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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

#211
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Well, for me that's not weird, it's just a big fuck you, totally consistent with what other companies are doing. Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS. And the market I'm in is too small for them to bother, so might as well sit on that pile of cash and not want my business. The weird part is that Linux is mostly about the server, being a really good home server for many people. And setting up…

> Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS.

I wish. "Multi-platform" and what it means for vendors:

Apple: macOS, iOS, watchOS, Safari.

Microsoft: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Windows Mobile.

Google: Chrome, Chromebook, Android, iOS.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instantly deleted it? That doesn't sound right for the spam folder.

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

There is no such silent drop. All traffic to Gmail is either delivered or rejected at SMTP time.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#213

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?

HN and FastMails mobile interfaces are the only mobile interfaces I am able to use on the entire Internet

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'

Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I personally use https://mailinabox.email/ to handle configuration for me and that works great.

If you're concerned about deliverability, you can also use a service like mail-tester.com [1], which receives a message you send and analyzes it for a wide variety of potential problems. I've found it to be a good guide.

[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#215

I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.

You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The default I have seen everywhere (qmail, postfix) is a week.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#217

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.

FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#218
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.

Gmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder.

The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was.

The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#219
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.

Serious question - why would you pay for email when there's plenty of good free providers? (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#220
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…

If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.

On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.

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