Live data from Hacker News

Moving Away from Gmail

rolisz.ro

101–110 of 287 posts

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#101
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...also, once it's a self-sustaining business, there will be the opportunity to hire people and decrease the busk-factor risk.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#102

I've been considering doing a similar thing but I'm in a different situation with Gmail. I hopped on to their business domains when they were initially released (and free) and I'm still grandfathered into their free plan. I use the account as my primary Google account which includes purchased Android apps, and I make pretty heavy use of that Google Drive with several external organizations. I'd like to move just my e…

In my experience (G Suite Basic) it doesn't do any MX record checks, I still have a domain "active" that had its MX records removed (expired domain) almost 2 years ago.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#103
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@Felz, hey mate, I love what you are doing. I will get Purelymail featured on SaaSHub for a few months. Hopefully that may bring you a few new sign ups. Please just get it verified there and improve the listing.

Keep up the good work!

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#104

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.

Yeah, JMP supports picture messaging and short codes, so works for most SMS-based 2FA. Group texting support will be completed in the next month or two, which would give JMP feature-parity with Google Voice. And you can run your own instance if you don't trust the one at https://jmp.chat/

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#105
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail back in 2013 [1] and haven't looked back.

Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the interface lean and functional.

It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email.

[1]: https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#107

> Privacy stuff is not a part of my requirements. Can you send me a zip file containing all of your emails then? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Funny how even people who claim they don’t care about privacy actually really value privacy.

I read this as "I don't care if my emails get mined to show me ads", not "I'll send out copies of all my email to random HN users".

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#108
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair comment, but all of those concerns are mitigated if you: 1) use your own domain(s) 2) take frequent backups so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.

How many people are actively backing up their email on their own? Backing up email seems much simpler than running your own email server, but it's still going to require some technical know how. To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.

I was thinking of using the desktop email clients doing the backup.

but someone who cannot do that is definitely not going to move off of free Gmail/Yahoo mail/...

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#109

I've been considering doing a similar thing but I'm in a different situation with Gmail. I hopped on to their business domains when they were initially released (and free) and I'm still grandfathered into their free plan. I use the account as my primary Google account which includes purchased Android apps, and I make pretty heavy use of that Google Drive with several external organizations. I'd like to move just my e…

In my experience (G Suite Basic) it doesn't do any MX record checks, I still have a domain "active" that had its MX records removed (expired domain) almost 2 years ago.

Niiiccceee. That does make me a bit more confident about it.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#110
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@Felz, hey mate, I love what you are doing. I will get Purelymail featured on SaaSHub for a few months. Hopefully that may bring you a few new sign ups. Please just get it verified there and improve the listing. Keep up the good work!

Cool! I'll take a look.
Post reply on HN