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From Gmail to Fastmail
21–30 of 166 posts
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#22What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues.
If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#23I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#24Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#25I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I like it so far. For me, scanning my email to show me ads didn't really bother me that much. But the thing that I really like with Fastmail is that my outbound email alias works the way I want. The university I graduated from gives us email aliases for life, and I prefer to use my university alias instead of my Gmail address. It obviously works fine when I rece…
when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever)
You can configure Gmail to use your university's SMTP server and then Gmail is simply an e-mail client. They steer you away from that option but it's available.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#26I've been eying Fastmail for a while. It's really sad that they won't offer Icelandic-only hosting, it would give some additional comfort. But perhaps that will change?
Is there any good reason why they haven't done this already? It seems to me privacy is a major selling point, especially after the Snowden revelations.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#27I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.
I think the tabs are great. With little or no training they're right 99% of the time and are a very effective way of separating "real email" - friends, colleagues, family - from the automated stuff that's not spam but which I also don't care about as much.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#28There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:
"Getting my data back under control
In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."
If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].
It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].
[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.
[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#29Something I think is another huge plus people don't mention: you get an actual, living person for technical and other support.
Responsive customer support is such a huge thing, and yet so few companies do it right.
Especially for something as crucial as email. I am probably still sticking with gmail for a while, but I can't imagine the horror of suddenly being locked out and not being able to get on the phone with anyone.
Re: From Gmail to Fastmail
#30What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues. If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?
Beside the non-standard way of managing folders (duplicate emails caused by labels) I find it slow compared to others.