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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully: https://www.stavros.io/posts/private-contacts-and-calendars-... Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!

I'm interested in keeping my data private, and willing to pay for it, I'm just not interested in maintaining a server, and dealing with 1) keeping it up, and 2) keeping it secure. I'd just rather pay someone a small monthly/annual fee to do it for me, along with keeping my data private.

Tuffmail

Edit: Not saying it's modern or user friendly. It has worked for me for 10 years without touching it, though.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.

I find myself in a minority on this one, but a big part of why I switched to FastMail is Gmail's search was always slow and typically insufficient for me. E.g., Gmail didn't (doesn't?) do stemming, meaning I needed to memorize exact phrases to find messages. I've had no such problems with FastMail search and it's remarkably quick.

I had the same experience years ago. Checking again today on my GMail account shows that partial string searches (or prefixes) don't work at all, but I don't really notice it because it gives good search suggestions in the popup.

For example, if I search for a partial string, say the first part of my last name, GMail finds no messages. But there are hundreds of messages from my family members with the same last name in my inbox.

Another example: searching for Verizo results in "no messages found", but GMail recommends I search for Verizon and that shows all the messages I expect (at a glance.)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#313
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one m…

I'm afraid to test it out with my personal account, but I wonder what would happen if you sent a test to a gmail account with the GTUBE spam signature? You know, the one that scores 999 points with Spamassassin.

http://spamassassin.apache.org/gtube/

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#314

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.

Actually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.

I have the same problem. A few emails a week get classified as spam by gmail, when they should not.

I guess many users don't complain about it as they never look in their gmail spam folders and see emails that they should have received.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#315
post #156

Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends). They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now. (1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and (2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw. I do like : (1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App. (2) Knowing that I'm suppor…

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/

Thanks for correcting me. HN won't let me edit my comment though :-(

Curious though, assuming usage as a personal email account, what would desktop clients get you that a good responsive web UI can't?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed. Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law…

FastMail's servers are in the US.

True, but Fastmail has addressed this. I'm not sure that their argument completely holds up, but here's what they have to say about it: https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-i...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#317

I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps: - better shortcuts in the web interface - the mobile web interface is actually good - can import email by IMAP - POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken - IMAP is better implemented - Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and each folder ends up being a connection - CardDAV works and has good picture reso…

I wonder how long before Google buys Fastmail.

Fastmail was previously bought out by Opera, then a few years later the original owners bought themselves back.

So now they are independent again I expect they are a bit more averse to being bought out.

That's my hope :-)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#318
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up. I hate badmouthing companies, but... I wanted to use them instead of Google but my standard .com domain kept error int out in there interface and multiple support emails and posts in their support forum went unanswered so I bailed back to Google. I wanted to like them, but their signup and support experience was terrible. Their other products seemed to work well, but they've lost me as a customer.

(Zoho CEO here) I am sorry to hear this. If you can email me your issue I will have it taken care of. svembu at Zoho dot com.

I'm having a vague recollection about the company now. Did you spend any time at Clemson?

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#319
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

That's actually an incredibly annoying fallout of gmail's deduplication that cannot be disabled. I believe gmail de-duplicates your list echo because it sees a copy in your sent folder. I wish it could be disabled :-/

Yes, this is a very annoying "feature" of gmail.

If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#320
post #78

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.

Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.

Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\
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