Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#11

Post by rasmusei » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

+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.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#12

Post by im_dario » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:40 PM UTC

"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.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#13

Post by cpbotha » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

readhn wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#14

Post by readhn » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

"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.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#15

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#16

Post by bartkappenburg » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:41 PM UTC

lorenzhs wrote: post #6

bartkappenburg wrote: post #3

"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...

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.

You would still have some meta-data :-)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#17

Post by preek » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#18

Post by unicornporn » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

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...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#19

Post by sbarre » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

rasmusei wrote: post #11

+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…

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/...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#20

Post by creshal » Mon, Aug 08, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

bartkappenburg wrote: post #3

"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...

The problem with GCM is that there's no real replacement for it. It's just too absurdly efficient.