I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
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Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#162But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?
Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS.
Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#163I'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…
I've been thinking about moving to FastMail for quite some time now for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned. What still keeps from switching though is that I rely on services like SaneBox and Unroll.me for organising my email. Unfortunately, the last time I looked only GMail is properly supported by these services and there doesn't seem to be a vendor-independent alternative either. Does anyone here use servic…
Happy SaneBox + FastMail user for two years now. SaneBox works great with any standard IMAP connection.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#164I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though. That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps f…
Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#165I'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…
>Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.
Which to me has always been kind of weird because Google uses Linux internally for most of their workstations.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#166Honest 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…
There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e. Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages. mu4e undeniably has…
I've been using mutt for a few years before switching to gmail and finally to FastMail. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en or https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html) I wasn't really slower than using mutt locally. Since they are both single page apps you can't "outrun" them by using shortcuts too fast. It works pretty well for me.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#167I'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…
For Google Drive you can just use insync. I used to use them before I went with my self hosted solution.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably you using Gmail makes you more likely to use other google services, also they have scale, so if they get $10 of value per Gmail customer that's a lot more than Fastmail. Also google is very bad at monetizing their products in general e.g. Google Docs has been around for years before Microsoft's cloud office offering, but they never seem to have bothered to turn that into a subscription based software package…
I think that's easier said than done. AFAIK Microsoft gets the real bucks from big business using their stuff. It would have been a very steep hill for Google to climb to compete with Microsoft in the office software market, doesn't matter that they had the web product sooner. You can see the same in reverse with the Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on. In ad…
> Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.
Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform, which is why it has dozens of apps on iOS and Android, and supports Linux on Azure.
Microsoft's Windows strategy is to be cross-platform, with Windows 10 for "internet of things", phones, tablets, games consoles, all types of PC and servers.
Windows phones didn't sell well enough and the hardware lagged what was needed for Windows 10 (eg Hello and Continuum). However, there's still an ARM/smartphone version of Windows 10, so that door's not closed yet. There are always rumors about a business-oriented Surface phone
Also, Windows 10 was and is free for smartphones, so there's still room for Asian manufacturers to have a go. Even if they don't ship many units, it provides a fall-back if Google gets too aggressive on Android.
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#169+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…
I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.
I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/
Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail
#170I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though. That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps f…
Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
It was down long enough that it blew through the queue for several (most? some?) MTAs which were about ~36 hours if I remember correctly.