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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

#351

Post by PatentTroll »

maccard wrote: post #342
runejuhl wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be interested in a service where you buy your own server (metal/VPS/whatever) and through an API/web interface select which profile to run? E.g. webserver (apache, nginx, ...), mail server (postfix, exim, ...), load balancer, database (mysql, pgsql, ...), or "app" (ownCloud (has CalDAV support), Wordpress, etc.)? The idea is that the server is yours, and yours only. We manage the setup, monitoring, alarms a…

Honestly, I'm not sure what I want. You mention response times and priority support, and are talking about choosing nginx vs Apache. That's far more detail than I care about. I want to click a button, give you my card details, have an inbox and calendar that I can easily access on my phone, work machine and home machine, and with some level of guarantee about the security and privacy of my data. I'm not bothered abou…

Same here. I settled on fastmail, and I'm pretty happy so far!

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#352

Post by tomaskafka »

rasmusei wrote: post #11

+1 on almost everything you wrote. I also moved from Gmail to Fastmail in almost exactly the same way some months ago. I agree completely to the plusses and minuses you mention. I would like to add one minus though. Any good old smiley like ":)" in emails gets replaced by a yellow smiley face icon. I hate to see yellow smiley faces where someone wrote colon end parenthesis. It's all done client-side though, so noone…

> they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off.

Thanks. Filed FastMail under 'opinionated a*oles, won't budge.' No need be their customer.

Also, their 'u'/'r' shortcuts don't work, and if this is their approach to fixing perceived problems ...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#353

Post by anoother »

bad_user wrote: post #124
honkhonkpants wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the mobile web interface is actually good" That's funny you should say that. I use gmail on its mobile web interface exclusively (using chrome on ios), while my wife who is a fastmail user can't make heads or tails of their mobile site. What is it you prefer about fastmail's mobile site?

What problems does she have with the web interface? For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense.…

One thing that _really_ annoys me about swipe-to-archive on gmail is that, if you do it accidentally, you can't swipe back to undo -- you have to actually tap 'undo'.

My muscle memory just seems programmed to swipe back in the direction I came; and this seems much more intuitive. It's such an annoyance that I've now disabled the swipe functionality.

Does Fastmail implement this better? Or maybe I'm just strange...

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#354

Post by timdeneau »

z3t4 wrote: post #336
timdeneau wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses. It doesn’t matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn’t blacklisted and I don’t send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody). There’s zero recourse. You simply don’t matter…

Are you on a dynamic IP? I used to run a mail server on a dynamic IP, and many people will be butt-hurt about it and block you on sight.

The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean.

From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by “safely” marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored, which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#357

Post by jonsjanssens »

As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible (https://soverin.net/features).

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#358

Post by bisby »

Accacin wrote: post #138
ultramancool wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author explains it very well. I have to disagree, it sounds like he just had a crappy provider, avoiding blacklists is pretty much just a matter of having your RDNS, SPF and domainkeys configured properly in my experience. Pretty trivial stuff, really.

Yeah? And where is your server hardware located? If it's on a VPS somewhere, well, how can you trust them? If it's at home, it's extra space and electricity that's being used. At the end of the day, email IS NOT secure. If you're paying for a service and they can say they're not reading your emails and they will respect your privacy, well that's good enough for me.

At home servers are extra space and electricity, AND potential outages if your ISP isn't 100% stable. I had outages sporadically for 2 weeks because a squirrel chewed through some coax outside my house. Im glad I didn't sporadically bounce emails for 2 weeks during that time. I'm sure a major provider has redundancy and controls in place for failovers... a single server in your house probably doesn't.

Re: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

#360

Post by clinta »

kennell wrote: post #251

The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins. And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps acco…

Just beware of trying to use this as your main google account. You will be waiting months or years for new features that become available to @gmail.com users.
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