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From Gmail to Fastmail

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Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#111

Post by brongondwana »

emiunet wrote: post #104
brongondwana wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

I believe it's based on BigTable.

There doesn't seem to be a published article that I can find on the exact internals, so I'm basing it off discussions on the protocol mailing lists.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#112

Post by ForHackernews »

paul wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two types of "data under your control" at play here. The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?). The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'…

It seems rather dishonest to imply that Google is giving (or selling) your data to marketing companies.

Newsflash: Google is a marketing company!

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#114

Post by napoleond »

The coolest thing about Fastmail is a feature I didn't expect before making the switch: Fastmail is actually faster than Gmail. IMAP is quicker, webmail loads quicker, everything is just snappier. I still use Google mail for a lot of stuff (and actually only have one inbox at Fastmail currently) but I have been extremely impressed with Fastmail so far.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#115

Post by YooLi »

I moved to from Gmail to Fastmail last April, but this April, I moved back to Gmail. I have an email address (on my own domain) that I've used since the late 90's. It's all over the Internet in newsgroup archives, forums, etc. from before anyone was hiding emails from spam scrapers. Consequently I get several hundred spam per day. The FM spam filtering is no where near as good as G filtering. I had to manually flag as spam a couple dozen mails every day as well and go through the spam filter and pick out the false positives. I have no problems with G's spam filtering. The other problem with FM is administering multiple accounts on my domain. While it true it's only something I need to do once, as has been mentioned already, the settings/administration leaves much to be desired. Overall, using Gmail is just more pleasant to me, enough so that it outweighs the concerns (read: Google being creepy) that caused me to leave last April.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#116

Post by untitaker_ »

Semaphor wrote: post #80
lobster_johnson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want CardDAV and CalDAV support, you should take a look at Fruux [1]. They are a "headless" contact/calendaring server, no GUI, just the API. I moved to them (off Google Calendar) around the same time as I moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and I'm extremely satisfied. [1] https://fruux.com

Does fruux now support keeping in sync with an ics file like facebooks private urls? Last time I checked that was the last hurdle I had to move away from google calendar.

I wrote a thing to synchronize ics files with caldav calendars: https://github.com/untitaker/vdirsyncer

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#117

Post by rdl »

brongondwana wrote: post #106
dueprocess wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whet…

Would you be willing to run Fastmail.is or Fastmail.com.au or something for some premium over general US fastmail?

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#118

Post by mreiland »

personZ wrote: post #23

I 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.

I've been thinking about switching to fastmail from gmail for a while now, even going so far as to ask for people's opinions about it on reddit. Seeing this really convinces me I need to go ahead and make the switch, and I would assume I'm not alone in slowly becoming disenfranchised with gmail, hence the many posts you're seeing.

My issues with gmail have nothing to do with the email scanning, etc, and everything to do with the interface getting more complicated over time. I just want an email web interface that's simple, and common.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#119

Post by microtonal »

ForHackernews wrote: post #112
paul wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather dishonest to imply that Google is giving (or selling) your data to marketing companies.

Newsflash: Google is a marketing company!

But that doesn't mean that they give or sell your data to other companies. In fact, that would be incredibly stupid, each bit of data you can sell only once, while as space, you can sell every day.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#120

Post by nnx »

chjj wrote: post #12
stevenleeg wrote: post #2

I also recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and haven't looked back. The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, IMAP works great across all of my devices (which makes me more inclined to use OpenPGP when I can), and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com. They're also working on CardDAV and a web calendar (with CalDAV support), which will get me completely off of google…

Just curious, does it support 2FA for the web login and api key (or device keys, whatever google calls them) access for IMAP?

It does.

You can append your current 2FA TOTP code right after the password when your email client requests the password.

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