Live data from Hacker News

Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

cpbotha.net

131–140 of 379 posts

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a threshold for spammyness that will cause email to be dropped silently and never reach the spam folder.

I'm skeptical this is true. Is there any documentation or other evidence for this?

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/Apps/l-TmEzzF...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#132

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..…

Depending on what your threshold for needs is, Rackspace Email is a pretty solid solution for about $2 / user / month.

Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#133
I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.

If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.

Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#134
post #91
post #50

FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features.…

Was in the same boat, when looking to leave Gmail. Now I pay 18€ per year for custom domain support, 10 aliases, 10GB mailbox, 50MB attachment, IMAP, ActiveSync, CardDAV, CalDAV. Webmail is handled by sOGO, roundcube, squirrelmail, support is fast and tickets get answered in couple hours max. Service is in EU.

Where's that?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#135

Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.

I've always wondered about using OS X Server to handle my email on a Mac Mini. Looks like a pretty clean solution to run your own.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ensuring it stays running and updated and secure and backed up. Docker isn't magic. A server instance and the associated apps still need to be maintained. And you're either trusting the creator of that Docker image or digging into every security setting anyway.

Updated is usually barely a problem, there hasn't been a serious postfix vulnerability since 2011 or a dovecot one since 2013 (and even the 2013 one wouldn't necessarily affect you as an individual user). One update every 3-5 years is not exactly something I'd call a problem. I don't update unless there's a major vulnerability and it's one I'm affected by. Rebuilding your docker when you hear about that is not exactl…

You still have to update the OS or whatever you're running the mailserver on. You have to make sure it's not compromised nor DDosed, it doesn't run out of space, it doesn't crash or get stuck for whatever reason, etc etc.

Again, Docker isn't magic.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#137
post #134
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was in the same boat, when looking to leave Gmail. Now I pay 18€ per year for custom domain support, 10 aliases, 10GB mailbox, 50MB attachment, IMAP, ActiveSync, CardDAV, CalDAV. Webmail is handled by sOGO, roundcube, squirrelmail, support is fast and tickets get answered in couple hours max. Service is in EU.

Where's that?

https://www.servermx.com

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail. That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author expla…

> That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author explains it very well. I have to disagree, it sounds like he just had a crappy provider, avoiding blacklists is pretty much just a matter of having your RDNS, SPF and domainkeys configured properly in my experience. Pretty trivial stuff, really.

Yeah? And where is your server hardware located? If it's on a VPS somewhere, well, how can you trust them? If it's at home, it's extra space and electricity that's being used.

At the end of the day, email IS NOT secure. If you're paying for a service and they can say they're not reading your emails and they will respect your privacy, well that's good enough for me.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#139
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updated is usually barely a problem, there hasn't been a serious postfix vulnerability since 2011 or a dovecot one since 2013 (and even the 2013 one wouldn't necessarily affect you as an individual user). One update every 3-5 years is not exactly something I'd call a problem. I don't update unless there's a major vulnerability and it's one I'm affected by. Rebuilding your docker when you hear about that is not exactl…

You still have to update the OS or whatever you're running the mailserver on. You have to make sure it's not compromised nor DDosed, it doesn't run out of space, it doesn't crash or get stuck for whatever reason, etc etc. Again, Docker isn't magic.

Updating the OS... usually a fairly rare occurence again, kernel vulnerabilities that affect you with minimal services exposed are quite rare, most vulnerabilities are local escalations and such which wouldn't affect just a mail server. When was the last remote root exploit in the linux kernel? Maybe SSH which would be the only other thing you might run... Neither is within my memory. I suspect these would be ever less frequent than mail service updates, if ever.

As for the rest those aren't really issues you need to actively watch, you'll just know when something goes wrong to take a look. I can't see running out of disk with just a mail service, crashes are... never and compromise/DDoS isn't really a risk if you secure it properly to begin with and update it that once every few years. It's really very hands off if you're not running any other services and just review the vulnerabilities.

I'm guessing this is even less of a problem for most of us though because I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server which is kept up to date regularly, so I was speaking simply to adding mail functionality to an existing system previously.

Post reply on HN