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Switching from Gmail to FastMail

maxmasnick.com

221–230 of 230 posts

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#221
The ad messages are under the promotions tab. Who clicks the promotions tab? You can even disable it.

Honestly, if they were interspersing ad messages with my regular mail it would be a big issue. But just like with search, where ads are separated off to the side, the ads here are clearly marked and separated. So I don't see a problem.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#222
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the kind that drones you, mate.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/australia-to-stoc...

For those like me who can't access the link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130609020621/www.news.com.au/te...

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#223

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.

How's the Rackspace web UI?

I have a few clients on it and they like it. I don't use webmail myself, though.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#224
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not use Gmail with PGP?

It's certainly an option, but you must use a client like Thunderbird to do it, loosing the ubiquity of the web interface. Maybe when window.crypto will be standardized and with a good browser extension we will have security and easy of use.

>good browser extension

http://www.mailvelope.com/

https://github.com/crised/SafeGmail

No good (edit: stable and drop-in) Firefox tool yet.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#225
post #167

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…

Thanks. I've just created an account at lavabit.com. Will consider paying for this as well, maybe for a custom domain. Nice tip.

If you don't pay, it's not encrypted. https://lavabit.com/secure.html

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#227
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So why not use Gmail with PGP?

Or just attach pgp files to your e-mail and use it with any e-mail client or server.

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analysi…

Tor attempts to work around traffic analysis by using fixed-length records, and being a bridge helps hide your traffic with other people's. But nothing's perfect.

"Secure" in this context means "not readable by anyone but the recipient". Of course, if you have the recipient in custody, this is the easiest method to decrypt the messages: http://xkcd.com/538/

(OTR-style cryptography is nice, but sucks for store-and-forward communication; for a comporably difficult message to decrypt more than once, use one-time pads - but don't complain to be about distributing the pad dictionary, that's totally out of scope here ;)

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#229
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not useful. You may be talking to your mail server using TLS, but it's highly unlikely that your mail server is talking to every other mail server (and vice versa) using TLS.

And then, even if all of the servers involved in delivering your mail communicate securely, the reciepent is going to reply in plain text, quoting your entire message...

Re: Switching from Gmail to FastMail

#230

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.

How's the Rackspace web UI?

No complaints. It's well organized and tends to follow a clear and minimalist design. Their status page follows a similar theme.

http://status.apps.rackspace.com/

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