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- gnasr 8y agoThis article looks like an ad for fastmail.com
- bunderbunder 8y agoAt least of the last time I looked around (within the past year), it's the only major cloud-based option that isn't ad-supported, but does offer all the extra goodies like calendars.
- craftyguy 8y agoThere are quite a few that have been around for several years e.g. mailbox.org, runbox.com (since 1999!!), posteo.de, startmail.com...
- adipasquale 8y agoAuthor here, thank you for the alternatives suggestions! I have edited the post and included them. I did not want the article to look like an ad for Fastmail by any means
- newscracker 8y agoTake a look at posteo.de for ad-free email with a strong focus on privacy. It’s also way cheaper than the lowest plan that Fastmail has. Posteo is a private company, doesn’t take investor funding and has been profitable. There are a couple of things I don’t like about Posteo (as a customer): 1. It recycles deleted addresses/aliases after six months and makes them avaiufor someone else to claim and use. Ideally, this should be never done to protect customers. Fastmail also recycles deleted addresses/emails within a few months (sooner than Posteo does, IIRC). 2. It provides only two aliases in the base pricing and additional aliases (if many are required) will increase the cost. Fastmail provides 600 aliases in every plan! So if you’re heavy on aliases, Fastmail would be cheaper. Other providers similar to this that I haven’t subscribed to, but you can read up on or try, are mailfence (has a free plan as well), runbox and mailbox.org. All of them have been around for quite sometime and also provide IMAP access (which is important if you want to migrate email content from one provider to another).
- Klonoar 8y agoI thought so too, but the author isn't using an affiliate link, so...
- adipasquale 8y agoAuthor here, really sorry if it felt like an ad, it is not! I have edited the app to include links to competitors. My point is to encourage people to resist Google's hegemony
- mark_l_watson 8y agoapologies for being off topic, but: I am a long time Fastmail customer, but the law passed in Australia yesterday has me somewhat concerned. Fastmail is an Australian company. Anyone else concerned?
- my_first_acct 8y agoAs far as I can tell, it changes nothing, assuming that your email was sent as plain text. Although Fastmail stores your email on encrypted disks [1], it of course has the encryption keys for these disks. Even before the new law, they would have been subject to any Australian search warrant requiring that they hand over your email, and would not have had any technical reason for not complying. In general, unless you and your correspondents are using PGP or some such, your email is readable by anyone who can obtain a search warrant in the country where your email provider resides. (Protonmail may or may not be an exception [2]). [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/mr-robot-uses-protonmail-still-isnt-fully-secure/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/mr-robot-uses-protonmail-still...
- cyphar 8y agoAustralian here. The law passed on Thursday is a massive concern, but in the case of an email provider there isn't as much of a change from what they could already do (TCNs aren't necessary -- they fundamentally already have collection capability unless you are using PGP for everything). However there are some other worrying changes like the fact that TANs and TARs are secret and have no judicial review. Warrants (even the new computer access warrants that were passed in the same bill) have judicial review. But at the end of the day, they'd be serving a warrant to fastmail, not you. Personally I use mailbox.org, and one of the really nice features is that you can give them a PGP public key and they'll encrypt everything you receive. So in the case of a warrant (though Germany has different laws on that matter) they could, at most, get the contents of new emails.
- adipasquale 8y agoAuthor here, I had completely missed that news. It is a bit concerning, you are totally right. I have edited the article to mention it and alternatives, thank you.
- ozten 8y agoI did this 3 years ago and have not regretted the choice.
- codewritinfool 8y agoNot using Fastmail, but I'm working on this now. Bye, Google.
- oarfish 8y agoIsn't fastmail an Australian company? If so then they'll have to backdoor all software in the future since parliament passed these insane new surveillance laws.
- dewey 8y agoEmail is plain text anyway so why would it matter? If you want to keep it private you’ll have to encrypt it anyway and then all their backdoors wouldn’t change that.
- jakevn 8y agoThere is a great difference between in-transit encryption and at-rest encryption. The former is not really comparable, as the existence of the email at rest will forever be vulnerable, in contrast to the time of transmission. A window of seconds versus years.
- cyphar 8y agoThe backdoor problem is a serious issue, but TCNs aren't necessary for email providers. All your emails are already I'm plaintext. I'd be more worried about the fact that TARs and TANs have no judicial overview and are secret in a way that other kinds of warrants aren't. But then again, you aren't the one being served with a warrant. As an Australian, I wouldn't use it anyway. Mailbox.org is better IMHO, and is what I use.
- threatofrain 8y agoHas anyone found anything which competes with Google Calendar?
- cweagans 8y agoThe fastmail calendar is excellent, IMO.
- news_to_me 8y agoIdk if it does anything beyond normal CalDAV stuff, but honestly, I'm not sure what more you'd want for a personal calendar. Does GCal have any useful exclusive features?
- beart 8y agoGoogle has tasks and reminders that don't seem to be supported by other calendars when syncing with CalDAV.
- craftyguy 8y agoMailbox.org has tasks/reminders that can be sync'd over CalDAV. I currently do it with vdirsyncer on my desktop/laptop and DAVDroid on my phone.
- threatofrain 8y agoHave you had success with 2 time zones for the same event? I know there's a setting to enable it, but I haven't had success.
- climb_stealth 8y agoMy fastmail calendar experiences: - timezone support is great and an explicit feature. You can pick the time zone when adding events and there is a dropdown at the top to view the calendar in the respective selected timezone. - you can scroll the calendar view flexibly and not just switch from month to month. You can for example scroll to see half of previous and half of current month. This fills me with so much joy and I can't understand why no one else does it. - you can't give someone else write access to your calendar. This is my major gripe with it and the reason I'm still actually using the gmail calendar in the fastmail interface.
- amaccuish 8y agoMoved from gmail to a VPS with dovecot, postfix and SOGo (provides xDAV, webui and activesync). Never looked back.
- txtsd 8y agoHow do you deal with emails sent to gmail getting labeled as spam by default? Also, qq.com and mail.ru block mails citing IP frequency limited and spam message rejected, respectively. I've found no way around these. I just send one personal email a day, on most days.
- amaccuish 8y agoI've never had that. My setup mostly did DKIM and all that for me. Never had mail arrive at the other end into spam. For incoming, I use rspamd. It's taken some training but it's a lot better now.
- blueberry_47 8y agoAny recommendation on an iOS mail app. I use the Apple one, which is fine if uninteresting. The Fastmail app is not very modern looking which I superficially care about. Any reasonable looking non-Apple mail app reads my email or collects my data.
- virusduck 8y agoI hate to say it, but Outlook is actually really nice.
- tabtab 8y agoThe desktop version or the web version?
- unixhero 8y agoAll four Android ios Web Desktop
- Waterluvian 8y agoI hate hate hate web outlook. I click on new emails and they often don't register as having been "read". Drives me up the wall.
- gagege 8y agoSame thing happens to me with Gmail. Weird.
- 8_hours_ago 8y agoHuh. I haven't had that issue with Outlook Web App. I have "Mark the item as read when the selection changes" selected in my options and I haven't noticed it failing.
- diffeomorphism 8y agoHeavily disagree. The web version on mobile (android; both firefox and chrome) feels slow and works badly on low bandwidth connections and touch support feels badly designed (e.g. selecting multiple messages, working with attachments). On desktops/laptops the imap support is also subpar with problems with showing multiple drafts for one email in the web version. This would maybe be excusable for a small startup, but for a company the size of Microsoft that is an embarrassing showing.
- Upvoter33 8y agoWhich other emailer has threads, snooze, and tabs? (need all of those really; hard to move without them) I do hate that I can't just pay for gmail and avoid the crappy ads...
- craftyguy 8y ago> threads Threads have been supported since, well, decades (message-id, In-Reply-To). Most modern mail clients support displaying messages in thread format. > snooze I originally missed snoozing, but now I just create a task any time I need to address something, or tag/flag it for follow-up. > tabs I'm not sure what this is. Can you explain? > I do hate that I can't just pay for gmail and avoid the crappy ads Just shows that google thinks that displaying targetted ads based on the contents of your emails is more valuable than you throwing cash at them. That's terrifying.
- joshuamorton 8y agoAs another person mentioned, your email contents aren't used to target ads, and you can pay for gsuite.
- craftyguy 8y ago>As another person mentioned, your email contents aren't used to target ads Yea, companies have never lied to users before, right? You're still trusting a company that is notorious for snooping and tracking folks to make a quick buck.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- craftyguy 8y agoAs another person mentioned, if you have gmail and visit here, google knows about every purchase you have made, the price you paid, etc: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases They're not reading your emails, right? How else would they know this much information?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jmole 8y agoWhy doesn't anyone every mention actually paying google and using GSuite, instead of using their free service?
- metal13 8y agoI do this. Highly worthwhile, and my email requires very little effort.
- unixhero 8y agoOr using adblock
- sudarshan_sar 8y agoI think the author is concerned with a much deeper issue than a simple ad blocker.
- unixhero 8y agoYeah. I don't disagree with the op. But advertisements nuissance are not the reason. They are so easily dealt with by using adblock.nin some incarnation.
- reaperducer 8y agoI pay the $5/month for GSuite just to get the spam filter. I'd happily pay someone else $5/month for a similar service, but I can't find a provider that both meets the same price point and has equal spam filtering.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nightski 8y agoThat might remove ads but it does little to assure someone regarding the privacy concerns. Google likely still stores a metric ton of data on you.
- coldnose 8y agoIf anyone's gone through this trouble already, care to explain how you did it? I've been thinking about rolling a VPS with postfix/dovecot, but it seems like such a hassle to maintain, and I'm not super confident in my ability to secure it.
- craftyguy 8y agoFind an email provider, sign up/pay for service, and use it. I recommend buying a domain, so you can have a fairly static email address even if you end up changing providers later on. Rolling your own email service never seemed worth it to me. You'll have to deal with backups/recovery, maintenance, and any quirks associated with the big mail places rejecting mails from your service. I'm almost certain someone will chime with "but it's not bad!", well, it's not bad until you're on vacation and suddenly your mail service goes down and now you have to either go without mail (stuff sent to you will be rejected), or stop what you are doing to fix it.
- freedomben 8y agoBut it's not bad! Jk, I'm a devops guy so I set up servers and infrastructures for a living, and I still think it's a pain in the ass. Mostly getting TLS working is the hard part. If you don't get it right, your emails will all go to the spam folder of the recipient, or just not deliver at all. Hell even if you get it right, that still might happen.
- jiveturkey 8y ago> Find an email provider, Like google perhaps?
- skbly7 8y agoYup, I have gone through this. If you aren't confident with your skills you can look up to softwares like VestaCP [1] to setup everything for you. You can also use more advanced solutions like FreedomBox [2]. The pain is worth it! Another fun tip: Enable catch all for your emails and then provide different email for each purposes, like this website can have email ycombi@yourdomain.com and so on. I love to regularly see which website fucked up handling my email id and I just silently block that email in a click (and hence, much less spams). [1] https://vestacp.com https://vestacp.com [2] https://freedomboxfoundation.org https://freedomboxfoundation.org
- ggm 8y agoThe example mbox sender frequency script is measuring the mbone list at isi. I was on that list back in the nineties. Here's a video from one of the top posters. https://vimeo.com/56349011 https://vimeo.com/56349011
- bpye 8y agoI have no complaints with Fastmail, great experience. Android mail clients however - I really wish K-9 Mail felt more modern, it's perfectly usable but the ancient UI makes it less nice to use.
- berkut 8y agoI've just switched from gmail to fastmail, and I'm not very impressed with Fastmail's iOS app (it's pretty slow to start / open / retrieve emails) or the lack of offline support it has. TBH, other than the annoying ability to too easily swipe emails left and expose the Archive green button, I really liked the Gmail app - it was extremely fast and easy to use. Anyone have any suggestions on a mail client for iOS? I can use the Apple one (and am doing currently), but I don't really get on with it for some reason...
- rimliu 8y agoOutlook. Seriously.
- PenguinCoder 8y agoI use fastmail and on android my client of choice is Maildroid. In combination it is a amazing experience and much better for me than native gmail/mail client.
- bpye 8y agoI might try Maildroid, I do quite like using an open source client though. If I was to use one that's already closed Outlook doesn't seem all that bad.
- borgel 8y agoAny luck using GMail with other IMAP accounts? I guess I assumed that was possible...
- xaedes 8y agoYea by importing imap into your gmail account... That would be pointless here, but maybe explains why you assumed it was possible.
- petilon 8y agoIf you have Gmail click this link, it is an eye opener: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Google knows every online purchase you ever made, every line item, the price you paid, the address it was delivered to, and so on. Keep in mind that Facebook and Google also combine this data with offline data about you purchased from other companies, to complete the picture. UPDATE: Here's an example of Google purchasing data about your offline purchases: https://www.fastcompany.com/90230910/google-has-been-secretly-tracking-your-offline-purchases-with-help-from-mastercard https://www.fastcompany.com/90230910/google-has-been-secretl...
- nooorofe 8y agoI've checked https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases "You don't have any purchases"
- freedomben 8y agoThis just looks like a list compiled from invoices/receipts that were sent to my gmail from various vendors that has been parsed. Actually there's a lot of stuff that is missing. Seems pretty tame actually, but I also don't use gmail for my whole life. I'm a big advocate of privacy, but I think Google is pretty open about what they do. If you don't want this, there are usually ways to opt out and still use the service, but of course you can always use something else. I've been really enjoying Proton Mail.
- petilon 8y ago
- jackewiehose 8y ago> First, I strongly suggest you buy a domain name, so that you really own your mail address Any opinions on that? I did so years ago (mostly for the reason of being independent of a mail provider) but meanwhile I realized you never "own" a domain. It's always just rented. It would be bad if someone gets in control of my domain so I just hope this won't happen before I'm dead... And even then it could be bad if it happens (although not for me anymore).
- rckclmbr 8y agoAt $10/year it would cost $800 for your lifetime. Not too shabby to put control in your hands
- PenguinCoder 8y agoMore like $10 a year for the domain and $20/mo or more for the actual email hosting and provider.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago$20/month? I pay less than $3/month for web/mail hosting, full cPanel setup with 10GB storage and unlimited traffic.
- beagle3 8y agoWhich provider?
- KozmoNau7 8y agoAzeHosting, a Danish provider. UnoEuro is similarly affordable.
- PenguinCoder 8y ago$3/mo for unlimited number of inbox/addresses, or $3/mo per inbox/addresses? Note, I'm not talking aliases, I'm talking 'per user, entirely separate inbox/login'
- ricccardo 8y ago> In exchange for free mails, would you let your postman open your letters, read them, and insert ads related to their contents? Note that this is not the case anymore: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html We never did that for G Suite, but with this announcement we also stopped doing it for consumer. Disclaimer: Googler working on Gmail. Please stay :-)
- exodust 8y agoI think the author's advice is more aligned with moving away from Google products in general. See step 10 of his list. Although he does contradict himself by admitting he will stick with Maps and Docs. His article is basically an ad for Fastmail. Whether he intended that or not, it's the impression I get. Fastmail costs about the same as G-Suite, but with less features, so it will take some will power for people to adopt his 10 step program.
- svnpenn 8y agomaybe fix your garbage email client? http://github.com/dominictarr/your-web-app-is-bloated http://github.com/dominictarr/your-web-app-is-bloated
- Splines 8y agoThat's why I use the basic html version of gmail. It loads instantly. Going to the new one is agony.
- justaj 8y agoHave you noticed that you have to enable JS and XHR in order to login to the HTML view? Otherwise I get a "Corrupted Content Error". That's pretty strange.
- ryacko 8y agoWe buy SSDs to have our web apps take multiple seconds to load.
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- alsothrownaway 8y agoI went with Namecheap as my Gmail replacement. I can use my own domain and setup was instant. The interface and admin panel are very clean which is nice, but $10/mo for one inbox doesn't really say "cheap" to me. Overall I am quite happy, though.
- BuckRogers 8y agoI've been on this un-Googlify trend for almost a decade now, as a beta Gmail user I ran into the "wow, I'm really neck deep in Google telemetry" wake up some time ago. The only stuff that I can't let go of is Maps as the author noted, and Youtube. I'll always use the best services and I like both. Outlook.com solves a lot of the problems the author detailed with calendar items and contacts, as well as provides the storage necessary to host your email archive. I'm willing to be datamined, but not by one monolith like Google for every service. That's really the problem and what people feel uncomfortable with.
- nilact 8y agoI wonder why nobody mentioned zoho.com (from India) and products they offer. They have docs as well as other apps that any business needs and no privacy issues.
- marklyon 8y agoAnd an unreliable registrar that takes them down at will.
- nilact 8y agoIt seems that issue was related to automated algorithm. For long term solution and this never happens again, Zoho decided to be registrar themselves. More information can be found out at: https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/update-on-zoho-services-disruption.html https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/update-on-zoho-ser...
- timwis 8y agoThe feature that makes it so hard for me to leave Gmail is the automatic bundling of promotions, updates, social, forums. That has made managing my inbox actually manageable. Is that any way to get a feature with another email provider?
- dsamarin 8y agoIt will be hard for me to leave Google Inbox because of the peaceful feeling I get from easily snoozing or marking my emails as done by the end of the day. I don't know if I will ever feel as accomplished and with as little distraction.
- timwis 8y agoSnooze is a bit easier; boomerang is a service that offers that for at least outlook as well.
- chrnad 8y agoDoes anyone know if you can disable email on GSuite (i.e. change MX on my domain to Fastmail), but keep the rest? I use my GSuite account login on a lot of sites, I've got shared photo albums etc.
- dual_basis 8y agoYes
- ianmf 8y agoI do this. I use Gsuite but not their email. I changed the MX records of the domain to the other email host.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]