Moving Away from Gmail • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#81

Post by sneak » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

Keeping years and years of old emails on the server is a bad idea whilst subjected to the third party doctrine, which holds that the government snoops can access your emails without a warrant due to the fact that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are storing your emails on a hosted server.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act

How often do you need the mails from years ago? Archive them to a local mailbox and include it in your normal backups.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#82

Post by Felz » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

Felz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 avo…

No offense taken! I think you're broadly right that I could be doing a better job on reassuring messaging, and I'll put that on my work queue.

I also hope to solve any bus factor problems before leaving beta. Right now if I were struck down, I think I'd still have about 9 months worth of free AWS credits on the account running the service, plus any profits. (It's not quite a self sustaining business yet, but it's not that far from it either.)

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#83

Post by profsnuggles » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:43 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #51

Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or other event (I don't mind paying for…

The closest I've found is https://jmp.chat/

I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll something with asterisk. Although I saw https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms the other day.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#84

Post by sbuccini » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

bichonnages wrote: post #80

sbuccini wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, e…

In my case, they have always replied to my emails. I think it would be much better if they were actively using their twitter account in order to keep us informed.

Agreed, or proactively email users when they are experiencing severe degradation

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#85

Post by jbullock35 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

From the article: "One thing that I miss is the fact that in GMail folders are actually labels and you can have multiple labels for an email."

Which competing services (apart from Outlook) offer Gmail-like labeling for individual messages?

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#86

Post by megido » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

Pure mail, but registration is such a nightmare

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#87

Post by dguo » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

trengrj wrote: post #75

I'm really looking forward to what DHH can do with https://hey.com/ . My aim with an email provider is that I trust it. A non-bootstrapped company with a founder outspoken against privacy issues seems a good place to try.

I'm planning on migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, but I'm holding off until Hey launches to see what it offers.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#88

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

dpwm wrote: post #64

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…

Out of interest, were you using a dedicated IP address with SES? As I understand it you've doomed to deliverability issues unless you have your own IP address which nobody else is sending from.

That said, by no means am I claiming that email deliverability is easy!

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#89

Post by delsarto » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

meagher wrote: post #70

svnpenn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As the recent changes to .org show, though, after a while the domain owns you rather than the other way around!

I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing.

Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in spam.

I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching!

Basically, everything is terrible.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#90

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails takes 2.5 seconds.

I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.