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Leave Gmail in 10 steps

blog.dipasquale.fr

41–50 of 151 posts

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#41

Any recommendation on an iOS mail app. I use the Apple one, which is fine if uninteresting. The Fastmail app is not very modern looking which I superficially care about. Any reasonable looking non-Apple mail app reads my email or collects my data.

I hate to say it, but Outlook is actually really nice.

Heavily disagree. The web version on mobile (android; both firefox and chrome) feels slow and works badly on low bandwidth connections and touch support feels badly designed (e.g. selecting multiple messages, working with attachments). On desktops/laptops the imap support is also subpar with problems with showing multiple drafts for one email in the web version.

This would maybe be excusable for a small startup, but for a company the size of Microsoft that is an embarrassing showing.

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#42
post #27

Any recommendation on an iOS mail app. I use the Apple one, which is fine if uninteresting. The Fastmail app is not very modern looking which I superficially care about. Any reasonable looking non-Apple mail app reads my email or collects my data.

Airmail or Spark.

Spark stores your email credentials and some of your mail on their servers. No-go for me.

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#43
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't fastmail an Australian company? If so then they'll have to backdoor all software in the future since parliament passed these insane new surveillance laws.

Email is plain text anyway so why would it matter? If you want to keep it private you’ll have to encrypt it anyway and then all their backdoors wouldn’t change that.

There is a great difference between in-transit encryption and at-rest encryption. The former is not really comparable, as the existence of the email at rest will forever be vulnerable, in contrast to the time of transmission. A window of seconds versus years.

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#44
If you have Gmail click this link, it is an eye opener: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

Google knows every online purchase you ever made, every line item, the price you paid, the address it was delivered to, and so on.

Keep in mind that Facebook and Google also combine this data with offline data about you purchased from other companies, to complete the picture.

UPDATE: Here's an example of Google purchasing data about your offline purchases: https://www.fastcompany.com/90230910/google-has-been-secretl...

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#45
> First, I strongly suggest you buy a domain name, so that you really own your mail address

Any opinions on that?

I did so years ago (mostly for the reason of being independent of a mail provider) but meanwhile I realized you never "own" a domain. It's always just rented. It would be bad if someone gets in control of my domain so I just hope this won't happen before I'm dead... And even then it could be bad if it happens (although not for me anymore).

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#46
post #2

This article looks like an ad for fastmail.com

apologies for being off topic, but: I am a long time Fastmail customer, but the law passed in Australia yesterday has me somewhat concerned. Fastmail is an Australian company. Anyone else concerned?

As far as I can tell, it changes nothing, assuming that your email was sent as plain text. Although Fastmail stores your email on encrypted disks [1], it of course has the encryption keys for these disks. Even before the new law, they would have been subject to any Australian search warrant requiring that they hand over your email, and would not have had any technical reason for not complying.

In general, unless you and your correspondents are using PGP or some such, your email is readable by anyone who can obtain a search warrant in the country where your email provider resides. (Protonmail may or may not be an exception [2]).

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html

[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/mr-robot-uses-protonmail-still...

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#47
post #44

If you have Gmail click this link, it is an eye opener: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Google knows every online purchase you ever made, every line item, the price you paid, the address it was delivered to, and so on. Keep in mind that Facebook and Google also combine this data with offline data about you purchased from other companies, to complete the picture. UPDATE: Here's an example of Google purchasing d…

I've checked https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

"You don't have any purchases"

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#49
post #44

If you have Gmail click this link, it is an eye opener: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Google knows every online purchase you ever made, every line item, the price you paid, the address it was delivered to, and so on. Keep in mind that Facebook and Google also combine this data with offline data about you purchased from other companies, to complete the picture. UPDATE: Here's an example of Google purchasing d…

This just looks like a list compiled from invoices/receipts that were sent to my gmail from various vendors that has been parsed. Actually there's a lot of stuff that is missing.

Seems pretty tame actually, but I also don't use gmail for my whole life.

I'm a big advocate of privacy, but I think Google is pretty open about what they do. If you don't want this, there are usually ways to opt out and still use the service, but of course you can always use something else. I've been really enjoying Proton Mail.

Re: Leave Gmail in 10 steps

#50

Any recommendation on an iOS mail app. I use the Apple one, which is fine if uninteresting. The Fastmail app is not very modern looking which I superficially care about. Any reasonable looking non-Apple mail app reads my email or collects my data.

If you use FastMail, they're actually native push on iOS Mail because Apple allows them to be. Any other app would be IMAP polling.
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