Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

cpbotha.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 379 posts

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#71

Post by exhilaration »

rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#72

Post by 0xmohit »

rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

Is their spam filter deliberately design to be too conservative?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#73

Post by Noseshine »

douglasheriot wrote: post #45
EGreg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?

Google Apps isn’t Google’s primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.

Given that ~90% of Google's revenue is its search business (AdWords and AdSense) that's true for pretty much everything they do apart from that core business.

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#74

Post by satbyy »

unicornporn wrote: post #18

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..…

I'm happy with Zoho Mail [1]. Even their free tier comes with a custom domain and 5 GB mailbox.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#75

Post by Kequc »

childifchaos wrote: post #5

Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care. Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life. So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.

I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete.

We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes.

It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#76

Post by bad_user »

I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:

   - better shortcuts in the web interface
   - the mobile web interface is actually good
   - can import email by IMAP
   - POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken
   - IMAP is better implemented
   - Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and 
     each folder ends up being a connection
   - CardDAV works and has good picture resolution,
     when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px
   - FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible
   - on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then
     I can import my huge work email as a backup without
     polluting my searches and my archive
   - Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is 
     pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains
   - FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome,
     as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail
     only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.

On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.

And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.

In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#77

Post by arm »

exhilaration wrote: post #71
rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

It’s the top comment right now because it was only posted 5 minutes ago.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#78

Post by 0xmohit »

exhilaration wrote: post #71
rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#79

Post by mythz »

unicornporn wrote: post #18

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..…

> 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...

That's not a valid comparison, the economies of scale Gmail benefits from means it can't be compared with a smaller email provider like Fastmail which has to ammortize the fixed overhead costs over a much smaller user base.

Gmail has over 1B monthly active users, at $40 /user would generate $40B a year on gmail alone, they made $75B Revenue in 2015 (16.3B profit). Google don't break their revenue numbers down but they have 7 properties with over 1B Users where I expect an overwhelming majority of their revenue still comes from Search when users are in the "actively searching" frame of mind and are more likely to purchase goods rather than in Gmail where their primary use-case is email.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#80

Post by josteink »

voltagex_ wrote: post #52

Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.

No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices.

Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account.

Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email.

Android is nice that way.

Post reply on HN