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Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

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Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#231

Post by unicornporn »

brightball wrote: post #132
unicornporn wrote: post #18

Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year). 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things..…

Depending on what your threshold for needs is, Rackspace Email is a pretty solid solution for about $2 / user / month. Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.

But if I remember things correctly they don't sell to a single user..?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#232

Post by mrmondo »

Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail.

Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better.

These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#233

Post by joshuak »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #212
ClashTheBunny wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a threshold for spammyness that will cause email to be dropped silently and never reach the spam folder.

There is no such silent drop. All traffic to Gmail is either delivered or rejected at SMTP time.

This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver.

(Or was your comment tongue-in-cheek?)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#234

Post by nirvdrum »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #230
nirvdrum wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a few years since I've actively used it. If they added the feature, fantastic. I recall looking for an email containing "dog" and search for "dogs" and couldn't get a match. It's unlikely I'll be switching back soon, if for no other reason than I'm prepaid on FastMail, but how is searching over large accounts now? I found with more than a few GB of email, search would take upwards of 20s. I had to get very…

20 seconds is completely outside of my experience. You were searching with the gmail frontend, or via IMAP? I have 5GB in Gmail and I get instant results as I type in the search box, and full results in about one second when I hit the enter key. I only have a little bit of email in my fastmail account so I can't really compare it.

This was with the Gmail front-end. It's entirely possible there was just something messed up with my account. I haven't come across too many others that have had similar issues, but most people I know have much smaller accounts.

Thanks for letting me know my info is out-of-date. The problem with these sorts of comparisons is it's hard to use both options extensively, simultaneously.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#235

Post by stryan »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #172
stryan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0]. [0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/

> The lack of support for desktop clients Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels? I agree desktop client support is a…

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I'm aware that it's not trivial to implement since they rely so much on the aforementioned OpenPGPjs library and that they're also working on implementing IMAP support. I just meant that the lack of desktop client support killed it for me currently. Once I can plug it into Thunderbird, preferably with an extension of some kind to keep things encrypted, I'll switch to it as my primary email. Though I am curious as to why you think that's their problem. From what I can tell Protonmail promises that the mail is encrypted on their servers and that accessing it through the official methods (i.e. the website and mobile apps) is also encrypted. While I admire their apparent commitment to extending such promises to the desktop, I'm also surprised they didn't whip up an IMAP interface (which I image would be simpler; send the passphrase to decrypt the mailbox then send the emails like normal) and say "This is for unofficial access, we make no promises". I'm also iffy on the fact that they don't have an export function. Especially with GhostMail switching to enterprise-only, I am very wary about trusting a webmail service that won't let me back up my emails locally in case they "disappear".

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#236

Post by nightski »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #219
Accacin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much). Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.

Serious question - why would you pay for email when there's plenty of good free providers? (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)

Because they aren't free, there is always a cost. Not only that, a single Gmail tab can take up 350-500 mb RAM. Lastly, getting Gmail on a custom domain is not "free" anymore.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#237

Post by lftl »

wcunning wrote: post #105
exhilaration wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark sid…

Was it an automated email? Is it possible that gmail rejected the email at SMTP time and the bounce wasn't properly relayed by another system?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#238

Post by honkhonkpants »

joshuak wrote: post #233
honkhonkpants wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such silent drop. All traffic to Gmail is either delivered or rejected at SMTP time.

This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver. (Or was your comment tongue-in-cheek?)

Your complaint seems to lie with the list management software, not with gmail.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#239

Post by chmars »

rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

Spam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels.

As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps).

In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country.

That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#240

Post by chmars »

exhilaration wrote: post #71
rfrey wrote: post #65

My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter. It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

It pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
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