this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Google getting rid of gmail would have to be hands down one of the biggest internet shakeups since its inception. Gmail has been the de facto free email service for almost two decades now. They have like a 53% market share of emails in the U.S.
Also the shitstorm it would cause, when you can't access an account that you used Gmail to sign up.
Maybe it would finally force the surprising number of websites out there that don't allow for email changes to change their policies. I recently switched every account I could to a personal domain and I couldn't believe how many just don't allow for it.
It's a weird problem actually. There are valid reasons for blacklisting and whitelisting free email providers.
Some sites only allow registrations from private domains. They blacklist all the free email providers, which makes sure that mostly businesses, academics, etc. are signing up for their services, rather than randos who may have little to no value as a user.
However, some sites see the randos as the only valuable users, and sometimes see private domains as a threat since a bad actor could use one to spawn an infinite number of valid email addresses for registering accounts. Free providers make it much harder to create a new address, so they whitelist them.
That isn't the problem I have though, the issue was how many websites don't let you change you email address full stop. Never had one reject my custom domain (but some shitty ones do reject email aliases)
It's likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It's like they've never heard of a UUID/GUID before.
I'm glad I got my own website years ago....it's literally just a function email server for me...no bullshit spam and I can have separate emails for stuff that I don't need to monitor.
OIDC is the future of this, logins tied to an account rather than a service.