Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

cpbotha.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 379 posts

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#361

Post by Tempest1981 »

chrisper wrote: post #167
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…

For Google Drive you can just use insync. I used to use them before I went with my self hosted solution.

Any suggestions for Google Docs users?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#362

Post by travisr »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #220
preek wrote: 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 t…

> 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.

I don't know what kind of machine you're using, but that's not true for any CPU/disk from the last 8 years or so.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#363

Post by acqq »

tijs wrote: post #339
maccard wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm using https://soverin.net for €29/year (€39 if you don't have your own domain) to limit my google dependence. Added benefit that they are based in EU. Disclaimer: our company works with them so I'm definitely biased.

Looks nice, but my worry is if they'd be alive in a year. I have actually used an e-mail provider before that's no more.

I'd like the European level of the data privacy but also a company that is set to live long, and the web site looks too much like a startup that can disappear tomorrow (as in "it didn't grow enough, who cares, it's just a web address, let's kill it and do something else.")

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#364

Post by mastazi »

tirant wrote: post #359
mastazi wrote: post #278

Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.

they are hosted in the Netherlands: https://soverin.net/

Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#366

Post by tjl »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #229
honkhonkpants wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.

I typically export mail regularly. In my case, I store them in a DEVONthink Pro Office database as that supports directly importing from Apple's Mail.app, has good search, and good cross-referencing support.

I really wish I followed this practice sooner as there's mail from the 90s I wish I still had. I've used e-mail continuously since 1991 so it would be a lot of mail. Disk space is the main reason why I didn't do it sooner.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#367

Post by kaishiro »

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.…

I, too, would be interested to know what issues someone could have with the Fastmail mobile interface. I'm not even sure how they could make it simpler - it's pretty great.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#368

Post by unhammer »

firewalkwithme wrote: post #213
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?

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

HN has tiny links (firefox android at least), I always have to zoom in to get to comments or upvote anything. But otherwise fairly readable …

I agree about Fastmail's mobile interface though. Almost anything else goes through Reader View (currently trying out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea... which seems promising). Just wish the Reader View could remember my scroll position …

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#369

Post by maccard »

runejuhl wrote: post #343
maccard wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I want. You mention response times and priority support, and are talking about choosing nginx vs Apache. That's far more detail than I care about. I want to click a button, give you my card details, have an inbox and calendar that I can easily access on my phone, work machine and home machine, and with some level of guarantee about the security and privacy of my data. I'm not bothered abou…

Thank you for responding. The listed roles were just to show the idea of the service; an role providing mail and calendar (e.g. Kolab) would only have a few required options (if any). Any additional detail would be optional and have our default recommended values.

I would say there are plenty of people who _would_ be interested in that sort of a service. I've been thinking about this since I wrote the above responses, and I'm fairly certain that what I want is gmail + google calendar + google drive, without the google. The more friction or configuration steps I have to go through, the less likely I am to use it.

Case in point: I'm not particularly happy with providing LastPass with my password info. I currently pay for their service. In order to transition to KeePass, I have to give up the automatic sync functionality between my devices, I have to manually back up my key database myself, and I lose the browser extensions that lastpass provides. I'm finding it hard to justify switching for the above reasons.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#370

Post by unhammer »

dingaling wrote: post #162
snemvalts wrote: post #35

But 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.

Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)
Post reply on HN