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From Gmail to Fastmail

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Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#91

Post by bigtones »

plg wrote: post #74

"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…

Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#92

Post by joedavison »

tpeng wrote: post #85

Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.

They have one really great domain: sent.com

I have never had a problem communicating it.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#93

Post by brongondwana »

etix wrote: post #36
personZ wrote: post #23

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.

I am related with FastMail (also pretty easily verifyable) - and we love how popular we are on HN. We do get kind of surprised at how often people post about loving us as well, but we're not complaining

(I'm sitting on my laptop during the break at my choir rehearsal today and reading through this thread to see if there are any questions I can answer. I'm doing this instead of going to get a coffee... which now that I think about it must mean I'm insane, because I'm going to need coffee to survive the next set of rehearsals. Madness. If anyone at Melbourne wants to come to an awesome concert next weekend, email me or something)

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#94

Post by brongondwana »

_mikz wrote: post #22

What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues. If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?

FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server)

And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in size, and big slower disk for the rest. The index metadata is also on the SSDs, so most common usage patterns can be served entirely from SSD.

Those SSDs are a RAID1 pair of Intel DC3700 drives, which are enterprise drives and very fast even for SSDs. We dropped a chunk of money on moving to this setup, and it's made both IMAP and regular web usage very nice.

So basically, we're optimised for IMAP and we're optimised for speed. Every server has local storage, and the local storage is fast. It gives quite predictable performance, and very fast performance.

That's my story as both the author/maintainer of our IMAP server, and the designer of the server architecture.

That's not saying that GMail is awful, just IMAP isn't so much their focus, and they don't optimise for it.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#95

Post by melville_X »

tjr wrote: post #61
ender7 wrote: post #28

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…

Even running your own mail system might not gain you as much as you'd hope: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...

This is a good reason for all of us to keep switching away from GMail. It benefits us all via network effects.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#96

Post by Groxx »

djokkataja wrote: post #55

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail about a year ago after using exclusively Gmail for email since 2007. I've been very happy with Fastmail since then. Primarily I was bothered by getting the service for "free" from Google--it's not free for them to provide it (no such thing as a free lunch), which means they have to find ways to monetize my personal communications with others without me directly paying them. Obviously…

I've seen "no chat interface" come up in multiple gmail/fastmail comparisons, and I'm genuinely confused as to why. Do people expect email to come with a chat client? It seems weird to me to have email + xmpp/hangouts merged together and not separated (I use Adium, for instance). Email contacts are rarely people I chat with, with the exception of my innermost circle who I contact with pretty much everything, whichever fits best at the moment.

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#97

Post by masnick »

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…

Amen. I switched to FastMail from Gmail more than a year ago and also absolutely love it. I highly recommend it for anyone dissatisfied with Gmail.

A few things that may be helpful for people considering making the switch:

- If FastMail's IMAP import doesn't work for you, this might (it worked for me): http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...

- If you want to try FastMail "risk free" so you can switch back to Gmail if you don't like it: http://protips.maxmasnick.com/how-to-test-fastmail-risk-free...

- My own writeup about my experience switching to FastMail from Gmail: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944)

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#99

Post by e12e »

gress wrote: post #63
paul wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather dishonest to imply that Google is giving (or selling) your data to marketing companies.

It's also dishonest to imply that Google is not itself a marketing company.

I did take me a while to realize that Google long since made the pivot from tech company (the search engine that started it all) to ad company (where they make their money). After you look at the profit numbers, it really isn't all that interesting how they spin what they're doing -- or what they do to maintain a customer base that buys ads (such as creating a smart phone platform to stay relevant).

I'm not actively going out looking for other direct marketing companies in order to give them my data -- why would I do so with Google?

Re: From Gmail to Fastmail

#100

Post by [deleted] »

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.)

[deleted]
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