41–50 of 166 posts
I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has to be private as private should be. But you also don't want to pay any money for it?
No. Do you believe that by paying money your privacy is guaranteed? Even Fastmail's privacy is doubtful regarding its non-US clients -which would be my case if i used it.
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…
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'…
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'm not related to Fastmail in any way, you can verify that easily. I'm just a simple but happy customer who likes to share when he think that it might be of interest to others.
ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your privacy risk assessment?
I just don't want advertising companies or the NSA sniffing around my personal communications. It has to be private as private should be.
Stopping a government is different. Are you preventing just the slurping of data? (Just because they have your emails in their cache doesn't mean they're grepping for you); or might you be targeted? In which case you're going to have to carefully use operating procedures and software. And make sure the people sending you email do the same. Also, you'll need better locks, and no windows on the ground floor and etc.
The idea of privacy with email is, unfortunately, very ephemeral. As seen in other articles also submitted to hn in the past, even if you stop using Gmail, Google will still have a very huge chunk of your data to track simply because the vast majority of the people you communicate with have a Gmail account. There is no easy/apparent way out.
In fact, writing this another way potentially identifies a more compelling reason to leave:
By using Gmail, you are incrementally harming the privacy of everyone you communicate with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has to be private as private should be. But you also don't want to pay any money for it?
No. Do you believe that by paying money your privacy is guaranteed? Even Fastmail's privacy is doubtful regarding its non-US clients -which would be my case if i used it.
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?
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 that I'd like Fastmail to have push. Every time they come up on HN, I mention it, because I'm a paying Fastmail customer and would like to stay one because they're really perfect in every other way, but the lack of push email is just very disappointing.
> I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?
On iOS there are options like Boxcar and the like, but they're usually sub-optimal and rely on passing your login credentials to a third party.