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From Gmail to Fastmail

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Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#71

Post by teach »

mariodiana wrote: post #69
mariodiana wrote: post #68

I'm currently reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, NO PLACE TO HIDE, and I have to say that a person should take much comfort in the fact that Fastmail is in Australia rather than the U.S. Australia is a member country in what the NSA terms the "Five Eyes" (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) These countries are thick as thieves when it comes to sharing signal intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi…

s/should/shouldn't/ (Sorry for the typo.)

Can't you edit your comment? You ought to be able to go that within the first hour or so.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#72

Post by teach »

xkarga00 wrote: post #53
ForHackernews wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but why would anyone set up and run an extremely privacy-hardened service for you, for free?

Probably because i am not the only one who would use it.

What would a company possibly have to gain by creating a service that a lot of people will use and not pay for?

Despite what you may have "learned" from the examples of Facebook and Twitter, companies giving away things for free isn't a very good business model.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#74

Post by plg »

"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer"

This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer.

With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product.

With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information.

I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction.

Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly.

Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#75

Post by United857 »

Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge.

If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#76

Post by eknkc »

sivers wrote: post #34

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to. Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day. The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused. Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless. Choose the Business email op…

Same here! Have been using fastmail for ~6 months now. I was hesitant, thought I'd miss push mail on iOS but it has been just fine. Also, there are some iOS mail clients that can push on FastMail (http://mymail.my.com) I always hated Gmail's slow/weird IMAP behavior. Switched to Office365 at some point. Exchange was great but so freaking slow. FastMail has standard, fast IMAP.

I also use the included DNS server for a couple of domains that had been lying around and the static file host for some http placeholder pages and stuff.

I'd never go back to Google at this point.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#77

Post by amirmc »

mercer wrote: post #57
kylec wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.

I'm really on the fence about that argument. On the one hand your argument makes a lot of sense to me, but on the other hand using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious. And intercepting your email correspondence, no matter the provider, might be so trivial to the intelligence agencies at this point that they might be doing so already anyways. It's not unl…

> "... using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious."

This kind of thinking is dangerous and scares me more than the dragnets themselves. There should be nothing suspicious about a citizen exercising their ability to choose from providers. As an analogy, I find it on par with thinking that hippies/minorities/whatever are somehow subversive just because they don't fit your idea of normal.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#78

Post by tjtg »

daxelrod wrote: post #20
stevenleeg wrote: post #2

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?

I wrote a ruby script which watches Fastmail's IMAP inbox, does some filtering and then sends a push notification when mail arrives using the Pushover app. https://github.com/tjtg/imap-pushover

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#79

Post by mercer »

amirmc wrote: post #77
mercer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really on the fence about that argument. On the one hand your argument makes a lot of sense to me, but on the other hand using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious. And intercepting your email correspondence, no matter the provider, might be so trivial to the intelligence agencies at this point that they might be doing so already anyways. It's not unl…

> "... using an email provider that is not one of the popular ones might in itself make you seem more suspicious." This kind of thinking is dangerous and scares me more than the dragnets themselves. There should be nothing suspicious about a citizen exercising their ability to choose from providers. As an analogy, I find it on par with thinking that hippies/minorities/whatever are somehow subversive just because they…

I can understand that this kind of thinking scares you, because it scares me too. I don't want to live in a world where hippies are monitored because they deviate from the norm, and I don't want to live in a world where trying to protect your privacy in itself can make you suspicious.

And yet hippies were monitored, and yet it's plausible that protecting your privacy does make you suspicious.

So I understand that this is scary, but I don't really understand why you consider this kind of thinking dangerous. If it's true, or if there's a good chance that it's true, then shouldn't that knowledge be acted upon, or at least considered, however scary?

Or am I misunderstanding you and are you just stating that in general you hate this situation?

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#80

Post by Semaphor »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #70
stevenleeg wrote: post #2

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…

If you want CardDAV and CalDAV support, you should take a look at Fruux [1]. They are a "headless" contact/calendaring server, no GUI, just the API. I moved to them (off Google Calendar) around the same time as I moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and I'm extremely satisfied. [1] https://fruux.com

Does fruux now support keeping in sync with an ics file like facebooks private urls? Last time I checked that was the last hurdle I had to move away from google calendar.
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