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From Gmail to Fastmail

blog.l0cal.com

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Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#121

Post by microtonal »

rdl wrote: post #117
brongondwana wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That would be great! I'd be happy to pay 1.5 times the current price if my accounts were guaranteed to be hosted in Iceland.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#122

Post by microtonal »

YooLi wrote: post #115

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 a…

Did you train the spam filter with the minimum number of e-mails that is required to activate your personal bayes classifier?

Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to classify your incoming mail. Because it's been trained by the exact type of messages you receive, it is normally significantly more accurate at classifying spam than our general database. However, it can only do so once it's been properly trained, which is why we have to wait until it has seen 200 of each type of message before it is activated.

Source: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#123

Post by microtonal »

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…

The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, [...] and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com.

In all fairness, if you use Google Apps for Business ($50 per year), you can also use e-mail with your domain and they are not scanning your e-mail to show you ads.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#124

Post by microtonal »

etix wrote: post #3
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…

IMAP IDLE works great, it's not as efficient as push on mobile because of the battery drain but at least you'll get instant notifications. That's what I use with K-9 on Android.

IDLE opens a TCP connection for every folder the client is IDLE-ing on. It surely drains the battery. I haven't used it, but NuevaSync provides Exchange ActiveSync for IMAP accounts.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#125

Post by zokier »

tpeng wrote: post #85

Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.

You should be using your own domains regardless of who is your email provider. That way switching email provider is only one MX record change away if the need ever arises.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#126

Post by claudius »

microtonal wrote: post #119
ForHackernews wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there really such a major difference between you giving your data to your email provider who then sells it to other companies or you giving data to your email provider who then uses it very much the same way these other companies would do?

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#127

Post by yeukhon »

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…

> A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process

If they get a court warrant, you should either give in or fight against it. I think most reasonable people would find that reasonable as opposed to secret surveillance (e.g. NSA).

I think it is necessary to realize that email communication is at least bi-direction. So if one side is vulnerable to attack, there is no privacy or security. The best we could do is of course encrypt the message.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#128

Post by microtonal »

Osmium wrote: post #50
daxelrod wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS push notifications are what has been causing me to move my email over to GMail. Otherwise I'd much prefer something like Fastmail. I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

> The iOS push notifications are what has been causing me to move my email over to GMail. Don't rely on Gmail for push: they discontinued Exchange-support recently, though they grandfathered in old users. What's irritating to me is that when I set up my new phone I lost it, and am now back to using fetch-only Gmail unless I want to use one of Google's proprietary apps (unless they've changed this recently). Agreed th…

Don't rely on Gmail for push: they discontinued Exchange-support recently, though they grandfathered in old users. What's irritating to me is that when I set up my new phone I lost it, and am now back to using fetch-only Gmail unless I want to use one of Google's proprietary apps (unless they've changed this recently).

Google Apps for Business does have Exchange ActiveSync:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/135937?hl=en

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#129

Post by microtonal »

daxelrod wrote: post #20
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…

The iOS push notifications are what has been causing me to move my email over to GMail. Otherwise I'd much prefer something like Fastmail. I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

I played a little with PushOver, which seems to work fine. PushOver provides a user-specific (difficult to guess) e-mail address. E-mails sent there become push notifications. This can be combined with Fastmail's option to forward summarized e-mails.

One of the nice things about Fastmail is that you can use Sieve, so you can e.g. set up filtering such that only e-mails that arrive in the inbox are forwarded for push notifications.

It's not my default setup yet (I am mostly playing with Fastmail, while still using GMail as my primary e-mail provider), but it looked promising.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#130

Post by microtonal »

bigtones wrote: post #91
plg wrote: post #74

"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer" This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer. With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality…

Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.

Fastmail also has PFS:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...

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