Supporting the good folks

[kjwcode]

I've decided that it's not worth continuing to use Google+ as a social network. Besides, Google is really getting on my bad side as of late, as are several other companies who are trying to squeeze marketable data out of people. Rather than complain too much or tilt at windmills, I've decided to start supporting the good folks.

I switched my main e-mail, calendar, etc. from Google to Zoho after not being able to find any webmail+calendar+tasks+wiki+addressbook packages that I really liked that would run well on my own servers. Rather than using Google+ for social outreach I'm going to give DreamWidth a try. In both cases I'll be going to paid accounts, and in both cases the dollar values each month are very reasonable -- in the range of a latté or two. I don't drink coffee, so I'll hardly notice. :)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Could you write a more elaborate post on your Google to Zoho transition, i.e. why and how? What are the most annoying Zoho's warts? Overall experience?
Thanks.

[kjwcode]

The "why" is mostly because Google treats its paying customers as second-class citizens, and I no longer trust the company in general. They once seemed to be fairly transparent and interested in doing the right thing. They don't seem to be so interested in that now, whether it be the refusal to provide useful support to paying customers, or whether it's their near-obsession with trying to force people to give up their personal information. There is a known issue where Google refuses to permanently disable or delete a Google Apps For Your Domain account (so if your domain expires or you give it up the new owner can't reinstate the same account with your data still intact), and I ran into that at full force. I'm still trying to get them to do the right thing, but getting no communication from them any more.

The "how" is much less interesting. I don't have a big bunch of e-mail that needed to be moved, so I just forwarded the messages to another e-mail address. Zoho has pretty good import tools (upload .eml files or zipfiles of them), but I didn't need to use them.

As for Zoho's interface, it works well for me -- I can't tell you how much you'll like it. Your "annoying wart" may be my favourite feature. They've got a free service tier and they don't ask for any identifying information, so give it a shot if you're curious.

[kjwcode]

Just got another message from Google support -- asking me to take a survey to tell my satisfaction with the "please cancel my account and make it so the next owner of the domain can't use it to get my data or into my account" issue. Needless to say, I told them that I'm not at all satisfied and they need to make it right. To be honest, it's rather what I expected -- "oh, customer's still on us to close/delete the account and we don't feel like it -- let's just wait a few days and close the case". Thanks for that, Google.

[kjwcode]

One more note on Zoho -- the iPad interface to Zoho Mail rocks. I like it much more than GMail on the iPad.