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Switching from Gmail to FastMail

maxmasnick.com

91–100 of 230 posts

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#91
post #22

For me, it's not that I'm afraid of GMail removing IMAP, it's that Gmail IMAP works really, really bad. For an email-client to work well with Gmail, it has to be tailored to Gmail, and that has given me some issues lately. For instance, most of my mail is sorted into labels, skipping the inbox. When using a mail client with IMAP, these labels shows as folders. Deleting the mail from my client, doesn't delete it from…

Wait, IMAP sucks because you do something in a non-standard way (labels in GMail) that is exposed over IMAP in the best way it can fake (folder) and it is IMAP's problem that automagically do what you think it should?

And just for added measure, deleting the label seems to me to be the right thing to do.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#93
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? FastMail? They're not American.

Servers are in New York.

Oh I see now, I always assumed they had their servers elsewhere since they aren't an American company. Hmm I'm going to ask them about that, I'd pay extra if they offered the option of running off non-US servers.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#94
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Push email isn't something I really want, but that's a good point if that is important to you. The other thing I forgot to mention in the post is contact syncing. I'm honestly not sure if I like the contact pollution gmail does more or less than not having sync between FastMail and my phone.

My contacts are perfect on Gmail, no pollution at all. I use Contacts extensibly (birthdays, addresses, notes and all). They are all synchronized with my OS X Contacts as well, photos included. How are yours getting polluted?

+1 to Masnick. Google Contacts wreaks havoc (when it actually syncs) on my nicely organized vCard-based Contacts, especially when they duplicate cards that are in different or special groups.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#95

The main problem with abandoning Google is all the services associated with it, not only mail. And paid Gmail continues to offer mobile sync, which FastMail does not. Yet, FastMail looks quite nice.

Also, FastMail doesn't appear to have 2 factor authentication.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#96
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please tell me where you think a server needs to be located were you would consider to be "safe." Please note that every European country also falls into the will be happy to spy on someone camp.

Another thing to note is that even if servers aren't located in US, data may be routed through there. Traceroute from my home connection (in India) to a Singapore IP looks like: India -> US -> Japan -> US -> Japan -> Singapore I'm not saying that the NSA has forced other countries to route their data through them. It could be due to several other reasons. But the main point is that it is hard to escape the NSA. Even…

if I'm talking to my mailserver over HTTPS/IMAP TLS, I don't mind where the traffic is routed.

It's still not ideal (they can still see who you're talking to), but you'll never have 100% privacy. Just make as much of the data useless as possible.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#97

The fact that they even offer 200mb and 800mb plans makes it hard for me to take them seriously. Shame.

Huh? I've had my email address since 1995. I have 5Mb / 6 emails in my Maildir and that's only because I've got lazy recently. I've recieved probably 500,000 emails over the years. Hoarding email is like recording all your phone conversations and keeping the tapes in your living space. If it's worth keeping, save it elsewhere. If it's not, delete it.

I completely disagree. I've kept every email I've ever received or sent since 1996 (close to a million emails, all searchable/indexed) and it has proved extremely useful over the years to be able to find ancient emails very quickly. I'm sure some large proportion of those emails I will never use, or will never be useful, but space is cheap, and keeping them doesn't hurt at all.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#98
post #47
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i pay for my gmail (google apps) so I don't have any ads.

Is there anything (for example in the T&Cs) that stops Google from creeping ads to paying customers in the future? I bet not.

If they take example from AT&T, they would be selling your information even if you are a paying customer, which might result in more targeted ads elsewhere...

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#99

I installed http://www.iredmail.org/ on a five buck a month Droplet at DigitalOcean around six months ago. Seems to work great and I control it. I never use Roundcube. I use IMAP from the built in Mail.app on OS X. There is even a tutorial to set everything up. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

What about backups? I don't worry about Gmail backing up my email (though I probably should), but is there some way to get iRedMail to send encrypted backups to S3 regularly or something?

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#100

The main problem with abandoning Google is all the services associated with it, not only mail. And paid Gmail continues to offer mobile sync, which FastMail does not. Yet, FastMail looks quite nice.

Also, FastMail doesn't appear to have 2 factor authentication.

Actually, they do have it: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/03/google-authenticator-now-...
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