A list (rant) of things that can be shown to bigtech enthusiasts.
In this file I would like to collect a list of things that make me dissatisfied with big tech “services”, especially “free” ones.
1. Services
1.1. Google
1.1.1. Gmail’s IMAP does not support the NOTIFY extension
It has been many years this extension has been standardised, and Google not implementing it is purely a business move.
The NOTIFY extension is needed for proper working of mail clients with Google, but Google does not want you to use mail clients, it wants you to only use their app, even though your business processes might critically depend on it.
In the end, this creates in the users the feeling of “email is an outdated technology”; it is not, but Google deliberately tries to make you think so.
1.1.2. Google’s CardDAV is broken.
Well, it “kind of works”, but is very glitchy.
You want CardDAV in order to synchronise your address book. But Google does not want you to use your own address book program, for whatever reason, it wants you to use their program, or at least work via their API.
In the end, this creates in the users the feeling of “email is an outdated technology”; it is not, but Google deliberately tries to make you think so.
1.1.3. Gmail label filters are totally broken.
It is totally impossible to filter incoming messages by substring.
In my example, I want to tag “[Maxima-discuss]”, properly, as a string. But the best thing Gmail can do is matching “maxima” and “discuss” separately, which is not even close to what I need, because I literally have an email titled “Let us discuss the Maxima and Minima theorem on Tuesday.”