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Switching from Gmail to FastMail

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Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#151

Post by wyclif »

adestefan wrote: post #7
tehwalrus wrote: post #5

American company, American servers, American jurisdiction. Sure they won't read your email, but the NSA will (just like Gmail.) Update: hmm, so Opera aren't american? interesting. All the servers are definitely in the US though: > "we have standard servers and a high speed connection in the US." - https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html

Fastmail is owned by Opera a Norwegian company. Nice try though to inject a completely worthless comment.

It's actually not a worthless comment. Norwegian ownership makes absolutely no difference to the privacy equation wrt the NSA if Fastmail's servers are colocated in the US.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#152

Post by stock_toaster »

johngalt wrote: post #123

Tried fastmail and wasn't impressed. Rackspace email is a great choice. Its cheap and fast. Outages are rare. Has active sync support and IMAP push works on android/iPhone. Rackspace also allows you to run exchange mailboxes alongside IMAP if you have a few users who are still tied to outlook.

I wish rackspace email had 2-factor auth and/or application-specific-passwords. :/

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#154

Post by kaolinite »

I switched to Fastmail from Google Apps a month or so ago and absolutely love it. Really fast, great web UI and works better with desktop clients than Gmail (none of the weird label issues, duplicate folders, etc). The entire migration process was very smooth too and the support always got back to me within an hour or so.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#156

Post by dsl »

milhous wrote: post #74
tehwalrus wrote: post #5

American company, American servers, American jurisdiction. Sure they won't read your email, but the NSA will (just like Gmail.) Update: hmm, so Opera aren't american? interesting. All the servers are definitely in the US though: > "we have standard servers and a high speed connection in the US." - https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html

Fastmail is hosted by NYI.net in Lower Manhattan, a major FreeBSD shop. The site lists Opera as one of their customers. The very nature of e-mail leads me to conclude that it really doesn't matter where an e-mail provider is located, because it will always be intercepted at some point. One can use another e-mail service, but if the people you talk to still use gmail, then does it really matter? Perhaps it's time to t…

Opera owns Fastmail

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#157

Post by pan69 »

It seems that these Fastmail guys are primarily charging for storage. My question would be, do they allow to set up many different domains and email addresses inside a single account or is this a one email address/domain per account thing?

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#158

Post by derefr »

tehwalrus wrote: post #75
[deleted] wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I'm not bashing the USA in general, I'm sorry if it sounds like it (it's quite hard to write a catchy comment in this vein and get the tone right, perhaps I got the balance wrong this time.) However, I am pointing out something that a lot of non-US citizens on HN have been saying lots over the past few weeks; setting up an email service that is outside the US (for the purpose of trying to avoid PRISM surveillance) is…

Also keep in mind, most of the people you'll want to send mail to will still be using email providers located in the US. So the messages will just be NSA'ed when they're delivered, instead of when they're sent.

On the other hand, if you have specific counterparties and you can get them to switch to the same thing you're using, just use TorMail, or run a VPS somewhere where you both have SSH keys and use it as a dead-drop, or whatever. "The solution must involve SMTP and POP/IMAP" is only relevant when you're communicating with unauthenticated peers... at which point, you'd better not say anything important anyway. ;)

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#159

Post by dkoch »

I've had the same Fastmail account since 2003 -- they were one of the first webmail providers to have strong IMAP support back in the day. It's always been reliable for me with very few outages through the years.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#160

Post by chimeracoder »

tehwalrus wrote: post #96
pyvek wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You do unless you're using PGP for all your emails, because SMTP can be easily intercepted in plan-text.

Of course, if you're using full end-to-end encryption (like PGP) for all your emails, you don't care so much about using HTTPS to fetch them, because you're using end-to-end encryption.

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