[Chapter-delegates] Google for Non Profits - I think not

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2015, Glenn McKnight wrote:

> Hi All
> Not sure  if anyone is interested for your a  Google Work account for your
> chapter.
> 
> http://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/
> 
> Get the job done with Google Apps for Nonprofits:
> 
>    - Get free access to the Google Apps suite including Gmail, Google
>    Calendar and Google Drive
>    - Work better with colleagues through online collaboration
>    - Store documents in the cloud: 30GB of storage across Gmail and Google
>    Drive
>    - Stay connected from anywhere; securely access data anywhere
>    - 24/7 support; no hardware, no updates
>    - Google Apps for Nonprofits is free for all members of Google for
>    Nonprofits

No, thank you - and I will tell you why:

1) This month (July 2015) sees demise of similar program "Google for
ISPs".  The ISPs were sent a single email in December that this service
will be shutting down. Many smaller ISPs missed that information and
were migrating in a hurry. So the half-life of such product
at Google seems to be around 4 years. 

Google giveth, Google taketh away.

2) Google constantly messes up with the setup of such services.
It's enough to remember Google Apps offered some time ago
for free to individuals - you could not attach the existing
gmail.com account to such a service - everything had to be
created from scratch. And the conditions to do so has been
changing, up to stopping to offer the service altogether to
new customers (in 2012).

3) In the recent months Google Mail spam control got really
aggresive. Virtually all email from freshly-launched domain (I've had
those issues for example with domain names registered for organisation
of some events) ends up in the "Spam" folder. I recently noticed that
some newsletters that I value and have been receiving for a long time -
started being filtered out of the main inbox.

4) For some of us, especially in countries with a high standard of
personally identifiable information protection, the terms and conditions
can be difficult to accept.

I'd rather support the development of open-source tools that can
be deployed anywhere. I know, not that fancy.

Marcin Cieślak