Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

giuliomagnifico.blog

51–60 of 406 posts

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#51
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider. And backup your emails of course.

I own a domain that I use as my primary email address, but it's a "premium" domain that costs quite a bit to lease every year. To me the main concern here is that my payment fails, I don't notice, the domain goes up for sale and somebody grabs it. Then they have access to everything. So, I use my personal domain for all mail except anything that's "vital" like government websites, banking, paying rent, etc. for which…

If you can afford it, renew the domain for 10 years into the future (which means having it paid for till 2035, for example). Every year, renew the domain for one more year so that it’s always paid for 10 years into the future. If payment fails or you’re busy with something else, you’d still have several years of no worrying (some caveats and risks may still apply depending on the TLD and registrar).

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#52
post #30

> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms. > So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail). Ok, so now you have two problems.

But we haven't started using regular expressions yet...!?

I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.

If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.

Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)

Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).

Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.

Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#53
post #7

I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back. Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there. Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win pri…

> I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google

For me and my partner was enough when Google started collecting info about purchases/delivery orders on gmail and dumping it in some separated page without any consent nor notification.

We moved to Proton but once they changed branding and starting introducing additional services beside mailbox we knew they enter milking-out path. Their newest AI plaything was reason to leave.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#55
post #7

I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back. Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there. Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win pri…

This solves the "dependence on Gmail" problem (which is definitely a worthy problem to solve) but not the general "dependence on a particular mail provider" problem. The next step in this walk-down-the-risk-chain is self-hosting on a VPS, where you're now just dependent on your VPS provider, and the next step could be self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP. Happy trails!

Backup your data. Email is data. It is easy enough to do and frees you from many problems. You restore from backup and go on with life.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#57

Something to be aware of if you're considering mailbox.org: https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

Oh, thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, I'm not using a custom domain on mailbox, I use my custom mail domain with another service.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#58
post #44

Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month. Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance…

I also ran into the Google storage quota after 20+ years of gmail + drive + photos. I ended up paying for Google One at $4/mo just to make it long enough to move all of data somewhere else.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#59
post #44

Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month. Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance…

I’ve got Dovecot running in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi. Moved everything over using Thunderbird. If you use mbox format, once done, you can turn the files read-only and Dovecot will still work. And you can throw a Solr server into the mix to get fast mail searches.

Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

#60

Anyone considering a move should also look at NameCrane/CraneMail by the crew behind BuyVM. Solid service, incredibly reasonable prices, great community/discord. They are always looking to improve, extremely proactive and reactive to customer feedback and issues. No builtin PGP, but I believe that is out of their control as they use SmarterMail on the backend.

I hadn’t heard of this and looked for it. How is Cranemail so cheap? I’m really surprised but also concerned that one can get 100 GB of space with unlimited mailboxes and aliases (with just a sending limit) for $10 a year (which gets even cheaper when paying for multiple years or lifetime).
Post reply on HN