this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
585 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
75963 readers
4369 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tbf most people don't download offline copies, they just let all their email live on their provider's servers and never think twice.
Personally, I've used either Outlook or Gmail since 2000 and haven't ever had an issue getting access to my emails.
That is an important point. For all that Microsoft and Google do to enshitify email, all the spying, all the privacy invasions they do monitoring your every click, contact, and the content of every email, they are extremely reliable at storing those emails. If you move away from them, there is a non-zero chance that is greater than the above companies that your new provider will go belly-up and you lose access to email. So there is an incentive to download things, at least periodically, and store them somewhere. If you use a mail client, that's very easy. This is an aspect of tech literacy, like backing up your files in more than one place generally, that very few are taught.
The 3, 2, 1 rule of backups should be taught to school children. Instead, big tech go out of their way to abstract away the problem behind layers of infantilizing services. It works well, until it doesn't.
@Jason2357 @funkajunk I mean that was the initial selling point for Gmail wasn't it? Don't worry about deleting or archiving anything, ever, you can just search for it... Basic file management skills sidelined.
As I said. Works great until it doesn't. In hindsight, Gmail has been extremely reliable for most people, but that wasn't true for some other Google services. I do think a lot of people have probably lost their email because of their password management skills though.
Which, again, is an issue if you need to get your McCauley on and get out the door in 5 minutes flat