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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

#171

Post by toyg »

ultramancool wrote: post #139
toyg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

> I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server

Oh yeah, me too, and tbh it's enough of a pain already without having to deal with mail, spam and the likes.

There is a reason that companies like Heroku exist and prosper; it's the same reason personal mail servers never saw mass-adoption, despite being one of the first things you could do on the internet. The anecdote that you find it easier than most doesn't change the reality of the matter.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#172

Post by eatbitseveryday »

stryan wrote: post #156
reacharavindh wrote: post #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 suppor…

I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0]. [0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/

> The lack of support for desktop clients

Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels?

I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#173

Post by unfunco »

readhn wrote: post #14

"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.

I don't think they are, as mentioned, Australia doesn't have the equivalent of a National Security Letter. FastMail has a very short and very easy to understand privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#174

Post by EduardoBautista »

graffitici wrote: post #155

I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang…

This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#175

Post by bachmeier »

curt15 wrote: post #165
bad_user wrote: post #76

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…

>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.

That plus the whole Android and ChromeOS thing. If you have Google Drive on a Chromebook, you have Google Drive on Linux.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#176

Post by tdkl »

scholia wrote: post #168
Noseshine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

> Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform

Now, when Windows Mobile turned out to be a failure. But not couple years ago and definitely not when they were buying Nokia.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#177

Post by honkhonkpants »

bad_user wrote: post #124
honkhonkpants wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.…

Honestly I don't know. All I know is she basically refuses to use it because it's too much work.

It sounds like the FM mobile site meets your requirements, especially with respect to inbox zero housekeeping (that I don't practice). I think that's a long way from claiming that the gmail mobile site doesn't work, as the other poster stated.

I think it's nice that there is more than one email service. I don't think they have to be totally ordered by some objective criterion.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#178

Post by jimcsharp »

wcunning wrote: post #105
exhilaration wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark sid…

It will frequently gobble up multi-lingual emails. I discovered this when I ignored a customer in Chile for a while because he had a Spanish email signature.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#179

Post by ultramancool »

toyg wrote: post #171
ultramancool wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

> I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server Oh yeah, me too, and tbh it's enough of a pain already without having to deal with mail, spam and the likes. There is a reason that companies like Heroku exist and prosper; it's the same reason personal mail servers never saw mass-adoption, despite being one of the first things you could do on the internet. The anecdote that you find it easier…

I just don't understand where the difficulty some people have in mind comes from so I'm trying to understand it better. You don't have to be bleeding edge to be secure against remote attacks, most of the configuration is trivial, I think more people would do it if it wasn't made out to be such a difficult thing for no real reason.

Maybe if someone made an integrated mail server it'd be more common.

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