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Switching from Gmail to FastMail

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Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#181

Post by thrownaway2424 »

dochtman wrote: post #45

I've been trying FastMail for the past two months or so and have been very impressed; it's actually better than GMail in many ways. Most importantly to me, it seems to be quite a bit faster than GMail for me. One problem I've had is with their spam filtering. I've marked everything spammy as Spam (some 800 messages so far), but I can't figure out how to get things marked as non-spam (so that the personal database get…

I'm interested in quantitative evidence of "faster". I have 1.5GB of mail in gmail that I sync to fastmail and gmail is significantly, noticeably faster for me. Especially search.

I am skeptical of performance claims especially by people (not referring to you, but to the author of the post) who think mail.app is fast. Mail.app needs several seconds to do things that gmail does in 50 milliseconds, like load a thread with 100 posts, or free text search.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#182

Post by minor_nitwit »

nwh wrote: post #29
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

Yep. If the servers are in the US, or any of the NSA-tained countries like Australia, somebody is reading it.

If you're in the US and your data passes through a pipe outside of the country, to say go to an email server, they nab it too. It has to be encrypted locally to be secure.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#183

Post by socksy »

tombrossman wrote: post #131
workhere-io wrote: post #106

Another alternative is http://www.runbox.com/ - hosted entirely in Norway which has strong privacy laws.

Is Runbox still storing account passwords in plain text? They looked like a great option but when I set up an account recently they emailed me my username and password in plain text. I cancelled immediately but if they get the security basics right I may look at it again.

Whilst I can't condone the sending off passwords over in plain text, if done at the registration stage it doesn't necessarily mean that they're being stored as plain text.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#184

Post by jarek »

D9u wrote: post #170

I've been a Fastmail user for about seven years now, but my reasons for choosing Fastmail had nothing to do with security, it has to do with mobile accessibility. From the first time I tried Fastmail I noticed that the site was compatible with my mobile devices, which, at the time (2006), was the exception rather than the rule. When ASA/Opera took the site over, the site quality went down, IMHO, but I still use Fastm…

For the record, the ASA in "Opera Software ASA" is short for Allmennaksjeselskap, the Norwegian term for a public limited company.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#186

Post by cschmidt »

workhere-io wrote: post #104
adestefan wrote: post #76

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.

Please note that every European country also falls into the will be happy to spy on someone camp. Privacy laws vary a lot within Europe - even within EU - and while I'm sure every country in the world is "happy to spy", as you put it, I can't think of any European country save for the UK whose spying is as intensive as NSA's.

Well, France seems to be doing quite well, according to LeMonde

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/07/04/revelations...

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#187

Post by matthewdavis »

tippytop wrote: post #134

Snowden used lavabit.com, which is located in the US (and probably being scrutinized a bit more than usual these days). I think it's more important to diversify services than to insist on airtight alternatives. My mail is not terribly exciting, but when combined with the rest of my searches, visited webpages [1], chats, news reading habits, social network connections, and phone location, all housed under Google's roo…

>Snowden used lavabit.com, which is located in the US (and probably being scrutinized a bit more than usual these days).

Any proof to this? And, no, twitter is not a source of record.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#188

Post by decode »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #143
davidcollantes wrote: post #4

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.

Damn, I was about to sign up until I read this. I have to handle a lot of my work from my phone, and if it doesn't work well then I don't think it would be too useful for me. Do you know if there's any plan for them to release an android app that would let my phone sync? And I do realize the irony in trying to cut out google while using an android phone.

> Do you know if there's any plan for them to release an android app that would let my phone sync?

I use K-9 Mail on Android with Fastmail. They both support IMAP IDLE, so you get immediate push notifications of new messages.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#189

Post by contingencies »

peterwwillis wrote: post #140
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

Only S/MIME, PGP or similarly encrypted mail messages are secure. All other mail is routed through various servers which may or may not use an encrypted connection. It's like trusting the post office to never read your mail (which they have the authority to do if they perceive some kind of safety threat). Encrypt the message contents if you care for message privacy. If you want sender/receiver privacy too, you can tr…

encrypted mail messages are secure

What is secure? If government sezies your key, in some jurisdictions they can compel you to release your passphrase (if one is required), then they can go back and decrypt absolutely everything you ever sent. (OTR gets around this but this is largely by leaving the network layer location privacy / initial authentication / key exchange problems out of scope.)

Finally, traffic analysis is pretty powerful. Even if Eve can't read your messages, she can see who they went to and when (and maybe who they in turn communicated with afterwards) and thus easily determine probable relationships - Tor based endpoint, or not. (Hrrm ... but two Tor based endpoints, on the other hand...)

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#190

Post by zw »

masnick wrote: post #171
pwelch wrote: post #166

I'm really interested in switching email providers but is there a solution for calendar? I really enjoy my calendar syncing across multiple devices and sharing with my friends and family. Anyone have some good solutions?

I actually use iCloud because the Google Calendar -> Calendar.app syncing was pretty flakey. Obviously that's a bad choice if you're not all on Apple devices, but if you are I think it works pretty well. Based on this excellent post ( https://kkinder.com/2013/05/21/leaving-googles-silo-alternat... ) it seems like there isn't a great drop-in replacement for Google Calendar (except for iCloud).

It's not actually a bad choice at all, though, considering their CalDAV support is best-in-class.
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