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Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

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Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#121
post #17

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 wit…

I wanted to get this setup going a while back but I'm usually stuck on Windows for most of the day. I got Bash on Windows setup this weekend and I think I'm going to give it another shot.

Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort. I'll get myself 100% on Linux one of these days :/

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#122
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#123
Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends).

They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now.

(1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and

(2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw.

I do like :

(1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App.

(2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp.

https://protonmail.com

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#124

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 reso…

"the mobile web interface is actually good" That's funny you should say that. I use gmail on its mobile web interface exclusively (using chrome on ios), while my wife who is a fastmail user can't make heads or tails of their mobile site. What is it you prefer about fastmail's mobile site?

What problems does she have with the web interface?

For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.

Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.

And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#125

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 reso…

How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.

Search within emails is good and supports advanced search with "from:", "to:", "after:" and things like that. And if you're using a desktop client, like Thunderbird, search through IMAP with FastMail feels faster.

The only difference I found is that Gmail also indexes attachments, like PDFs. Which is a cool capability, but I wished for that only once in the last year and that's only because somebody sent me a PDF without a textual description of what it is. So it can be useful, but not a deal breaker.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#126

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 reso…

How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.

90% of the time I'm just searching for messages from a particular sender. Like GMail, FastMail autocompletes contact names in search so this works great for me.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#127
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.

I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.

The more, the better. I've 1600 learned spam and 7677 learned non-spam. The spam filter works pretty well for me. Occasionally one slips through, but that happened on gmail as well. So I'm very happy with FastMail.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#128
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.

I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.

Sounds like the SpamAssassin default settings.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#129
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.

I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much).

Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#130
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I have interests other than running my own email server. I am capable of running my own email server. I'm also capable of taking my own garbage to the dump every week. I'm capable of removing my own appendix if that is required (under self administered local anesthesia). I hire those things done because I have better things to do with my time. I got tired of keeping up with the latest anti-spam best practices…

> FastMail is a cheap and easy option to email. So is spinning up a docker container with this all already configured... I just don't see the argument I guess, it's just too easy to do yourself. Instead you're getting ripped off and losing privacy. There's no reason to believe fastmail is any more private than GMail, staff can just as easily read and deliver your mail to whomever they please. A medical degree takes y…

Native two factor auth (like U2F integration) alongside mobile apps would be the big ones.
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