161–170 of 287 posts
> 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…
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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…
> friends who could step in "could" or "would"? Is there something in place, and have they agreed to this?
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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?
https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverabi...
Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers. You'll have to be persistent.
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?
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
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.
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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.
If you think I'm saying no one should still be using email (the collection of standards and protocols, that is) then you are correct.
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
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.
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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.
any provider can ban your account. my recourse is to switch my domain. I do not use @gmail.com address - I use my own domain with google mail.
That is key, and really good advice. People with that setup are massively better off.
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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.
• POP3 doesn’t have the concept of mailboxes. All you will get is the messages that exist at the time of request, not any folders you’ve put them into or labels applied.
• If you delete a message on the server, it won’t be deleted locally, which means that your backup does not represent the current state of affairs.
Also POP3 is definitely designed for the “download and delete on server” approach, and various tooling may have limits on it because of that. For example, if you get Gmail to fetch from some other server over POP3, it stops working after there are 50,000 messages. This undocumented limit bit me some years back when I used Gmail in this way, and it didn’t even notify me that fetching had stopped working! It was two weeks before I noticed that no new messages had been coming in from that source.
> POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
I refute this. IMAP is a synchronisation protocol. Clients can choose to operate fully online (performing every operation on the server), fully offline (downloading everything from the server and operating locally) or a hybrid (e.g. keep only the last 30 days of messages locally). The protocol, and most clients, are fully capable of creating a continuous local backup containing the entire current state of the server. Is this “the entire history”? Depends on your definition. I’d argue it’s more true of IMAP than it is of POP3. But it’s not like a Git repository showing what happened and when. I know of no email protocol that provides that. But you can make it so yourself, e.g. sync IMAP into a maildir that happens to be a Git repository and commit after every sync. That would have the entire history, at the resolution of IMAP fetch.
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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!