The Good Cloud advertises it offers email service, but this is apparently not offered on free accounts, as I can attest.
Hi,
It seems you are correct, I just checked with support. There is however a story to it.
We started with adding this functionality so initially it was true. However due to a lot of abuse we had to exclude some apps as it took too much resources from support for a free service. The apps are offcourse available for paid accounts:
https://thegood.cloud/en/articles#free-account-vs-paid-subscription-what-are-the-differences
We did however neclect to notify Nextcloud GmbH to our current offering, so thank you for pointing that out. We will contact them to uodate to the current state.
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Perhaps it would also be useful if the other restrictions were described somewhere.
For example, The Good Cloud’s free account requires a password for each share and shares expire after 7 days. I can understand the reasons for expiring shares, but not the need for passwords. Most users will use the link and password together anyway. At least for security purposes, the password is not useful anyway. Worse still. Nextcloud beginners might find this quite cumbersome and be put off by Nextcloud. I don’t use passwords or expiring links. Both are practically unnecessary in a private environment. Many people will think how simple Microsoft 365 is.
Screenshot Share at The Good Cloud
There are also free Nextcloud hoster without the restrictions of enforced password protection and enforced expiration date. Maybe you should tell that to Nextcloud beginners. Here a incomplete list of hosters.
I think we outline the differences in that article correctly. Point 5 outlines the requirement for passwords:
It also states the reason: we had to do this due to abuse.
But I understand you want to know more details, so here it is: We initially enabled shares without requiring passwords, but again… it was abused, we got some content that was in violation of our terms. But the damage was already done: a lot of indexed search engines found this content. The content was confirmed terroristic content, setting explicit passwords on the shares prevented this.
Setting the bar low on signup (just an email, validation of the email can be done later) allows for creation of a user account without validation. So this makes it very easy to provide a non-existing email and share illicit content. But this is done to make the signup experience very easy and that still exists. So I agree that setting passwords on shares limits the user experience, but allowing unvalidated emailaddresses provides a better signup experience and is in my view the better choice.
As I said, we initially saw the world in bright eyes, but our enthusiasm has been tempered due to bad experiences. Due to the massive numbers (~10k extra free users per month) we have to take a pragmatic approach. I also believe this is why the other hosters have stopped offering this service. But we believe it is good to have a privacy friendly alternative in this world, even when the service is economically not viable.
I understand the expiring shares after e.g. a week, but not the passwords. Shares have a length of 15 letters and numbers e.g. https://cloud.server.tld/s/abcdefghijklmno. Nobody will guess the 36^15 possibilities. And if someone posts the share publicly somewhere, they can also post the password. Passwords are only useful if they are transmitted via a different method. I think this is not the case for most Nextcloud users, so it is useless. This also applies to abuse.
The best option here is that users who do not log in for a certain period of time are automatically deleted. As far as I know, this is also the case there.