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I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to
by ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone.
But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.
EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
- rolisz 7y agoThe bus factor of PurelyMail is a valid concern and I hope it will be solved in the future.
- benhurmarcel 7y agoAlso if cost is a concern for Fastmail, there's Mailbox.org which is a very reliable alternative.
- hinkley 7y agoAnd yet we tell each other that if you run a small business it's important to remember you can fire a customer.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoI think it's very important for customers to be able to trust the business though. This means the business relationship should have clearly defined terms and both parties should be expected to follow them. Unfortunately, the trend is for services to have take it or leave it terms and to essentially be written to hold them blameless while letting them do whatever they want. A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
- lonelappde 7y ago> And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important. Since a billion people use less trustworthy providers, apparently not.
- themodelplumber 7y agoI've used Fastmail for almost five years now, and I think it's been hit by a bus at least twice :) A bit tongue in cheek, but always have a back up strategy and move on whatever seems best to you, not to someone else.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThere is definitely still an upside from Gmail: The author can redirect his email address to any other service on a whim and all his inbound email comes with. So as long as his archive is backed up he does have a good strategy to restore access.
- bmarquez 7y agoZoho Mail only costs $2 more per year vs PurelyMail (it's shown on PurelyMail's website along with other competitors) and also avoids the "one man show" problem. I'm not sure saving $2 a year is worth using a self-proclaimed (according to its website) beta service. Then again Gmail was in beta for many years.
- beagle3 7y agoLast I checked, Zoho was per address; This guy specifically looked for domain support (meaning, potentially hundreds of addresses). PurelyMail seems to charge by storage, not mailbox address; and AFAIK so does Migadu (which, up until reading this post, I thought was unique in that).
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoI will admit it's unfortunate to have to pay per inbox on FastMail. I can't even pay less for my second box to be smaller and more limited, it must be at the same rate as my main box. They do allow infinite aliases which covers most of my needs, but when I wanted to use a FastMail box for my home automation system's service account it didn't make sense to do so.
- mattlondon 7y agoZoho offers catch-all adresses on their service so one inbox can handl hundreds of adresses. Not exactly the same as hundreds of individual addresses/inboxes, but may fit some people's needs. I've been using Zoho like this now for a little while and I am pretty happy with it considering the price.
- inapis 7y agoZoho is per user/inbox but a single user/inbox can receive emails for multiple domains and email ids. You can also set up individual sending identities. I am currently receiving email for 7 domains while paying for one. There is an undocumented limit though. You can generally only have upto 30 aliases.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
- yumraj 7y agoFair comment, but all of those concerns are mitigated if you: 1) use your own domain(s) 2) take frequent backups so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.
- thanksforfish 7y agoHow many people are actively backing up their email on their own? Backing up email seems much simpler than running your own email server, but it's still going to require some technical know how. To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
- yumraj 7y agoI was thinking of using the desktop email clients doing the backup. but someone who cannot do that is definitely not going to move off of free Gmail/Yahoo mail/...
- icebraining 7y agoIn Roundcube, you can just click "More → Download folder" to get a backup of an email folder. Installing Thunderbird and configuring the account, while more involved than the above, is still within reach of many non-technical users. I think most people don't backup because they don't think they need to, rather than because they are unable. Unfortunately, they're wrong.
- teambayleaf 7y ago> 2) take frequent backups My argument is that people really should use POP3 (not IMAP) for this reason. POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
- Felz 7y agoHi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.) As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoHey! I feel like ensuring you clarify you'll only shut down an account if they break the rules you set out is a really good practice and there are examples, like FastMail's, you could borrow from. I know the standard boilerplate is to give a service the right to do whatever it wants, but as a small indie service operator you can be better than the fairly standard! ;) Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already. I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.
- Felz 7y agoNo offense taken! I think you're broadly right that I could be doing a better job on reassuring messaging, and I'll put that on my work queue. I also hope to solve any bus factor problems before leaving beta. Right now if I were struck down, I think I'd still have about 9 months worth of free AWS credits on the account running the service, plus any profits. (It's not quite a self sustaining business yet, but it's not that far from it either.)
- starpilot 7y agoI'm more worried that PM is still fairly new and in beta. These hobby businesses come and go, and changing one's email is a huge pain. What's saying that PM will be around for 10+ more years, like Gmail has?
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThis is mostly because changing your email address is a huge pain. Once you're using your own domain, changing email providers is like changing web hosts or domain registrars: Some work but not a big deal.
- distances 7y agoOr, as an easier solution, a dedicated email forwarding service. I've been using one for about 15 years now and changed the actual email service provider a couple of times just by updating the forwarding address. Of course then the problem is to identify a reliable email forwarding service that won't go anywhere.
- crispinb 7y agoThe bus factor is a potential issue. Legal terms & conditions probably aren't as the corrupt civil law systems of nearly all polities make legal redress unavailable or hopelessly impractical to all but the wealthy (who probably aren't looking at $10 pa mail). Ordinary people don't read legals, partly out of laziness, but partly from a (correct) judgement that they are irrelevant to them.
- fma 7y agoEspecially since the author says he is moving away from Gmail because "First and foremost, because it's a single point of failure".