Local stores bullshit too, I was at a well known American ‘sporting goods’ store and got an exercise ball of 75cm size (it states on box), it is fully pumped and smaller than a 55cm ball that I have. When purchasing online I’ve had better luck
I have noticed the balls in my local dicks have occasionally been smaller than advertised as well, I wonder if there is some trend or fraud being perpetrated
I still think about my lost address that I obtained when Gmail was invite only. My family still occasionally CCs it and it drives me nuts, I would pay money to at least have it shutdown so they don’t think I received an email. I had email forwarding to another address when stolen and immediately after it was stolen it had the weirdest messages, I tried multiple ways reaching out to google and it still bugs me I was unsuccessful. I’d love the their of my account to at least have it shutdown
Maybe you should send it enough mail to fill it up and the it would reject emails? Send a bunch of emails with large attachments and avoid getting marked as spam.
I got mine when it was invite only too, I had it a very long time.
I use protonmail now -- I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue)
>I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue)
I also have paid services a lot of money where customer service was nonexistent until I did a credit card chargeback or raised an issue with government regulators.
I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to push my state legislature to encode into law with regards to customer service minimums that would cover anyone doing business in the state, free or paid.
I'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer.
And as you correctly note, there I'd no "user service" department.
You can of course push for any law you like, but I expect laws protecting "users" to be toothless. Basically the TOS will boil down to "we can do anything we like" - which I guess is more or less what they say now.
I find it helpful to think of users as distinct from customers because it let's you understand the provider company motivations.
For example, Google's customer's are advertisers. Hence they cull services not conducive to advertising.
Most startups see VCs as the customer. Their business model is to sell shares to VCs in round after round. Seen in that light their attitude to users is rational and users only exist as props to VC sales.
VCs (and founders) are chasing an exit, which is usually acquisition or aquihire. Your use of the service will thus rarely survive the exit.
These are not things to be outraged about. They are all completely rational and predictable outcomes. When you use a service, these are factors you should evaluate.
> I'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer.
I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.
Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.
Thats not exactly a new question. Netscape would also like an answer.
Obviously the short answer, for you personally, is "nothing". You cannot affect either the closing business or Google.
The somewhat longer answer is that there are certainly other mail services that currently exist. So there are still options. And yes, those services will need to differentiate their offering.
[Some will no doubt mention the option to self-host. I did that myself for about 15 years. It's a lot of extra work to do that though.]
Obviously some services (like YouTube) are double-sided. Consumers go there because producers are there and vice versa. But, as you point out, even there you have choices - free with ads, or subscription. (Not that you'll get any "customer support" from Google.)
your paid email address would now always end up in people's spam folder by default, because the big 2 don't trust any email not originating from the big 2
“Modern” risk boards have Australia with 3 borders to defend including the normal and addingcross-map Argentina to New Zealand and Japan to Philippines (I believe this map comes from a risk computer game)
Have they re-balanced the continental rewards etc? IIRC North America had three borders, but was worth a lot more.
However, I have no desire to play Risk again as the dice mechanic is infuriating and it's almost the opposite of a euro-game i.e. Players can get eliminated a long time before the end of the game and the game length can be arbitrarily long. Also, if a player falls too far behind the other players, it's very unlikely that they can turn things around (excepting the infuriating dice mechanic which can let a single soldier defeat hordes of invaders).
Another major feature of Risk (more or less whatever side rules you're playing with around alliances and so forth) is the role of the cards which pretty much dominate everything else in the endgame.
I was hoping that was case but the problem is the message id of the email appears as if google generated it from mx.google.com
Perhaps I don’t know enough here? This would not be the first time a google account was stolen and I’d like to protect what I have, despite having repeatedly tried and having facility members with threads and emails as proof google offered zero help to resolve or even close the account from the their so senders would at least be notified I didn’t get it
I think it’s terrible, I asked one to find a picture I thought was copied to me from somewhere was a quote not knowing it was made by that person.
The LLM uploaded to internet and “found” the exact picture stating it didn’t exist anywhere else, that source is still viewable on the internet despite me immediately submitting a request to remove. It’s not private but I felt like I’d been had.
Caveat emptor