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The post is from April, I'm reposting this because it's even more relevant now, with Australia's data retention due to take effect next week. As a founder of a

• brongondwana 11y ago
  It's nice to see this blog post getting more traffic. Unlike our average blog post which we make up out of our own heads, this one had a bunch of legal research behind it by actual lawyers. And yes, totally agree. It made us put our plans of an Australian datacentre on the shelf for the foreseeable future. Data in Australia is already crazy expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...) and we're working at the latency problem from the other direction (http://jmap.io http://jmap.io) as well, so we're focusing more on making the location of the datacentres not matter so much. We're currently in Amsterdam, Los Angeles and New York.
  • joneil 11y ago
    Wow that CloudFlare link is pretty damning. It's interesting contrasting that to both sides of politics trying to talk up the "innovation economy". To your credit, I'm in Melbourne too and have always thought Fastmail was really snappy, which I assumed was due to Australian servers. So it looks like I was wrong, and your Jmap strategy is right.
  • voltagex_ 11y ago
    Thanks for all your work. I've recently set up FastMail, but damn, kicking the GMail dependency is hard.
    • Sophistifunk 11y ago
      I'm hoping Nylas N1 will help with this.
      • bad_user 11y ago
        Speaking on privacy concerns, the Nylas N1 client uses the Nylas web service for processing mail. So instead of the client using IMAP and SMTP to connect and fetch your email, you give Nylas the right to do that on their server side. What this means is that in addition to trusting Gmail or FastMail with your data, you now have to trust a third-party as well. And that may be cool for others, but doesn't work for me.
        • Sophistifunk 11y ago
          Ouch, I wasn't aware of this, as I haven't used it yet, and my brief poking around the source was mostly focused on the UI. On the plus side, it's open source and seems nice inside, so it shouldn't be hard to add support for regular old IMAP or JMAP if one wants.
    • bad_user 11y ago
      I also switched from Google Apps / Gmail to FastMail and I can't go back even if I wanted to. Biggest difference between Gmail and FastMail in how they handle email is tags vs classic IMAP folders. This can be a turn off for people, but for my personal email I discovered that I want folders. This is because my personal email also has the role of backing up my work email. I've lost work email in the past when switching jobs and I don't want that to happen again. And with FastMail I can simply download my work email in its own folder, so it doesn't have to pollute my personal email. FastMail is also very flexible in its settings. Setting up filters is easy in Gmail but limited compared with what you can do with those Sieve scripts in FastMail. Speaking of the interface, I now like FastMail's interface more, as it makes it easier to switch between folders, or back and forth between email, calendar, contacts or notes. SPAM filtering in Gmail is said to be extremely good, however a certain class of spam has been reaching my Gmail Inbox for the past 2 years with me being unable to stop it - I made the mistake of giving away an email address on my blog and now I get emails related to SEO marketing and bullshit. In Gmail I cannot setup a filter that automatically marks an email as spam if it contains the word SEO. But in FastMail I can do just that. FastMail does CalDAV for the calendar and CardDAV for their contacts. I can sync my Android phone and it works out great. IMAP is also very responsive and standards compliant. And personally I feel good about rewarding a smaller player that plays nice with others because monoculture are bad ;-) Another thing I did after that was to create 2 Google accounts. I'm using one Google account for Google Play purchases and nothing else. This is because Google Play purchases are not transferable. So for example I have an old phone lying around that I gave to my son for playing. Restricted accounts only work on tablets, don't know why, so my son ended up having access to my email, which is not cool. Plus I'm all for paying for apps, but I should be able to share my purchases with my wife. Like if I buy a GPS device, we can both use it, but if I buy a maps app my wife can't borrow it without borrowing my account, along with my email. And I don't like this kind of lock-in. There are some downsides. I could not find a good email client that can do IMAP Idle. FastMail's app works on Android but I don't like the UI. On the bright side that app is simply exposing their web interface, so FastMail works very well in a mobile browser, something that Gmail doesn't do and it matters when borrowing other people's devices. All in all it's been a great transition for me and best of all is that I can now try out other Google services and products without feeling remorse or fear of lock-in ;-)
  • david_ar 11y ago
    > Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world PSA: This is why you don't privatise public infrastructure