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Moving Away from Gmail

rolisz.ro

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Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#61

Post by johnklos »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #45
simonjgreen wrote: post #41

It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.

Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault tolerance. And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web interface, ... Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much. Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires constant monitoring and maintenance.

No.

You don't need fault tolerance. It's nice, but not necessary. How often is your VPS or colocated server going to go down, anyway? Email is meant to deal with transient issues.

Web interface? Again, you don't need that at all.

Constant monitoring? No. Maintenance? Certainly not constant.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#62

Post by thanksforfish »

hysan wrote: post #54

One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accou…

This is also true for sites that use Google accounts for OAuth. Your account has a one to one mapping to your Google account.

You can keep the old address and auto-forward emails from the old to the new. I think that's the best you can manage.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#63

Post by nullc »

vzaliva wrote: post #59

email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in features and UI. So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies? 2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am p…

Considering the importance of email that you mention: What is your plan if google suddenly bans your account?

Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse-- they won't even respond to you.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#64

Post by dpwm »

simonjgreen wrote: post #41

It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.

Two years ago I felt the same way.

Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was great.

Then we started having bizarre deliverability problems to a growing provider of corporate emails. So after trying a number of solutions, we settled on SES. All was great again.

Then we started having weird deliverability problems that resulted in bounced emails to an accountancy firm. One of the public IPs ended up on a blacklist. This got fixed fairly swiftly. Things were good again.

Then it happened again.

Yes, deliverability can be solved – the question is for how long. Maybe we chose poorly with SES, but it seems other providers have had problems. I ultimately concluded that it's really not worth the hassle, and we ended up with the email provider that was causing us the bulk of the problems. It was a difficult pill to swallow, and I realize that I've done my part in making the problem worse. But sometimes, life is too short.

The world was different a decade ago. We didn't have overzealous spam filters by default that self-reinforce their awful decisions. I appreciate that spam is a really hard problem. But the solution we have is worse than the problem: we've just made an oligarchy of email, where not even all the big players have the clout to keep themselves out of blacklists all of the time.

And with all that said, for a personal email server, I still might self-host – but I'd be prepared for emails to not get reliably delivered.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#65

Post by sbuccini »

rakoo wrote: post #17

Unaffiliated, I found migadu ( https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html ) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need. As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many address…

I would caution everyone considering Migadu. My biggest issue revolves around support — they don’t have a public status page so when the service goes down it’s impossible to know if the issue is on my end or on theirs. They're averaged one big outage (~24 hours) a year over the past 3 years, not counting smaller outages, so this isn’t a generic thought experiment. They don’t respond to most of my emails to support, either. Do not recommend.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#66

Post by sbuccini »

wheresvic3 wrote: post #35
rakoo wrote: post #17

Unaffiliated, I found migadu ( https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html ) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need. As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many address…

I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc. Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite su…

Same experience here.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#67

Post by thanksforfish »

> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop

Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).

Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#68

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Felz wrote: post #40
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone. But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be. EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate servic…

Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.) As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-yo…

Hey! I feel like ensuring you clarify you'll only shut down an account if they break the rules you set out is a really good practice and there are examples, like FastMail's, you could borrow from. I know the standard boilerplate is to give a service the right to do whatever it wants, but as a small indie service operator you can be better than the fairly standard! ;)

Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.

I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#70

Post by meagher »

svnpenn wrote: post #55
meagher wrote: post #50

The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people don’t own their own email address. Their address is tied to the client. Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations. I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/

You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?

The post is about “owning” your email address so you can move, not moving to a new provider.
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