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To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your stuff from gmail. How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even though

To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your stuff from gmail. How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even though I've been paying for another email service for more than a year.

mstade 8y ago
Man, I pay $50/year for my Fastmail account. I use a custom domain, so total cost is a bit higher, probably something like $60-$70/year, not sure. Moving from gmail to fastmail, given their integrated migration process, was a complete breeze. I still have gmail forwarding set up to my new email address, but I haven't logged into the account for well over two years at this point. This reminds me to actually check how many emails I received over the past year that came via gmail. Off the top of my head I can only recall a single one, at least from a person I know and wanted to receive email from. I swiftly replied with my new address of course. I'm going to stop forwarding now, and set up an auto-reply to give people a new address. Not my personal one, but an alias I'll set up in a minute, so that I can shut that down eventually too. Probably useless paranoia, but it floats my boat. I don't regret the move one bit, and the whole process of setting up my account and moving all ten or so years worth of email from gmail to Fastmail was over and done within a week. Fastmail does what it says on the tin – it's very fast. It also pretty much never fails. In the past two or so years that I've had my account I have only experienced downtime once, for a few minutes. I made myself some coffee and then service was back again. I am not affiliated with Fastmail in any way, shape or form – just a very happy customer.
- kakarot 8y ago
  How is hosting your data with Fastmail and allowing them to sniff your traffic better than hosting with Google? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me.
  - mstade 8y ago
    Sure, but that's a different discussion altogether. The post I replied to was implying the effort is greater and more complex than most think, and I'm saying it probably isn't – at least not for the common cases. Privacy is a very real concern, but a different conversation.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    It's not the same thing. First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company. Otherwise you can sue them. I'm in the EU and in my country there are state agencies that protect the consumer and handle the suing. Filling a complaint for me is easy and I've had great results in the past. This is why even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC. Google's standard ToC says that their service: 1. may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users 2. may collect your device fingerprint 3. can use your content for all their existing and future services 4. can share your personal information with other parties 5. may stop providing services to you at any time, for any reason 6. keeps the rights on your content when you stop using it And as we've seen, Google indeed does all of the above. The second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail and the cost of switching is higher, as can be seen by the people complaining about it. But that's a situation of making your bed and then sleeping in it. And in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. It's the new IExplorer and the fact that it has an open source core doesn't matter that much when speaking of Google's lock-in on the market, because the Google-free forks are completely irrelevant.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      > First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC. It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC. I guarantee you that Fastmail has this clause.[0] > second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail That's irrelevant and a false equivalency. You can use Gmail with your own domain. > in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-te https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bin...
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Since I'm paying them they answer to me. They don't get income from sources other than people paying for email. If they sniff my email they don't have anything to gain from the effort, so they are much less likely to.
Rjevski 8y ago
It doesn't take that much more. Office 365's base plan is something like 35£/year, plus around 10£/year for a domain. They offer IMAP import so migrating from Gmail is seamless.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Without a good importing tool (warning: the GSuite importing tools are shit), I recommend "imapsync": https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync After cloning the repository and installing the listed dependencies (some Perl packages available in your Brew / Ubuntu repository already), you can do: imapsync \ --host1 imap.old.com \ --user1 "old@email.com" \ --password1 xxxxxxxxxxxxx \ --ssl1 \ --host2 imap.new.com \ --user2 "new@email.com" \ --password2 yyyyyyyyyyyyy \ --ssl2 \ --errorsmax 1000000 \ --syncinternaldates \ --useheader 'Message-Id' \ --noreleasecheck \ --noexpunge \ --automap Works great for importing to and from Gmail, but you might want to add a folder rewrite for the Sent folder (with --f1f2). But with FastMail, for those interested, the out of the box importing tools in their web interface work great, so no need for any command line tools.
  - teh_klev 8y ago
    I've used imapsync in the past to migrate thousands of mail accounts from and old decrepit IMAP environment (with some weird edge cases) to a shiny new IMAP based mail platform. It's a hugely flexible and versatile tool and it's quite zippy as well, can highly recommend.
- timerol 8y ago
  Effort, not money. As a Firefox/gmail user who routinely shits on Google, it's mostly the lock-in of any email address that keeps me coming back. I've actually opened a few paid accounts, but effort to switch is real. I gave up partly through switching over the dozens (100s?) of services that send me emails. I would never get to the point where all of my acquaintances and relatives actually use the new address.
realradicalwash 8y ago
I finally did it this year! All the scandals (dragonfly, drone programme, auto sign-in in chrome, grabbing data through auto translate, etc.) were just too much. Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data, to privacy oriented choices felt empowering. I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant. It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv. I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).
- mikekchar 8y ago
  I use OpenAnd for maps/navigation installed from fdroid (although I've paid for it previously on Play). I find it does everything I want.
  - kuroguro 8y ago
    Did you mean OsmAnd? I couldn't find anything named "OpenAnd".
    - mikekchar 8y ago
      Yes. Sorry. When I was typing it I was thinking, "That doesn't seem right!", but I couldn't get my brain in gear.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Google Maps doesn't have a good alternative. On my phone I try to use OsmAnd on iOS, based on Open Street Map, see: https://osmand.net/ https://osmand.net/ — my experience with this is mixed, where I live (in Bucharest Romania) it definitely has more info than GMaps on points of interest, however it's not as reliable for car navigation or public transit, so it's not as reliable for getting directions. If you keep using Google Maps (I still do), at least disable the location tracking in your Google Account.
- oAlbe 8y ago
WA 8y ago
The smart choice would've been to not use Gmail in the first place. The fact that Google doesn't have your best interest in mind is nothing new. The fact that Gmail invades your privacy by reading your emails to show you ads has been in there from day 1. I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard. Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well). Edit: added 2nd paragraph
- cujo 8y ago
  > Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard. Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.
  - RRRA 8y ago
    As someone with a domain at home and a working email server, I'm still stuck with Gmail as I don't have time to make sure my setup is resilient enough to base my daily emails on... It's a sad world and we're a very geeky crowd.
    - bad_user 8y ago
      > As someone with a domain at home and a working email server Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers. It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite. Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth. Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense. Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address. I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.
qwertay 8y ago
Took me 2 seconds. set my gmail account to move everything to my new email and then copy/pasted all the emails using thunderbird

mstade 8y ago

Man, I pay $50/year for my Fastmail account. I use a custom domain, so total cost is a bit higher, probably something like $60-$70/year, not sure. Moving from gmail to fastmail, given their integrated migration process, was a complete breeze. I still have gmail forwarding set up to my new email address, but I haven't logged into the account for well over two years at this point. This reminds me to actually check how many emails I received over the past year that came via gmail. Off the top of my head I can only recall a single one, at least from a person I know and wanted to receive email from. I swiftly replied with my new address of course. I'm going to stop forwarding now, and set up an auto-reply to give people a new address. Not my personal one, but an alias I'll set up in a minute, so that I can shut that down eventually too. Probably useless paranoia, but it floats my boat. I don't regret the move one bit, and the whole process of setting up my account and moving all ten or so years worth of email from gmail to Fastmail was over and done within a week. Fastmail does what it says on the tin – it's very fast. It also pretty much never fails. In the past two or so years that I've had my account I have only experienced downtime once, for a few minutes. I made myself some coffee and then service was back again. I am not affiliated with Fastmail in any way, shape or form – just a very happy customer.

kakarot 8y ago
How is hosting your data with Fastmail and allowing them to sniff your traffic better than hosting with Google? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me.
- mstade 8y ago
  Sure, but that's a different discussion altogether. The post I replied to was implying the effort is greater and more complex than most think, and I'm saying it probably isn't – at least not for the common cases. Privacy is a very real concern, but a different conversation.
- bad_user 8y ago
  It's not the same thing. First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company. Otherwise you can sue them. I'm in the EU and in my country there are state agencies that protect the consumer and handle the suing. Filling a complaint for me is easy and I've had great results in the past. This is why even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC. Google's standard ToC says that their service: 1. may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users 2. may collect your device fingerprint 3. can use your content for all their existing and future services 4. can share your personal information with other parties 5. may stop providing services to you at any time, for any reason 6. keeps the rights on your content when you stop using it And as we've seen, Google indeed does all of the above. The second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail and the cost of switching is higher, as can be seen by the people complaining about it. But that's a situation of making your bed and then sleeping in it. And in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. It's the new IExplorer and the fact that it has an open source core doesn't matter that much when speaking of Google's lock-in on the market, because the Google-free forks are completely irrelevant.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    > First of all lawful companies don't do anything that isn't in the terms of service, that being the legal contract that describes your relationship with the company I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC. It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC. I guarantee you that Fastmail has this clause.[0] > second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail That's irrelevant and a false equivalency. You can use Gmail with your own domain. > in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-te https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bin...
- bluGill 8y ago
  Since I'm paying them they answer to me. They don't get income from sources other than people paying for email. If they sniff my email they don't have anything to gain from the effort, so they are much less likely to.

Rjevski 8y ago

It doesn't take that much more. Office 365's base plan is something like 35£/year, plus around 10£/year for a domain. They offer IMAP import so migrating from Gmail is seamless.

bad_user 8y ago
Without a good importing tool (warning: the GSuite importing tools are shit), I recommend "imapsync": https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync After cloning the repository and installing the listed dependencies (some Perl packages available in your Brew / Ubuntu repository already), you can do: imapsync \ --host1 imap.old.com \ --user1 "old@email.com" \ --password1 xxxxxxxxxxxxx \ --ssl1 \ --host2 imap.new.com \ --user2 "new@email.com" \ --password2 yyyyyyyyyyyyy \ --ssl2 \ --errorsmax 1000000 \ --syncinternaldates \ --useheader 'Message-Id' \ --noreleasecheck \ --noexpunge \ --automap Works great for importing to and from Gmail, but you might want to add a folder rewrite for the Sent folder (with --f1f2). But with FastMail, for those interested, the out of the box importing tools in their web interface work great, so no need for any command line tools.
- teh_klev 8y ago
  I've used imapsync in the past to migrate thousands of mail accounts from and old decrepit IMAP environment (with some weird edge cases) to a shiny new IMAP based mail platform. It's a hugely flexible and versatile tool and it's quite zippy as well, can highly recommend.
timerol 8y ago
Effort, not money. As a Firefox/gmail user who routinely shits on Google, it's mostly the lock-in of any email address that keeps me coming back. I've actually opened a few paid accounts, but effort to switch is real. I gave up partly through switching over the dozens (100s?) of services that send me emails. I would never get to the point where all of my acquaintances and relatives actually use the new address.

realradicalwash 8y ago

I finally did it this year! All the scandals (dragonfly, drone programme, auto sign-in in chrome, grabbing data through auto translate, etc.) were just too much. Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data, to privacy oriented choices felt empowering. I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant. It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv. I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).

mikekchar 8y ago
I use OpenAnd for maps/navigation installed from fdroid (although I've paid for it previously on Play). I find it does everything I want.
- kuroguro 8y ago
  Did you mean OsmAnd? I couldn't find anything named "OpenAnd".
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    Yes. Sorry. When I was typing it I was thinking, "That doesn't seem right!", but I couldn't get my brain in gear.
bad_user 8y ago
Google Maps doesn't have a good alternative. On my phone I try to use OsmAnd on iOS, based on Open Street Map, see: https://osmand.net/ https://osmand.net/ — my experience with this is mixed, where I live (in Bucharest Romania) it definitely has more info than GMaps on points of interest, however it's not as reliable for car navigation or public transit, so it's not as reliable for getting directions. If you keep using Google Maps (I still do), at least disable the location tracking in your Google Account.
oAlbe 8y ago

WA 8y ago

The smart choice would've been to not use Gmail in the first place. The fact that Google doesn't have your best interest in mind is nothing new. The fact that Gmail invades your privacy by reading your emails to show you ads has been in there from day 1. I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard. Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well). Edit: added 2nd paragraph

cujo 8y ago
> Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard. Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.
- RRRA 8y ago
  As someone with a domain at home and a working email server, I'm still stuck with Gmail as I don't have time to make sure my setup is resilient enough to base my daily emails on... It's a sad world and we're a very geeky crowd.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    > As someone with a domain at home and a working email server Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers. It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite. Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth. Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense. Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address. I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.

qwertay 8y ago

Took me 2 seconds. set my gmail account to move everything to my new email and then copy/pasted all the emails using thunderbird