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Moving Away from Gmail

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Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#151

Post by alex_studer »

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 Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience, hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam (unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough email volume?

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#152

Post by contravariant »

masnick wrote: post #146
jw14 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree $3/month is reasonable for email, but since the encryption backdoor laws passed in Australia in Dec 2018, I've been avoiding Australian software.

You should take a look at https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/ . They say it doesn’t affect their customers.

While that's true it's also because they don't use E2E. Which I guess makes any discussion about encryption backdoors rather pointless.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#153

Post by ekovarski »

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.

Hey sounds promising but out of the gate it sounds like it will be missing a lot of features I need, eg

no migration path, you start with a clean slate web based only, no imap access (not sure of smtp) no custom domains on day 1

Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its missing crucial elements.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#154

Post by nicoburns »

joering2 wrote: post #112
nicoburns wrote: post #90

> 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 t…

It actually is. It has some tweaks done so that no matter what device you on it still runs most functionality.

That's absolutely standard for a webapp though (and really old devices are only supported through the "Basic HTML" view). There's no reason why wide device support should cause it to be slow.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#155

Post by knr2345 »

codethief wrote: post #126
wycy wrote: post #116

Question for people who have emails at their own domain: what do you pick as your email address? Do you typically use first@firstlast.com? firstlast@firstlast.com? first@last.com? me@firstlast.com? Do you typically use multiple accounts?

It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following: - mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response - @firstlast.tld for automated emails from services like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications. The nea…

Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly?

My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and genericwords.tld.

Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders, etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or always mark as read, or never mark as read.

I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome.

I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed to be accepted.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#156

Post by tbodt »

Felz wrote: post #82
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

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…

Could you also commit to notifying users when the privacy policy or terms of service change? I suspect you already do this, but it would be good to have it in writing.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#157

Post by tbodt »

nicoburns wrote: post #90

> 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 t…

It's that slow because there's just so much JavaScript going on.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#158

Post by secabeen »

alex_studer wrote: post #151
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 Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience, hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam (unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough email volume?

I don't think it matters even with all that stuff. The first time you email anyone, it's going to go to spam. Once you have established a mail flow, then it will continue. The best setup is to have them email you first, then your replies will already be well scored.

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#159

Post by mzzter »

I’ve had a great experience with Purelymail, though I haven’t figured out how to complete the DKIM and DMARC setup.

When I was evaluating options for hosting an email address from my own domain, two things sold me on Purelymail: - special characters allowed in the name, like "~" - the pay-as-you-go pricing

Re: Moving Away from Gmail

#160

Post by teambayleaf »

yumraj wrote: post #20
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…

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.

> 2) take frequent backups

My argument is that people really should use POP3 (not IMAP) for this reason.

POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.

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