I'm kind of tired of all the complicated political analysis I've been doing recently, so I thought I'd rest with the usual easy update, namely the taking of another shitty E-mail provider to the butchery (sorry for the spoilers). First of all, the service is paid, and the only way to pay seems to be PayPal (the "Pay by card" option doesn't seem to work; not that it would make it much better, since it uses Stripe). Let's remember that PayPal not only requires you to dox yourself, but they have also positioned themselves as arbiters (local) of who deserves to be able to transfer money, and who doesn't:
After the Charlottesville violence, PayPal pulled its services from 34 organizations the SPLC identified as hate groups (Jan 2017; Hatewatch 2017).
Purelymail brags about being cheap ($10 per year), but so what if I can't pay with crypto? Hey, there's a trial mode, but it requires a fucking phone number to sign up for - what a joke! And before you are even able to try it, you're hit with the message "Calculating, please wait. This is an antispam measure that should take about 3 minutes." I really can't be fucked to wait so long for this shitty provider to graciously let me use it. If that wasn't enough, your password needs to get past some arbitrary rating thing before being accepted. It's funny how they claim your password would get broken in exactly this or that amount of minutes or years, as if it didn't depend on the assumptions the cracker makes. I've had it claim that my password that seemed pretty strong would be broken in minutes (don't worry, I'd never use that one for a "real" account, but I'm still certain that's a nonsensical estimate). Ugh! Just let me through, I'll take care of my password strength by myself, thank you very much!
Also, it's funny how they are still beta despite being around since early 2019. I think it's just a way to defend themselves from fuckups. Hey, maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on this service. After all, it's run by one guy. And there are some positives about it. Namely, it supports mail clients (but so does Gmail). Oh, and there is no political discrimination:
The company will not discriminate against its users for any personal or political reason. To the extent possible, Purelymail takes no stance on any political issue. Really, we're just here to provide a service.
Nice to know, but I think very few providers actually discriminate in this way, so not doing so is not that big of a deal. Purelymail also pretends to have good security... and maybe they do, but so what if you can't get in, in the first place? And remember, you're relying on one guy to handle all that "security". Strangely, that page also says this:
During our beta period, we retain backups of deleted email messages for one month. This includes original undelivered messages. We do this to prevent data loss from any mistake or accident on our part.
So, "deleted" means not actually "deleted" in the Purelymail world. Their ToS also says some "interesting" things:
The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice. The Company reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.
Services provided by and payments made to the Company are non refundable, except at the sole discretion of the Company.
"Any" reason? Including personal and political ones? So much for non-discrimination. After going through all the hoops this service requires from you to be able to sign up, they can just trash you and steal the money you've given them. Amazing. Then there's this:
The Company reserves the right to monitor, retain, or disclose any information necessary to satisfy applicable laws, regulations, or governmental request.
Hahaha. I guess there wasn't a reason to give this service the benefit of doubt, after all.