Are you mad at Google too?

Yesterday I received an inbox message from Gmail team that read:

Gmail update: Reach more people you know

Ever wanted to email someone you know, but haven’t yet exchanged email addresses? Starting this week, when you’re composing a new email, Gmail will suggest your Google+ connections as recipients, even if you haven’t exchanged email addresses yet.

 

How it works with email addresses

Emailing Google+ connections works a bit differently to protect the privacy of email addresses. Your email address isn’t visible to your Google+ connections until you send them an email, and their email addresses are not visible to you until they respond.

 

Receiving email from people outside your circles

If you receive an email from someone outside your circles, it will be filtered into the Social category of the inbox (if enabled) and only after you respond or add them to your circles, can they start another conversation with you.

 

How to control who can contact you

You’re in control of whether people can reach you with a new setting in Gmail on the desktop. To learn more, check out the Help Center.

Basically what Gmail has done is to enable people on Google+ to send you an email, one per person, without restrictions, unless you visit your Gmail’s new setting on the desktop and create those restrictions. This is an attempt by Google to promote the use of Google+. The new feature has made several people mad, with majority already planning to ditch Gmail for other emailing platforms. The basic argument is that Google has opened up Gmail to spammers. Here are a few collection of the madness in the web against Google’s Google+ promotion.

mdvrdrmn Cannot agree more! Google is trying to force people onto Google+. I don’t need integration, good tools to collaboration when I need it . I have been using gmail for many years now but I’m seriously considering to say goodbye. I have already started to move my (10.000+) pictures away from picasa.

 

timacheson WTF?! I already started receiving spam through Google+ because of this. And I don’t even use Gmail! But I set it to redirect emails to Outlook.com years ago so I still receive emails at my old address. Google+ has been riddled with spam and spammer accounts from the start.

So, if you still use Gmail, Google just gave spammers a tool to send you emails. In fact, anyone on the planet can now send you emails — even if they know nothing about you. They don’t even need your email address. This is because Google counts anyone with a Gmail account as a Google+ user so this tax-dodging corporation can make it look like real people are using its failed social network. Despite doing this very quietly yesterday, the backlash is already so bad that I expect they’ll disable the feature by default pretty soon for damage limitation.

GFail!

 

Chris Paterson Google is getting worse and worse with each passing day. If you’re still using google products, then I recommend you do some serious soul searching. People who use google are supporting a culture that says its okay to violate our privacy. Please don’t support them or Facebook, or any other company that makes money from collecting our personal information. Instead we should be using sites that don’t violate our privacy such as Ravetree, HushMail, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Do you intend to opt out of Gmail too? I’m not…I still think Gmail is the best emailing platform available out there.

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