28 ms·

Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

649 points by cpbotha 10y ago

AdamN 10y ago
"If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you’ll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third-party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!
- 0x0 10y ago
  I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon
bartkappenburg 10y ago
"I do have FastMail’s Android app on my telephone. The app is a Cordova / PhoneGap / CrossWalk style unit with real-time email push and notification via Google Cloud Messaging (this is a relatively energy-efficient way for android phones to get push notification and is natively supported by FastMail)." Migrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.
  - bartkappenburg 10y ago
    You would still have some meta-data :-)
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      Well yeah but if all Google knows is when you're getting push notifications about email, then that's a lot better then them having all your email. I mean, there's a good chance that the person who just emailed you is using Gmail so they still have a lot of your email even if you don't use it at all. It's all a trade-off.
      - _RPM 10y ago
        Civilians think Gmail IS email. I gave my landlord my email the other day, and she was like oh, isn't there supposed to be gmail at the end of it? I had a custom domain.
        lorenzhs 10y ago
        It always confuses the hell out of people when I give my email as "<companyname>@mydomain.foo". I've gotten responses from "oh do you work here?" to just confused looks. It's really just to help me with filters (and null-route things should the email get too much spam)
        _RPM 10y ago
        What was quite ironic for me is that I bought a ".mobi" domain name, because it was the only TLD that I was able to get so it can be $first_name + "." + $tld. - It seems that the .mobi TLD is more confusing than ever for people. I originally got it as a shorthand to my actual domain ( routing all emails to my primary domain )
  - brongondwana 10y ago
    It's just an edge trigger - pretty much a modseq counter on the entire user (though we have plans to split it up into categories a little more so you know if it's just a calendar change or just an email arrival)
- creshal 10y ago
  The problem with GCM is that there's no real replacement for it. It's just too absurdly efficient.
m0nty 10y ago
> I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam blacklists My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email. "So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?" "No." "So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here." I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.
- bdavisx 10y ago
  Perhaps it wasn't a spammer, it would seem like a really "good" (in an underhanded, evil manner) for for a competitor to try to hurt your business.
  - m0nty 10y ago
    Non-commercial domain, in this case, on a .org address. But there's all sorts of evil can be done with this kind of thing, yours is another example.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.
- 0x0 10y ago
  Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/1149929-my-client-has-been-blackmailed-negative-seo-help.html http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...
childifchaos 10y ago
Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care. Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life. So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia. I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.
- Aoyagi 10y ago
  Downgrade?
- Kequc 10y ago
  I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete. We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes. It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.
- otec 10y ago
  Excellent sum up! What's the point of Fastmail if the servers are in the US?? The author starts his "poem" with Snowden and privacy concerns, but he ends up with exactly the same solution as Gmail.
- jboles 10y ago
  FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.
readhn 10y ago
If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
- cpbotha 10y ago
  In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users. That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.
  - readhn 10y ago
    gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing. We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...
    - mapleoin 10y ago
      fastmail is not free
    - gkya 10y ago
      Fastmail is paid service.
- ElijahLynn 10y ago
  That was exactly my initial thought and then I read " after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire."
- bad_user 10y ago
rasmusei 10y ago
+1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention. I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.
- sbarre 10y ago
  You could use the excellent Chrome add-on Resource Override[1] to make this change yourself if you really want to. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/pkoacgokdfckfpndoffpifphamojphii?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/...
- warp 10y ago
  This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.
- aibara 10y ago
  I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are. I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/ https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/
  - rasmusei 10y ago
    Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)
- 10y ago
im_dario 10y ago
"So far, my conclusion is that this is a service that is technically more than capable of replacing GMail, even for power users. Furthermore, FastMail’s primary (and in fact only) business model is to charge you money for making sure that you can keep on emailing like a boss. Together, this makes for an offer that I could not refuse". Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.
- EGreg 10y ago
  About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?
  - douglasheriot 10y ago
    Google Apps isn’t Google’s primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      Given that ~90% of Google's revenue is its search business (AdWords and AdSense) that's true for pretty much everything they do apart from that core business. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-6-most-profitable-lines-business-googl.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...
readhn 10y ago
"The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence." Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.
- falcolas 10y ago
  This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).
- bad_user 10y ago
  This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed. Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      What about lavabit? They were forced to shut up shop because of a secret order that was for much more than metadata.
deleted 10y ago
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preek 10y ago
Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article? I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five years. Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e. Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages. mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.
  - dividuum 10y ago
    I've been using mutt for a few years before switching to gmail and finally to FastMail. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en or https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html) I wasn't really slower than using mutt locally. Since they are both single page apps you can't "outrun" them by using shortcuts too fast. It works pretty well for me.
- bluGill 10y ago
  Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one. Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.
unicornporn 10y ago
Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year). 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things... One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1]. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-to-run-your-own-mail-server https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may...
- alicewales 10y ago
  Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'
  - joering2 10y ago
    that's only semi true, and probably true if you hadn't checked DO given IP address whether it was previously blacklisted in which case you need to create new server with hopefully pure IP. In case of my own DO mailserver, Yahoo will put you into deferred state for a while eventually will see other emails are not similar enough and give you a chance to go into main mailbox. Unless you have nasty friends who mark each of your email as spam, Outlook Gmail and Yahoo will let it thru to their main mailbox. Also most of my friends are checking spam folder once a week or so, and then its enough for Yahoo to get you to reply to that email once, to consider it being 2-way conversation and all my future emails go to their main inbox without any issues, helping my IP get better reputation. TLDR: most stories of personal mailserver being bad idea because big guys will put you in spam are grossly overstated, unless you plan to use your server to send large amount of emails that contain marketing stuff.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
tanqueray 10y ago
Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think. Did you delete the Gmail account?
noja 10y ago
I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.
ultramancool 10y ago
Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.
- Avshalom 10y ago
  because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of having literally none of your mail ever delivered.
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    I bought a house and run all my bills from my own mail server, so that certainly hasn't been my experience. You just need to configure it correctly and make sure your IP doesn't have a bad rep.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Not really true. I've been running my own email server for years, and it's actually really easy. After the initial setup, I don't think I've ever had and email end up non-delivered.
- keysergalt 10y ago
  Security, Spam Filtering, Better web interface, native apps, two-factor auth, DR, etc. These are just some of the reasons.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Spam filtering?
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail. That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author explains it very well.
joering2 10y ago
> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...] I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you. Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??
arenaninja 10y ago
I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non-starter
- softawre 10y ago
  Privacy != anonymity
- superuser2 10y ago
  Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.
  - arenaninja 10y ago
    Ah I see. The distinction wasn't clear until you brought it up. In that case, it makes sense
  - extropic-engine 10y ago
    They actually do accept bitcoin.
jhwhite 10y ago
How does this work with Google Docs? I have a Google Apps account and I don't want to lose all my documents. Is it possible to have my email usage through FastMail but keep my email address to log in to google so I can still access all my docs? Or do I need to create a gmail address and move my docs over, then move my email over?
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  Yes, all you need to do when moving to Fastmail is update the DNS MX records for your domain so that email is routed to your Fastmail Inbox. Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.
snemvalts 10y ago
But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?
- tjr 10y ago
  https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dingaling 10y ago
  Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS. Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
  - unhammer 10y ago
    Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)
ynak 10y ago
FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features. [0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  100 domains / 500 aliases is just a limit to prevent abuse in my opinion. What the step from full to enhanced earns you is 15 times the storage, the ability to use your own domain(s), and full mobile sync, at twice the price. It seems rather fair to me (I'm on enhanced, ~3GB of email, 1 custom domain, mobile sync).
- Illniyar 10y ago
  What about the family or business plans? They seem to have custom domain even at the lite option. https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html
  - anonova 10y ago
    Oh, that's interesting. I've been wanting to use a custom domain just for forwarding, and the enhanced personal plan seemed like overkill. I'll have to look into the limitations of the lite family plan.
  - ViViDboarder 10y ago
    It says no custom domain support. I only see it at the enhanced option, just like personal.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      Uh, it says "Use your own domain or one of ours" at the top. That sounds to me like you can use a custom domain with any family plan, Lite and Full included. Are you sure that isn't the case?
voltagex_ 10y ago
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  You can use Fastmail for email and still keep your Google Apps account, that's what I've done it seems fine.
- josteink 10y ago
  No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices. Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account. Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email. Android is nice that way.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Unfortunately that requires me to keep paying $6AUD/month for Google Apps. That may be the way to go, ultimately.
    - josteink 10y ago
      Fair enough. I have a grandfathered Google Apps account which costs me zilch and nada, so it's easy to forget that for other people it costs money.
voltagex_ 10y ago
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
0xmohit 10y ago
Has anybody used HushMail [0] or ProtonMail [1]? How does it stand against both free services like GMail/Yahoo or paid ones like FastMail? [0] https://www.hushmail.com/ https://www.hushmail.com/ [1] https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/
- basemi 10y ago
  Hush user here for 2y already. I've the desktop paid account and I'm very happy with it (POP+IMAP) They seem to be more privacy oriented than popular ones. Web UI is nice but maybe not "so nice"? (I do not use it so freq.) Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_provider...
- jmnicolas 10y ago
  I'm a paid Hushmail customer since 2010 I think. Their web interface is sub-par and sometimes it's pretty slow to connect. I was thinking to change for Fastmail but they're a bit more expensive and the mails are stored in the US I think (I'm French). I'll probably investigate this in December when my hush subscription is due.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Hushmail should be considered compromised. They have turned over plaintext emails to US law enforcement in the past.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Thanks, this is interesting. So, ProtonMail [0] and Tutanota [1] appear to be better choices. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota
    - tribby 10y ago
      On the data-privacy front, you may also be interested in Unseen[0], which has servers in Iceland, and Lelantos[1], which routes over Tor. I haven't used either service but they've come recommended. ProtonMail looks interesting. [0] https://unseen.is/ https://unseen.is/ [1] http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/ http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/
Theizestooke 10y ago
I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.
rfrey 10y ago
My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
- exhilaration 10y ago
  It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
  - arm 10y ago
    It’s the top comment right now because it was only posted 5 minutes ago.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
    - Diederich 10y ago
      Yup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      Yap, I noticed a few valid messages there recently. Marked them as "Not Spam" but it was a bit worrying.
    - josephb 10y ago
      Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\
dave_atx 10y ago
I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though. That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps from free GMail. $50 a year gets you an SLA, support, and no ads. It's been extremely reliable for me and I've not had any downtime (that I've noticed) for 5+ years. No performance problems either that I hear folks complain about with free GMail either.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Mostly because it doesn't defeat the issue with data collection. Google Apps doesn't, as far as I've ever been told, bar Google from using it's privacy-invasive "features" on your data. And while you can justify Gmail as a free service that violates your privacy to pay for it, Google Apps offers no such justification.
  - msh 10y ago
    Google apps can be free if you have a old account. Only reason I still have a account. But I am trying to move out of it.
- petemc_ 10y ago
  Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
  - dave_atx 10y ago
    It was down long enough that it blew through the queue for several (most? some?) MTAs which were about ~36 hours if I remember correctly.
    - whacker 10y ago
bad_user 10y ago
I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps: - better shortcuts in the web interface - the mobile web interface is actually good - can import email by IMAP - POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken - IMAP is better implemented - Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and each folder ends up being a connection - CardDAV works and has good picture resolution, when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px - FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible - on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then I can import my huge work email as a backup without polluting my searches and my archive - Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains - FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome, as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not. On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc. And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed. In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 10y ago
  How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.
ucaetano 10y ago
Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...
- richardkeller 10y ago
  Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.
poushkar 10y ago
Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.
rufugee 10y ago
I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email. YMMV.
- kingosticks 10y ago
  I had exactly the same experience. The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use. So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.
z3t4 10y ago
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.
- timdeneau 10y ago
  I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses. It doesn’t matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn’t blacklisted and I don’t send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody). There’s zero recourse. You simply don’t matter when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.
  - z3t4 10y ago
    Are you on a dynamic IP? I used to run a mail server on a dynamic IP, and many people will be butt-hurt about it and block you on sight.
    - timdeneau 10y ago
      The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean. From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by “safely” marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored, which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.
reacharavindh 10y ago
Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends). They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now. (1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and (2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw. I do like : (1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App. (2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp. https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com
- stryan 10y ago
  I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0]. [0]:https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/ https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/
  - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
    > The lack of support for desktop clients Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels? I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      >Do desktop clients support decrypting email? This is the traditional workflow for PGP-encrypted email, and has been for decades. Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.
      - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
_RPM 10y ago
I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes. If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files. Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.
- msh 10y ago
  Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.
  - _RPM 10y ago
    Must you be connected to an Exchange service to get real push?
    - msh 10y ago
      No, they both support at least some imap servers.
- vinw 10y ago
  K9 for Android does immediate push notification. You just need to configure IMAP IDLE. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9
magicfractal 10y ago
Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).
- dividuum 10y ago
  No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to Google servers.
graffitici 10y ago
I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang.. At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..
- EduardoBautista 10y ago
  This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.
peb 10y ago
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
peb 10y ago
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
joshstrange 10y ago
I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
mlinksva 10y ago
Any news on JMAP since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 ?
abtinf 10y ago
Why does FastMail charge a family account fee, thus making it more expensive to have two accounts under a family account than two individual accounts?
- zafiro17 10y ago
  There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.
  - thelibrarian 10y ago
    There is also the benefit of being able to use one custom domain, and have multiple accounts attached to it.
- awqrre 10y ago
  You would probably be paying for convenience (1 bill, contact sharing, etc...)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bbrik 10y ago
How do you handle changing your email address?
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?
  - matt_wulfeck 10y ago
    I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.
    - victorhooi 10y ago
      Why not just download your old mail and archive it then? Google provides an easy way to do this (Google Takeout). As in, I don't see the problem with having more storage - you use only as much as you want. Personally, I find having all my mail searchable from any computer useful. And Google does provide lots of security features (2FA, suspicious login detection, new login alerts, login audit logs etc)
    - tjl 10y ago
      I typically export mail regularly. In my case, I store them in a DEVONthink Pro Office database as that supports directly importing from Apple's Mail.app, has good search, and good cross-referencing support. I really wish I followed this practice sooner as there's mail from the 90s I wish I still had. I've used e-mail continuously since 1991 so it would be a lot of mail. Disk space is the main reason why I didn't do it sooner.
mungoid 10y ago
Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason. With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.
manigandham 10y ago
From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web" Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?
- skummetmaelk 10y ago
  For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.
cm3 10y ago
It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but: Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.
- alanh 10y ago
  Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently
tomfitz 10y ago
I was a Fastmail customer for 3 years (2012-2015), but have since migrated to Gmail. I outlined the factors in this decision in https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eba5316f874 https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb... .
agrafix 10y ago
My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.
mrmondo 10y ago
Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail. Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better. These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kennell 10y ago
The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.
- olalonde 10y ago
  Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.
  - godzillabrennus 10y ago
    You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      If you're using Gandi (a registrar I would strongly recommend), you can set this up from your Gandi domain dashboard: Click "Manage mailboxes" and create a forwarding address. Example: https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png - The MX values for your domain need to be Gandi's default email servers.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime. Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Holy crap... So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff. It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?
estrabd 10y ago
I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.
godzillabrennus 10y ago
Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account. That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.
- stevejohnson 10y ago
  > If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  What did you switch from where the customer service was decent?
mastazi 10y ago
Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.
- tirant 10y ago
  they are hosted in the Netherlands: https://soverin.net/ https://soverin.net/
  - mastazi 10y ago
    Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!
- mastazi 10y ago
  By the way I obviously meant "similar to FastMail", sorry for the typo
Zelmor 10y ago
Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.
confounded 10y ago
Very happy recent convert to KolabNow! Pros: - 100% green energy - 100% Free Software - Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture! - Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and notes (IMAP) - Swiss privacy laws - They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing. Cons: - No 2FA :( - Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for the above) - Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)
- aorth 10y ago
  I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least. I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).
Tergmap 10y ago
Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are communicating with.
greenspot 10y ago
Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard. And you get the Google Apps at a good price.
mankash666 10y ago
Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email like protonmail is the right option against snooping
size12font 10y ago
How good is the search in fastmail?
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Very good. See https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.
outcoldman 10y ago
I also did this trick 2 years ago https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/ https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/, happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.
jonsjanssens 10y ago
As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible (https://soverin.net/features https://soverin.net/features).
moeirs 10y ago
It took me an hour to read all of the comments and replies on this post. But I just noticed that "iCloud" Mail wasn't mentioned in a single word. Interesting.

649 points by cpbotha 10y ago

AdamN 10y ago

"If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you’ll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third-party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!

0x0 10y ago
I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon

bartkappenburg 10y ago

"I do have FastMail’s Android app on my telephone. The app is a Cordova / PhoneGap / CrossWalk style unit with real-time email push and notification via Google Cloud Messaging (this is a relatively energy-efficient way for android phones to get push notification and is natively supported by FastMail)." Migrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...

lorenzhs 10y ago
Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.
- bartkappenburg 10y ago
  You would still have some meta-data :-)
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Well yeah but if all Google knows is when you're getting push notifications about email, then that's a lot better then them having all your email. I mean, there's a good chance that the person who just emailed you is using Gmail so they still have a lot of your email even if you don't use it at all. It's all a trade-off.
    - _RPM 10y ago
      Civilians think Gmail IS email. I gave my landlord my email the other day, and she was like oh, isn't there supposed to be gmail at the end of it? I had a custom domain.
      - lorenzhs 10y ago
        It always confuses the hell out of people when I give my email as "<companyname>@mydomain.foo". I've gotten responses from "oh do you work here?" to just confused looks. It's really just to help me with filters (and null-route things should the email get too much spam)
        _RPM 10y ago
        What was quite ironic for me is that I bought a ".mobi" domain name, because it was the only TLD that I was able to get so it can be $first_name + "." + $tld. - It seems that the .mobi TLD is more confusing than ever for people. I originally got it as a shorthand to my actual domain ( routing all emails to my primary domain )
- brongondwana 10y ago
  It's just an edge trigger - pretty much a modseq counter on the entire user (though we have plans to split it up into categories a little more so you know if it's just a calendar change or just an email arrival)
creshal 10y ago
The problem with GCM is that there's no real replacement for it. It's just too absurdly efficient.

m0nty 10y ago

> I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam blacklists My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email. "So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?" "No." "So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here." I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.

bdavisx 10y ago
Perhaps it wasn't a spammer, it would seem like a really "good" (in an underhanded, evil manner) for for a competitor to try to hurt your business.
- m0nty 10y ago
  Non-commercial domain, in this case, on a .org address. But there's all sorts of evil can be done with this kind of thing, yours is another example.
kbenson 10y ago
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.
0x0 10y ago
Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/1149929-my-client-has-been-blackmailed-negative-seo-help.html http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...

childifchaos 10y ago

Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care. Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life. So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.

lorenzhs 10y ago
FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia. I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.
Aoyagi 10y ago
Downgrade?
Kequc 10y ago
I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete. We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes. It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.
otec 10y ago
Excellent sum up! What's the point of Fastmail if the servers are in the US?? The author starts his "poem" with Snowden and privacy concerns, but he ends up with exactly the same solution as Gmail.
jboles 10y ago
FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.

readhn 10y ago

If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.

cpbotha 10y ago
In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users. That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.
- readhn 10y ago
  gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing. We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...
  - mapleoin 10y ago
    fastmail is not free
  - gkya 10y ago
    Fastmail is paid service.
ElijahLynn 10y ago
That was exactly my initial thought and then I read " after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire."
bad_user 10y ago

rasmusei 10y ago

+1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention. I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.

sbarre 10y ago
You could use the excellent Chrome add-on Resource Override[1] to make this change yourself if you really want to. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/pkoacgokdfckfpndoffpifphamojphii?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/...
warp 10y ago
This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.
aibara 10y ago
I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are. I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/ https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/
- rasmusei 10y ago
  Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)
10y ago

im_dario 10y ago

"So far, my conclusion is that this is a service that is technically more than capable of replacing GMail, even for power users. Furthermore, FastMail’s primary (and in fact only) business model is to charge you money for making sure that you can keep on emailing like a boss. Together, this makes for an offer that I could not refuse". Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.

EGreg 10y ago
About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?
- douglasheriot 10y ago
  Google Apps isn’t Google’s primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Given that ~90% of Google's revenue is its search business (AdWords and AdSense) that's true for pretty much everything they do apart from that core business. http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-6-most-profitable-lines-business-googl.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...

readhn 10y ago

"The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence." Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.

falcolas 10y ago
This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).
bad_user 10y ago
This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed. Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.
- magicalist 10y ago
  > the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    What about lavabit? They were forced to shut up shop because of a secret order that was for much more than metadata.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

preek 10y ago

Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article? I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five years. Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.

Someone1234 10y ago
There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e. Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages. mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.
- dividuum 10y ago
  I've been using mutt for a few years before switching to gmail and finally to FastMail. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en or https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html) I wasn't really slower than using mutt locally. Since they are both single page apps you can't "outrun" them by using shortcuts too fast. It works pretty well for me.
bluGill 10y ago
Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one. Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.

unicornporn 10y ago

Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year). 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things... One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1]. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-to-run-your-own-mail-server https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may...

alicewales 10y ago
Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'
- joering2 10y ago
  that's only semi true, and probably true if you hadn't checked DO given IP address whether it was previously blacklisted in which case you need to create new server with hopefully pure IP. In case of my own DO mailserver, Yahoo will put you into deferred state for a while eventually will see other emails are not similar enough and give you a chance to go into main mailbox. Unless you have nasty friends who mark each of your email as spam, Outlook Gmail and Yahoo will let it thru to their main mailbox. Also most of my friends are checking spam folder once a week or so, and then its enough for Yahoo to get you to reply to that email once, to consider it being 2-way conversation and all my future emails go to their main inbox without any issues, helping my IP get better reputation. TLDR: most stories of personal mailserver being bad idea because big guys will put you in spam are grossly overstated, unless you plan to use your server to send large amount of emails that contain marketing stuff.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

tanqueray 10y ago

Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think. Did you delete the Gmail account?

noja 10y ago

I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.

whamlastxmas 10y ago
I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.

ultramancool 10y ago

Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.

Avshalom 10y ago
because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of having literally none of your mail ever delivered.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  I bought a house and run all my bills from my own mail server, so that certainly hasn't been my experience. You just need to configure it correctly and make sure your IP doesn't have a bad rep.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Not really true. I've been running my own email server for years, and it's actually really easy. After the initial setup, I don't think I've ever had and email end up non-delivered.
keysergalt 10y ago
Security, Spam Filtering, Better web interface, native apps, two-factor auth, DR, etc. These are just some of the reasons.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Spam filtering?
lorenzhs 10y ago
Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail. That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author explains it very well.

joering2 10y ago

> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...] I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you. Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??

arenaninja 10y ago

I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non-starter

softawre 10y ago
Privacy != anonymity
superuser2 10y ago
Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.
- arenaninja 10y ago
  Ah I see. The distinction wasn't clear until you brought it up. In that case, it makes sense
- extropic-engine 10y ago
  They actually do accept bitcoin.

jhwhite 10y ago

How does this work with Google Docs? I have a Google Apps account and I don't want to lose all my documents. Is it possible to have my email usage through FastMail but keep my email address to log in to google so I can still access all my docs? Or do I need to create a gmail address and move my docs over, then move my email over?

pmyjavec 10y ago
Yes, all you need to do when moving to Fastmail is update the DNS MX records for your domain so that email is routed to your Fastmail Inbox. Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.

snemvalts 10y ago

But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?

tjr 10y ago
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dingaling 10y ago
Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS. Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
- unhammer 10y ago
  Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)

ynak 10y ago

FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features. [0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html

lorenzhs 10y ago
100 domains / 500 aliases is just a limit to prevent abuse in my opinion. What the step from full to enhanced earns you is 15 times the storage, the ability to use your own domain(s), and full mobile sync, at twice the price. It seems rather fair to me (I'm on enhanced, ~3GB of email, 1 custom domain, mobile sync).
Illniyar 10y ago
What about the family or business plans? They seem to have custom domain even at the lite option. https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html
- anonova 10y ago
  Oh, that's interesting. I've been wanting to use a custom domain just for forwarding, and the enhanced personal plan seemed like overkill. I'll have to look into the limitations of the lite family plan.
- ViViDboarder 10y ago
  It says no custom domain support. I only see it at the enhanced option, just like personal.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Uh, it says "Use your own domain or one of ours" at the top. That sounds to me like you can use a custom domain with any family plan, Lite and Full included. Are you sure that isn't the case?

voltagex_ 10y ago

Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.

pmyjavec 10y ago
You can use Fastmail for email and still keep your Google Apps account, that's what I've done it seems fine.
josteink 10y ago
No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices. Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account. Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email. Android is nice that way.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Unfortunately that requires me to keep paying $6AUD/month for Google Apps. That may be the way to go, ultimately.
  - josteink 10y ago
    Fair enough. I have a grandfathered Google Apps account which costs me zilch and nada, so it's easy to forget that for other people it costs money.

voltagex_ 10y ago

Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.

0xmohit 10y ago

Has anybody used HushMail [0] or ProtonMail [1]? How does it stand against both free services like GMail/Yahoo or paid ones like FastMail? [0] https://www.hushmail.com/ https://www.hushmail.com/ [1] https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/

basemi 10y ago
Hush user here for 2y already. I've the desktop paid account and I'm very happy with it (POP+IMAP) They seem to be more privacy oriented than popular ones. Web UI is nice but maybe not "so nice"? (I do not use it so freq.) Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_provider...
jmnicolas 10y ago
I'm a paid Hushmail customer since 2010 I think. Their web interface is sub-par and sometimes it's pretty slow to connect. I was thinking to change for Fastmail but they're a bit more expensive and the mails are stored in the US I think (I'm French). I'll probably investigate this in December when my hush subscription is due.
dublinben 10y ago
Hushmail should be considered compromised. They have turned over plaintext emails to US law enforcement in the past.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Thanks, this is interesting. So, ProtonMail [0] and Tutanota [1] appear to be better choices. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota
  - tribby 10y ago
    On the data-privacy front, you may also be interested in Unseen[0], which has servers in Iceland, and Lelantos[1], which routes over Tor. I haven't used either service but they've come recommended. ProtonMail looks interesting. [0] https://unseen.is/ https://unseen.is/ [1] http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/ http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/

Theizestooke 10y ago

I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.

rfrey 10y ago

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

exhilaration 10y ago
It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
- arm 10y ago
  It’s the top comment right now because it was only posted 5 minutes ago.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    Yup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    Yap, I noticed a few valid messages there recently. Marked them as "Not Spam" but it was a bit worrying.
  - josephb 10y ago
    Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\

dave_atx 10y ago

I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though. That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps from free GMail. $50 a year gets you an SLA, support, and no ads. It's been extremely reliable for me and I've not had any downtime (that I've noticed) for 5+ years. No performance problems either that I hear folks complain about with free GMail either.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Mostly because it doesn't defeat the issue with data collection. Google Apps doesn't, as far as I've ever been told, bar Google from using it's privacy-invasive "features" on your data. And while you can justify Gmail as a free service that violates your privacy to pay for it, Google Apps offers no such justification.
- msh 10y ago
  Google apps can be free if you have a old account. Only reason I still have a account. But I am trying to move out of it.
petemc_ 10y ago
Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
- dave_atx 10y ago
  It was down long enough that it blew through the queue for several (most? some?) MTAs which were about ~36 hours if I remember correctly.
  - whacker 10y ago

bad_user 10y ago

I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps: - better shortcuts in the web interface - the mobile web interface is actually good - can import email by IMAP - POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken - IMAP is better implemented - Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and each folder ends up being a connection - CardDAV works and has good picture resolution, when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px - FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible - on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then I can import my huge work email as a backup without polluting my searches and my archive - Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains - FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome, as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not. On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc. And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed. In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
amelius 10y ago
How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.

ucaetano 10y ago

Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...

richardkeller 10y ago
Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.

poushkar 10y ago

Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.

rufugee 10y ago

I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email. YMMV.

kingosticks 10y ago
I had exactly the same experience. The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use. So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.

z3t4 10y ago

E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.

timdeneau 10y ago
I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses. It doesn’t matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn’t blacklisted and I don’t send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody). There’s zero recourse. You simply don’t matter when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.
- z3t4 10y ago
  Are you on a dynamic IP? I used to run a mail server on a dynamic IP, and many people will be butt-hurt about it and block you on sight.
  - timdeneau 10y ago
    The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean. From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by “safely” marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored, which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.

reacharavindh 10y ago

Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends). They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now. (1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and (2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw. I do like : (1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App. (2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp. https://protonmail.com https://protonmail.com

stryan 10y ago
I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0]. [0]:https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/ https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/
- eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  > The lack of support for desktop clients Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels? I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    >Do desktop clients support decrypting email? This is the traditional workflow for PGP-encrypted email, and has been for decades. Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.
    - eatbitseveryday 10y ago

_RPM 10y ago

I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes. If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files. Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.

msh 10y ago
Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.
- _RPM 10y ago
  Must you be connected to an Exchange service to get real push?
  - msh 10y ago
    No, they both support at least some imap servers.
vinw 10y ago
K9 for Android does immediate push notification. You just need to configure IMAP IDLE. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9

magicfractal 10y ago

Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).

dividuum 10y ago
No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to Google servers.

graffitici 10y ago

I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang.. At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..

EduardoBautista 10y ago
This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.

peb 10y ago

In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).

peb 10y ago

joshstrange 10y ago

I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.

mlinksva 10y ago

Any news on JMAP since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 ?

abtinf 10y ago

Why does FastMail charge a family account fee, thus making it more expensive to have two accounts under a family account than two individual accounts?

zafiro17 10y ago
There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.
- thelibrarian 10y ago
  There is also the benefit of being able to use one custom domain, and have multiple accounts attached to it.
awqrre 10y ago
You would probably be paying for convenience (1 bill, contact sharing, etc...)
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bbrik 10y ago

How do you handle changing your email address?

k-mcgrady 10y ago
Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.
  - victorhooi 10y ago
    Why not just download your old mail and archive it then? Google provides an easy way to do this (Google Takeout). As in, I don't see the problem with having more storage - you use only as much as you want. Personally, I find having all my mail searchable from any computer useful. And Google does provide lots of security features (2FA, suspicious login detection, new login alerts, login audit logs etc)
  - tjl 10y ago
    I typically export mail regularly. In my case, I store them in a DEVONthink Pro Office database as that supports directly importing from Apple's Mail.app, has good search, and good cross-referencing support. I really wish I followed this practice sooner as there's mail from the 90s I wish I still had. I've used e-mail continuously since 1991 so it would be a lot of mail. Disk space is the main reason why I didn't do it sooner.

mungoid 10y ago

Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason. With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.

manigandham 10y ago

From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web" Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?

skummetmaelk 10y ago
For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.

cm3 10y ago

It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but: Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.

alanh 10y ago
Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently

tomfitz 10y ago

I was a Fastmail customer for 3 years (2012-2015), but have since migrated to Gmail. I outlined the factors in this decision in https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eba5316f874 https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb... .

agrafix 10y ago

My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.

mrmondo 10y ago

Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail. Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better. These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.

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kennell 10y ago

The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.

olalonde 10y ago
Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    If you're using Gandi (a registrar I would strongly recommend), you can set this up from your Gandi domain dashboard: Click "Manage mailboxes" and create a forwarding address. Example: https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png - The MX values for your domain need to be Gandi's default email servers.
- r3bl 10y ago
  Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime. Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.
- brightball 10y ago
  Holy crap... So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff. It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?

estrabd 10y ago

I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.

godzillabrennus 10y ago

Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account. That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.

stevejohnson 10y ago
> If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.
vertex-four 10y ago
What did you switch from where the customer service was decent?

mastazi 10y ago

Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.

tirant 10y ago
they are hosted in the Netherlands: https://soverin.net/ https://soverin.net/
- mastazi 10y ago
  Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!
mastazi 10y ago
By the way I obviously meant "similar to FastMail", sorry for the typo

Zelmor 10y ago

Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.

confounded 10y ago

Very happy recent convert to KolabNow! Pros: - 100% green energy - 100% Free Software - Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture! - Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and notes (IMAP) - Swiss privacy laws - They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing. Cons: - No 2FA :( - Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for the above) - Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)

aorth 10y ago
I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least. I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).

Tergmap 10y ago

Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are communicating with.

greenspot 10y ago

Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard. And you get the Google Apps at a good price.

mankash666 10y ago

Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email like protonmail is the right option against snooping

size12font 10y ago

How good is the search in fastmail?

lorenzhs 10y ago
Very good. See https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.

outcoldman 10y ago

I also did this trick 2 years ago https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/ https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/, happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.

jonsjanssens 10y ago

As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible (https://soverin.net/features https://soverin.net/features).

moeirs 10y ago

It took me an hour to read all of the comments and replies on this post. But I just noticed that "iCloud" Mail wasn't mentioned in a single word. Interesting.