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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

#271

The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps acco…

Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.

Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime.

Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.

You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.

If you're using Gandi (a registrar I would strongly recommend), you can set this up from your Gandi domain dashboard: Click "Manage mailboxes" and create a forwarding address. Example: https://i.imgur.com/qRmho7J.png - The MX values for your domain need to be Gandi's default email servers.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#273

The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps acco…

Also, you can add email aliases - even for other domains. This is how I have my email setup. For $5 a month it's worth it for me.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#274

Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account. That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.

What did you switch from where the customer service was decent?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#275
post #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.

I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses.

It doesn’t matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn’t blacklisted and I don’t send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody).

There’s zero recourse. You simply don’t matter when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#276

The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps acco…

Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.

Holy crap...

So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff.

It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully: https://www.stavros.io/posts/private-contacts-and-calendars-... Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!

I'm interested in keeping my data private, and willing to pay for it, I'm just not interested in maintaining a server, and dealing with 1) keeping it up, and 2) keeping it secure. I'd just rather pay someone a small monthly/annual fee to do it for me, along with keeping my data private.

Try Radicale contact and calendars on Sandstorm[0]. 1 click install[1]. Can be self hosted or as part of their hosted service[2] (free while in beta).

[0]https://sandstorm.io/

[1]https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvj...

[2]https://oasis.sandstorm.io/

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#279
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

E-mail deliverability is one of my top concerns, and I don't trust myself to handle it as well or better than the experts working on Google's email platform. SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc. are fairly basic concepts to learn but I wouldn't call myself an expert in their implementation by any stretch of the imagination. That's to say nothing of the non-standard oddities that pop up with deliverability to certain networks, ISPs, etc. that require ongoing attention and that I don't want to have to deal with.

If you are willing to deal with the occasional hiccup and learn about the odd issue as it comes up, the above is not really a huge concern. But if you are like me and would give up a lot to avoid the horror of realizing some email(s) have not gone through at the worst possible time (i.e. on the day of an important business deadline, with no time to troubleshoot the root cause), entrusting your mail to a platform like Google or FastMail is a must.

The "tinkerer" aspect of me would like to run my own mail server and would enjoy knowing that it's fully within my control and configured exactly the way I want it. The pragmatist in me says, "No way!"

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