Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • It’s 2026 and someone is genuinely shocked that an unprotected web form gets instantly destroyed by bots.
    by gionn
  • I don’t use gmail anymore, it just redirect to my custom domain (I use apple mail, but since I own the domain, I can move to anywhere/anytime)
    by mococa
  • I use a custom domainm professionally. I had a client ask me to “gmail” him some information.
    by dinosaur0001
  • Why not just add extra verification for Gmail addresses?
    by wavewrangler
  • "Blog flooded in spam" but it has less than 50 comments on all posts generally? Or is it assuming they are deleting or blocking the supposed flood of spam comments that is unbearable enough to block gmail?
    by altmanaltman
  • Random little sites that allow and auto-publish user submissions have gotten targeted with spambots for decades. And I mean in the AI era, using an LLM to generate even more capable spambots for every site is super doable.

    This silly submission front-paged purely because of the title, and loads of lazy HNers who just upvote based on the title, not realizing this basically has nothing to do with gmail.

    by llm_nerd
  • Given they accept any input that presumably matches a regex it doesn’t matter which one you choose.

    But if you are looking for a new email provider and de-Google your life, I’m pretty with ProtonMail and their other offerings. Also moved my 2FA and Password manager to them, alongside their VPN.

    by Insanity
  • Has anyone tried Migadu? I was wondering whether it’d be a good option for if I wanted to use it for my business.
    by heltale
  • I've been a proton user for a while but have always shied away from their other offerings...feels like too many eggs in one basket to use them for both email and password management (things I consider to be the most critical of all services I use). Vpn as well! Am I being paranoid? It would be nice to not pay for 3 separate services but I have kind of a blockage about it
    by temp0826
  • proton has some issues that may or may not be issues for you

    - https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/proton-mail-fbi-stop-co...

    - http://thoughtportal.org/2025/02/26/proton-mail-says-its-pol...

    these people seem more problem free so far https://mail.tutanota.com/login

    by zetsurin
  • That ship has sailed. A far as most are concerned gmail is email. So that is now the reality. Google has successfully, without any resistance, assimilated email and the web.

    I run my own mail and I faithfully avoid chrome as much as I can but the ship is long gone over the horizon.

    Sad. But so it goes.

    by jocoda
  • With that attitude, certainly.
    by ghssds
  • What do you use, Fayafox?
    by sharyphil
  • When i worked in small ISP, i did some stats on customer accounts (about 2k customers) and only about 10% was @gmail.com. But it was 5 years ago and in EU.
    by zajio1am
  • I have emails from gmail, hotmail, yahoo and my own domain. Also many browsers. I use Google stuff mostly because it works best. It's sort of how the free market is supposed to work?
    by tim333
  • Not true for me. All businesses of any size, and even most small businesses, that email me have their own domain. Individuals use a variety of services, and even one or two non-geeks use their own domains.
    by graemep
  • I'm having to leave Gmail soon (kicking and screaming) because they've made it so you can't send mail using third-party email addresses anymore.

    I have 8 email addresses configured through Gmail, only a few of which I even own the domain for. My main email address goes back 25 years. I've been using Gmail for over a decade, but I guess I have to switch to Fastmail, which is so frustrating because everyone has standardized on Gmail.

    by joeyaloha
  • I think the difference between Google's DMARC policy for gmail.com and google.com says it all:

      bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.gmail.com
  _dmarc.gmail.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; sp=quarantine; rua=mailto:mailauth-reports@google.com"

  bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.google.com
  _dmarc.google.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:mailauth-reports@google.com"
    by bcrl
  • Wait, wouldn't setting gmail.com to p=reject break anyone using legacy email-forwarding setups and mailing lists?
    by rpdillon
  • Blog is getting too much spam, so they are restricting posts/comments from Gmail.com addresses.

    That's ok, I understand the desire. I also recognize that it's a lazy "fix". I have my own domain and prefer that so I can track compromised sites.

    In quasi-related conversation though, in the last year I have encountered 2 "necessary" websites (insurance, and medical form) that would only accept: Gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc addresses!

    It's frustrating.

    by UI_at_80x24
  • I gave up on reporting spam. Almost all of the spam I get (and I get a lot of it!) comes from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. None of them care much, none of them make reporting easy, and it seems they don't follow up, because the flood of spam never ceases.

    They are "too big to fail": few people can afford to just block Google. This is why I am very happy to see people starting to do just that.

    by jwr
  • Inferred context: It's the (unverified) email field of a blog comment submission form. gmail.com happens to be the domain that spammers pick most often for their fake email addresses for their spam comments.
    by Retr0id
  • I host my own email. I also have a gmail account, that I've had since the beta.

    I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered a person that asks for my email and then looked at me confused when it didn't end in gmail, outlook, or something, and then ask me for another email, as if only that would be good enough.

    by readme
  • Really? I've never really had this. I occasionally get a "huh, is this right?" in person but even that is rare now. And in the past decade, I've had my email rejected by a form maybe, once? twice?

    And most of the confusion in person seems to be down to my choice of TLD: .es and .io (I'm neither from Spain nor the Chagos Archipelago).

    by sandcat_
  • I have my own domain. I've been asked for my email, to which I replied "myname@foo.example" and they replied "myname@foo.example.com?".

    edit: Changed domain based on ButlerianJihad's suggestion

    by tom_alexander
  • I had websites state that the address was invalid because I didn't have an MX record, despite it not being an RFC requirment.

    Also, a lifetime ago, had Hurricane Electric (https://he.net) refuse to accept a sign-up because... I only had one MX record. I added an additional record pointing the same IP, but they weren't happy.. So I allocated an additional ipv4 address to the same server, just to satisfy them.

    It's a losing battle.

    by Daviey
  • I wanted to take a look at Boomi.com but couldn't sign up with gmail, turned on email forwarding for a parked domain to get past it. Stupid behaviour if you are trying to sell a product.
    by mywacaday
  • I own my own domain in the .us TLD, and I've been using it for my email for the past 20 years. When I applied for an "Electronic Travel Authorisation" (ETA) to enter Great Britain earlier this year the app flat-out rejected my email address as invalid.

    Usually, when that sort of thing happens, I just choose to take my business elsewhere or use my time in a different way. However it really ups the ante when a nation-state refuses entry based on that category of technical incompetence.

    by steelframe
  • I get no end of confusion because mine is firstname@firstnamelastname.com. People have told me that isn’t correct.
    by tonyedgecombe
  • I have my own domain and my email ends with a .casa TLD and it not only causes confusion, I have had some websites reject it as invalid.
    by seiferteric