Google, you are pushing me away. Let me count the ways, and then I’ll go back over the next few days and write up details on each.
- You’ve kicked my friend’s web site out of Adsense, because he has other advertisers that you don’t like. This is costing his company thousands of dollars a month, and you make it almost impossible to speak with someone to get you to realize that his site is completely in compliance with your requirements. Now he’s scrambling to replace that advertising revenue. My gut feel: Restraint of trade: You are trying to push out other advertisers.
- You’ve adjusted your spam filters on Google Apps mail. You did so to ~block~ some email from Twitter, and in the same stroke, I’m now getting spam for online pharmacies and Rolexes. I can’t believe for one minute that you cannot identify Twitter’s mail servers and whitelist those. My gut feel: Restraint of trade: You’ve tweeked your spam filters specifically to hurt your competitor.
- I am now getting spam (caught by Google filters) that was never sent to me. I’ve analyzed the SMTP headers, and noted that they were sent to bill@<other_domain>. These other domains are hosted at Google. My full email address doesn’t appear anywhere in the headers except for the “Delivered_To” line. My gut feel: Google has lost control of its cloud, but their attitude is that for a free service, the users can go “suck it” because free non-paying users can’t open support tickets.
Google is sending me other people’s mail (or maybe just email “misses” when they cannot find another recipient on a nearby domain).
Time for me to find a new email host. Heck, I might even host my own like I did for years. I certainly cannot trust Google to send my mail to me, or to not send other people’s mail to me. Unacceptable.