'd like to consider Tuta, check out this referral link that will take you right to the page describing their services which, you will notice, are built first on security and privacy: https://app.tuta.com/signup?ref=cEVZOVhxOFE. If it intrigues you, you'll get a month free with that referral key. They'll also credit my account 25% of your first month's payment... something to the tune of 75 cents. So, thank you in advance.
My next technology goal for 2025 will be turning this into a static site that I create and maintain myself, without the use of Blogger. How could the Internet look if we really designed it for us instead of as superhighways for advertisers and the gluttony of high-definition media items? I will be thinking about how to make a website that really is a part of me and not just an easy off-the-shelf platform that is also absorbing and leveraging your data. If you happen to check-in before I make a full post about it, you will likely already see the difference in appearance once I get this thing rolling. It will likely coincide with the domain changing to match my email.
Thank you for taking the time to read and connect with me.
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