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From Gmail to Fastmail

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Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#101

Post by mongrol »

ender7 wrote: post #28

There 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…

If you're using email then various governments (UK, USA) have it no matter where it's hosted. It's not under your control while in transit. At best you can encrypt it, but they'll take a copy of it anyway and burst it open if they need to.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#102

Post by dueprocess »

mercer wrote: post #26
sandstrom wrote: post #5

I'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.

It's likely the NSA reads your Fastmail at the breakfast table. Their servers are on US soil.

It would take some wicked mental gymnastics to rationalize that fact away.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#103

Post by dueprocess »

brongondwana wrote: post #89
XorNot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Fastmail is...another mail provider. Paying for email service might be a good idea for a lot of reasons, but people have an extremely absurd sense that they're "fighting the man". You know - by paying in US dollars, to a US company, using US banks.... EDIT: Something I did just see is that Fastmail gives you sieve scripting. Since going from hosting my own inbound email to Gmail, I've really missed having a good…

We're an Australian company. Everything else you say is accurate enough, though we actually use an Australian payment provider ( https://pin.net.au/ ).

So you don't transact with any US banks? What are you implying?

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#104

Post by emiunet »

brongondwana wrote: post #94
_mikz wrote: post #22

What 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?

FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server) And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in s…

I am curious what sort of storage solution Google is using to compare to this one..

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#105

Post by emiunet »

sivers wrote: post #34

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to. Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day. The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused. Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless. Choose the Business email op…

I have been using Google Apps and actually have an "evil" thought whenever I heard someone is switching off of Google: maybe, the more people leaving Google, the better its performance will be (for the ones who stay) (ie: their servers will be less busy)

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#106

Post by brongondwana »

dueprocess wrote: post #103
brongondwana wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're an Australian company. Everything else you say is accurate enough, though we actually use an Australian payment provider ( https://pin.net.au/ ).

So you don't transact with any US banks? What are you implying?

I'm answering the specific points made about FastMail with the whether they are correct or not.

We don't have an account with a US bank, though we do have an account in USD, and we're an Australian company, not a US company.

Other than that, our main datacentre is in the USA, and obviously if every US bank decided not to allow transactions to our accounts, we would be in trouble. That would be true regardless of whether we billed in USD or AUD.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#107

Post by songgao »

I made up my decision and finally made the switch this evening, after reading this post. So far I'm pretty happy about it. Thanks etix!

Several things I'd like to share here:

1. XMPP

Fastmail actually comes with a XMPP server. This is a big bonus feature that I didn't expect. It can also keep chat logs in an IMAP folder named 'chat'. Read more here: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html

2. External Account

If you want to manage other email accounts (receive emails from them), Fastmail seems only support POP (in contrast to Gmail supporting both POP and IMAP). Also, unlike Gmail which checks email with a dynamic frequency based on how many emails you receive at the time, Fastmail uses a fixed interval for checking emails from external account. The minimum interval you can set is 1 hour. I couldn't find a way to manually trigger a POP check in Fastmail either.

One hour is a bit too long for me, but fortunately I adapted to a better way than using external account. I simply set an auto-redirect rule in my other email accounts (e.g. my school uses MS Exchange) and that actually results in instant delivery of emails from external account. I guess this is the right way to handle the problem (other than making your primary email service pull emails from external account like what I did in Gmail before).

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#108

Post by mattkrea »

sivers wrote: post #34

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to. Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day. The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused. Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless. Choose the Business email op…

While I'll agree that the interface is beautifully simple why not host your own? Aside from software updates I've had to perform zero maintenance and find comfort in the fact that I host my own.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#109

Post by brongondwana »

mercer wrote: post #26
sandstrom wrote: post #5

I'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.

Basically, we just don't have the hardware in Iceland to support both running a full replica of everything from New York and also running production traffic in Iceland.

A fair bit of that is my personal fault for not pushing the extraction from Opera's racks into our own separate racks. We've been paying for capacity in Iceland for 3 months that we're not using yet.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#110

Post by nilkn »

vosper wrote: post #27
nilkn wrote: post #7

I 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.

The tabs are great for mobile, where I can use them to control which emails generate push notifications. On the web, though, the entire new Gmail interface in general is so much less efficient at conveying information that I find that any categorization provided by the tabs is just not a big enough of a positive to justify using that interface.
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