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Fastmail to end support for operamail.com email addresses
- dltj 6y agoYour email address is too important to leave in the hands of a third-party provider. This isn’t to say that using a third-party provider to run your email is a bad idea. You should own the domain, though.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoPerhaps it’s time for the development of a standard where your email address isn’t tied to a domain; instead, email is addressed to an identity and the underlying plumbing automatically handles routing and delivery. Very similar to how your mobile phone number is portable between providers. We can’t expect everyone to own a domain to control their messaging sovereignty.
- umanwizard 6y agoWhat should it be tied to? Who would maintain the mapping of names to addresses, and wouldn’t this just be reinventing the domain name system?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoDNS is for service discovery, not identity discovery and routing. I leave the rest of your questions for the standard to be developed. I don’t have all the answers, but am willing to pay people smarter than me to figure it out. Accept this sub thread as the official Request For Comments :)
- vbezhenar 6y agoYou own private key. Public key is your identity. Public key could be linked to facebook, twitter, github accounts, etc, so you can easily discover or verify people.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 6y agoYeah! Keybase + FastMail’s open JMAP standard is the model I think you’d build on.
- flurdy 6y agoWasn't that the idea behind .name TLD initially? Until they sold out and became yet another ccTld
- johnvaluk 6y agoWouldn't that approach also be doomed to failure? How would you provide a unique domain to every John Smith in the world?
- thombles 6y agoSounds a lot like the nomadic identities in Hubzilla and the Zot protocol. https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project https://zotlabs.org/help/en/developer/zot_protocol#What_is_Zot_ https://zotlabs.org/help/en/developer/zot_protocol#What_is_Z...
- hyakosm 6y agoYes. I also made the choice to pay for my email hosting from a reliable provider, it's cheap (1.5$ month) and I'm considered as a customer, I can have a support with real humans.
- guitarbill 6y agoTrue, but an added complication is that you have to be really, really careful about your domain. You have to trust your registrar, set up 2FA, and make sure it never expires, etc. So in the end, owning your domain isn't foolproof either, it's also another point of failure (similar to Google deleting your account, although one you may have more control over). For what it's worth, I use Fastmail + a custom domain and couldn't be happier. But I'd hardly recommend it to everyone for personal email.
- throwawaysea 6y agoAs someone considering either Fastmail or Protonmail, could you share what your experience is like and why you chose Fastmail?
- hosteur 6y agoI recently did a big survey of the mail hosting market. I settled on migadu. Have used them for two months now and am very happy with them. Consider checking them out.
- ProAm 6y agoYou have real customer support (a person) who gets back to you in a timely fashion and is always helpful. The android app and web app are intuitive and easy to use. I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago and couldnt be happier and it's cheap.
- joshe 6y ago15 year Fastmail user here. Fastmail has been great, no downtime, and I don't really think about it at all. Good web client and you can do filtering if you need to.
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 6y agoSame setup as the comment you're answering to. They've just been super reliable and mature for me. No huge updates that force me to adjust. Interface is nice and clean, uptime and service super reliable. Everything just seems to work for me (aliases, forwarding, filters, good Android app), and the pricing is within reason. I actually use their web interface and official Android app. I'm surely no power user, but have used various providers over the years until I settled with Fastmail (seemingly for good). It's difficult to decide whom to trust with e-mail but to me they seem trustworthy. I still like to have my own domain, so I could in theory take it with me, if I ever started being displeased. In general: Paying for a service (especially e-mail) is invaluable (my data not being mined), also for potential account recovery (didn't use their customer service often, but when it happened, it was decent). I can't comment on ProtonMail but especially with e-mail, a proven (long term) track record is gold, and Fastmail has it. addendum: upon rereading it almost sounds like a Fastmail commercial. I'm only a satisfied user without any further connection towards the company.
- Aardwolf 6y agoDon't you also depend on a third-party for your domain, though?
- kroltan 6y agoYes, but if one goes out of business you can buy your domain from someone else! Or even transfer it, if you are warned a nonzero amount of time in advance. Being able to keep your address across service providers being the important part here, that way your online life doesn't get in a huge jumble when your provider goes away.
- johnvaluk 6y agoI've hosted email for myself and some other users for decades now. We all own our domains and aren't getting any younger. I'm a little terrified of the responsibility I've taken on and have no idea what I'll do when we start dropping like flies. Renewals will lapse, allowing squatters to snatch up our domains, read new incoming email and impersonate us. I'm not thrilled with depending on third parties, either, but now I wish it was someone else's problem who might outlive us and exercise a small degree of ethical oversight. Maybe there's a business idea here...
- kroltan 6y agoThat's fair enough, as long as you would trust that business to not misuse your address space for other things. Same level of trust one would put in a regular email provider, I guess.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoAnd yet you literally can't run your own mail server in most situations. ISPs will block you. What's the solution?
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 6y agoRunning your own mail server, having problems due to shared IP is only one of the problems. Some more: Spam filtering for one. Uptime and updating without downtime. You would absolutely need redundancy (complexity of the solution required starts building up quickly). Keeping tabs on mail server security and the vulnerabilities discovered in your particular software stack. A 15 second down time means an important mail might not reach you. If your mail server crashes due to unknown reason at 4 am, do you really want it to be your problem to fix? And it will of course happen when it least fits your schedule for the day. On most days I could live with my website being offline for a few hours because I've screwed up, but with E-Mail? The solution? The more you think it through, own the domain, yes, but use a mature and reliable (and paid for) provider you trust to do the hosting for you. For someone technical enough to securely own a domain and not let it expire that seems like the best solution really, unless maybe you own your own hosting service? :P (but then, technically, I guess it's not your own private mail server either)
- dmm 6y ago> A 15 second down time means an important mail might not reach you Email servers will retry sending messages and won't expire them unless the retries fail for several days. So even a day of downtime shouldn't result in losing email.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pan69 6y agoThis is exactly the reason I'm using Fastmail. I can BYO my own domain.
- poglet 6y agoFortunatley the process for changing to to another alies is trivial, buy I imagine this would be extramly frustrating for many people. Many services make it difficult to change login or email (My Steam login is an email I havent used in over 15 years).
- wlesieutre 6y agoDoes this not work? https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3176-RTKC-3810#change_email https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3176-RTK... Or when they say "Steam Support will immediately email you a link to click on to verify your new email address" do they mean it's sent to your old email address where you can't get it?
- ficklepickle 6y agoUgh, paypal is bad for this. I have to keep an ancient hotmail account alive, just because it is the email I used to create the account 10+ years ago. I can login with my more recent email account, so it would be easy to forget the old hotmail account is even tied to it.
- tyingq 6y agoWait a couple of years and I bet Opera lets the domain expire, and someone will pick up a relative treasure trove of email traffic for $10.
- deeblering4 6y agoMy bet is on a domain squatter snapping it up and then reselling it for with hugely inflated asking price.
- jbverschoor 6y agoThe problem is that you don’t know for sure where your email has been used.
- thombles 6y agoAn underappreciated benefit of using a password manager consistently. It might be a long and unpleasant chore but you can have some confidence that you're updating everything that matters.
- sneak 6y agoI recently wrote a guide about how to stop relying on a domain you don't own for receiving email. I've heard a ton of positive feedback about it. This incident is a really good example as to why your whole email address should always ultimately be under your own control (i.e. at a domain you own). https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/
- jraph 6y ago> The operamail.com domain is owned by Opera, not Fastmail. We've handled mail at this domain on Opera's behalf since Fastmail staff bought back the company in 2013. Opera has since advised us that they will no longer allow us to handle mail through this domain. Why though? How come Fastmail handles mails on Opera's behalf, and why Opera now prevents Fastmail from doing it? How come they couldn't manage to agree on a way to avoid losing their users' email addresses?
- floatingatoll 6y agoFastmail was temporarily (see below!) called "Operamail" until they bought themselves out from Opera in 2013.
- AndrewDavis 6y agoFastmail was originally an independent company that was acquired by Opera. Later they became independent again.
- reustle 6y agoThe new owner of Opera is a Chinese company. If they want to implement their own email project with the same name, I'm sure they've got a few strong requirements that fastmail wouldn't want to comply with.