I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:
- better shortcuts in the web interface
- the mobile web interface is actually good
- can import email by IMAP
- POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken
- IMAP is better implemented
- Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and
each folder ends up being a connection
- CardDAV works and has good picture resolution,
when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px
- FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible
- on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then
I can import my huge work email as a backup without
polluting my searches and my archive
- Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is
pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains
- FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome,
as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail
only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.
On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info.
They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.
And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.
In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.
This is true of their interface as a whole. I keep it pinned as my first tab and avoid using a native mail client at all. It barely uses any memory or cpu, is always responsive, and has never crashed on me in 2 years of constant usage.
It's an amazing product and I'm always happy to see people leaving GMail for it.
If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully:
Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!
I'm interested in keeping my data private, and willing to pay for it, I'm just not interested in maintaining a server, and dealing with 1) keeping it up, and 2) keeping it secure.
I'd just rather pay someone a small monthly/annual fee to do it for me, along with keeping my data private.
We recently migrated to GApps sat work, and this is exactly how we imported old mail, so the feature is definitely there. I'm not sure if it's only available for GApps users or only available during some unspecified migration period, though.
It's only available to GApps users in the Admin panel. And when I tried it I had about 30% of my email missing in Gmail, so the import misfired. I ended up copying email manually with an email client. Maybe they fixed it, as I says, these days I'm on FastMail. But it's still a pita that the import has to be handled by admins.
Well, for me that's not weird, it's just a big fuck you, totally consistent with what other companies are doing. Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS. And the market I'm in is too small for them to bother, so might as well sit on that pile of cash and not want my business.
The weird part is that Linux is mostly about the server, being a really good home server for many people. And setting up a home server that synchronizes your files, for cheap with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard-drive, is a no-brainer. It's almost like they don't want people to do that.
But anyway, I'm voting with my wallet as they say. Currently paying €13.98/month for Dropbox, because I included the 1-year versioning add-on.
I also just gave up on 1Password for the same reason, even though I was happy with it on my Mac, switched to KeeWeb + Keepass2Android + MiniKeePass. In some ways it's even better - I now have a full history of all my edits and it can never switch on me or die.
They are probably dogfooding the office suite that works fine in Chrome on Linux, and anything that's not a Doc/Sheet/presentation is source code under version control. I doubt they felt a pressing need for a desktop app supporting arbitrary kinds of files.
I've been thinking about moving to FastMail for quite some time now for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned.
What still keeps from switching though is that I rely on services like SaneBox and Unroll.me for organising my email. Unfortunately, the last time I looked only GMail is properly supported by these services and there doesn't seem to be a vendor-independent alternative either.
Does anyone here use services like SaneBox with FastMail?
> Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
When using Gmail with Google Apps you can set up wildcarding, I have it setup so I can put anything I like before the at symbol and it all funnels into my inbox, no plus required. I use this typically to set the email address used with a given company to their name @ my domain.
One of advantages of using google products now is that all of their products can be controlled with a single account without much hassle. Since one is going to use at least one of their products, it makes to use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of advantages, although Fastmail does provide more flexibility.
Search within emails is good and supports advanced search with "from:", "to:", "after:" and things like that. And if you're using a desktop client, like Thunderbird, search through IMAP with FastMail feels faster.
The only difference I found is that Gmail also indexes attachments, like PDFs. Which is a cool capability, but I wished for that only once in the last year and that's only because somebody sent me a PDF without a textual description of what it is. So it can be useful, but not a deal breaker.
I find myself in a minority on this one, but a big part of why I switched to FastMail is Gmail's search was always slow and typically insufficient for me. E.g., Gmail didn't (doesn't?) do stemming, meaning I needed to memorize exact phrases to find messages. I've had no such problems with FastMail search and it's remarkably quick.
90% of the time I'm just searching for messages from a particular sender. Like GMail, FastMail autocompletes contact names in search so this works great for me.
"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. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.
Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.
And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.
Funny, one of the reasons I switched to fastmail was because my mum could understand their interface but gmail kept changing every month! I haven't had a support call asking where the new email button has gone since.
One of the biggest benefits to fastmail for me is the buttons are labelled with text on desktop.
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 account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.
So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff.
It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?
Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime.
Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.
You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.
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.
I'm a Google apps 10-users-free legacy user from when it was free, what am I missing? I'm using inbox since the moment it came out, not sure what else there should be?
My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter.
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
Actually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.
GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.
Gmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder.
The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was.
The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.
Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
It pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
The challenge with spam filtering isn't in stopping all spam, but rather with nother filtering that one random email that turns out to lead to a life-changing opportunity..
Spam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels.
As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps).
In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country.
That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!
I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much).
Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.
I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.
The more, the better. I've 1600 learned spam and 7677 learned non-spam. The spam filter works pretty well for me. Occasionally one slips through, but that happened on gmail as well. So I'm very happy with FastMail.
It's a similar thing on Rackspace's email. Their spam filter never learns anything. Marking something as "Not Spam" just adds a whitelisting rule for that sender for that particular email account. You can bypass all of Rackspace's email filters simply by UTF8 encoding the from address and subject.
Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.
> I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam blacklists
My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email.
"So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?"
"No."
"So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here."
I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.
Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.
FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features.
And...this is why nobody can make any money providing decent services on the Internet, and as a result we're all subject to a constant onslaught of intrusive and scammy advertising. And those of us who might have been creating useful services are instead spending our time building ever more bogus advertising platforms...
Oh, that's interesting. I've been wanting to use a custom domain just for forwarding, and the enhanced personal plan seemed like overkill. I'll have to look into the limitations of the lite family plan.
100 domains / 500 aliases is just a limit to prevent abuse in my opinion. What the step from full to enhanced earns you is 15 times the storage, the ability to use your own domain(s), and full mobile sync, at twice the price. It seems rather fair to me (I'm on enhanced, ~3GB of email, 1 custom domain, mobile sync).
Fastmail has a family plan that costs $5/year (in addition to your normal account cost) and lets you use personal domains. That is the reason I'm looking at them as it was the best price I could find for such a service.
Was in the same boat, when looking to leave Gmail.
Now I pay 18€ per year for custom domain support, 10 aliases, 10GB mailbox, 50MB attachment, IMAP, ActiveSync, CardDAV, CalDAV. Webmail is handled by sOGO, roundcube, squirrelmail, support is fast and tickets get answered in couple hours max. Service is in EU.
+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 else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.
I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.
Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)
This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.
The shortcuts are .u and .r (note the dot). Hover over the "Mark" button to see it. Maybe they don't communicate the shortcuts in the best way but your post is overly inflammatory. This kind of language has no place on HN.
Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year).
15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...
One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1].
> 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...
That's not a valid comparison, the economies of scale Gmail benefits from means it can't be compared with a smaller email provider like Fastmail which has to ammortize the fixed overhead costs over a much smaller user base.
Gmail has over 1B monthly active users, at $40 /user would generate $40B a year on gmail alone, they made $75B Revenue in 2015 (16.3B profit). Google don't break their revenue numbers down but they have 7 properties with over 1B Users where I expect an overwhelming majority of their revenue still comes from Search when users are in the "actively searching" frame of mind and are more likely to purchase goods rather than in Gmail where their primary use-case is email.
I have about 20gb of messages in gmail that I'm considering moving too. But really, I can't think of a single time I've needed to look at a message that was more than a couple of years old. Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.
My plan is to move to fastmail but and only migrate across the last year or so of messages. Google's data liberation front[1] lets you download the complete data set as an archive. Then I'll just import the most recent year into fastmail (or one of the competitors) and ask google to delete its copy of my mail archive.
> Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.
It does look intimidating, but it's not. I've been doing it for years with little effort. Once you get dns set up, and set up spam-assassin (which is super easy), It's been pretty much just sit and watch it work, IME
Why delete from Google? They already crawled the hell out of it. You don't have much privacy to lose from them, even if they actually do delete the messages.
There is some risk that your gmail gets compromised in the future
I suppose, but the chances of your backup being borked might compete with that.
I plan to move away from gmail but I'll probably keep the old stuff there. Convince me otherwise!
Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'
Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I personally use https://mailinabox.email/ to handle configuration for me and that works great.
that's only semi true, and probably true if you hadn't checked DO given IP address whether it was previously blacklisted in which case you need to create new server with hopefully pure IP.
In case of my own DO mailserver, Yahoo will put you into deferred state for a while eventually will see other emails are not similar enough and give you a chance to go into main mailbox. Unless you have nasty friends who mark each of your email as spam, Outlook Gmail and Yahoo will let it thru to their main mailbox. Also most of my friends are checking spam folder once a week or so, and then its enough for Yahoo to get you to reply to that email once, to consider it being 2-way conversation and all my future emails go to their main inbox without any issues, helping my IP get better reputation.
TLDR: most stories of personal mailserver being bad idea because big guys will put you in spam are grossly overstated, unless you plan to use your server to send large amount of emails that contain marketing stuff.
Zoho is pretty good and a serious company, but I've had some trouble with them a few months ago (they were dealing with severe flooding) and it was on a really bad timing for me (I was expecting several critical emails).
After evaluating the alternatives, I'm still with them (both Google and Microsoft were too expensive or didn't support what I expected), I only wish they'd been more upfront with their issues. They did write a blog post later, and I think they've learned:
Why not use that transfer as an excuse to delete old email? I try to limit my accounts to hundreds of MBs, despite having far more capacity. Reduce the weight you carry around rather than hire a bigger backpack.
My tax returns are emailed to me. Even though I have never needed them I'm legally required to save them for 7 years just in case. I have a number of other emails in the old list that I don't expect to ever need again but they are still relevant to something and I need to keep them just in case. Odds are my house will not burn down, but I still have fire insurance - most of my old emails are like that: I don't believe I will ever need them but I can't prove it.
At work I've discovered outlook has an expires after tag that I can set on each email - I set this on everything I save which keeps my saved messages clean. I haven't found a convent way to do that with anything else though I understand something like it exists.
Probably you using Gmail makes you more likely to use other google services, also they have scale, so if they get $10 of value per Gmail customer that's a lot more than Fastmail.
Also google is very bad at monetizing their products in general e.g. Google Docs has been around for years before Microsoft's cloud office offering, but they never seem to have bothered to turn that into a subscription based software package - which they almost certainly could have.
> very bad at monetizing their products in general
I'd guess that it's a support problem. It's quite hard to deny users support for paid-for products, and Google tries hard not to provide human support. It's expensive.
Obviously I'd be pleased if anyone has a better explanation ;-)
I think that's easier said than done. AFAIK Microsoft gets the real bucks from big business using their stuff. It would have been a very steep hill for Google to climb to compete with Microsoft in the office software market, doesn't matter that they had the web product sooner. You can see the same in reverse with the Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.
In addition, the difficulties of monetizing websites and software that seem to be doing great when offered for free IMHO shows how much stuff we don't actually need and only like to play with.
I on the other hand have a mailbox that is not even 100 MB, but I would have to pay $40 a year just to use my own domain. That's also a bit too expensive for my low mail volume.
25 gigs at mailbox.org will run you EUR 3.50/month. Plus you get calendaring/contacts, proper CardDav/CalDav and GPG built in. They've been providing email for 27 years and run the email infrastructure for many companies large and small. Plus, your email would be running on renewable energy and their bank account is with a socially responsible bank (yes, such things exist).
What is reliable email worth to you though? $40/yr is a pittance for something I use every day...the analysis is harder when you have more data though, like you say.
I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though.
That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps from free GMail. $50 a year gets you an SLA, support, and no ads. It's been extremely reliable for me and I've not had any downtime (that I've noticed) for 5+ years. No performance problems either that I hear folks complain about with free GMail either.
Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
Mostly because it doesn't defeat the issue with data collection. Google Apps doesn't, as far as I've ever been told, bar Google from using it's privacy-invasive "features" on your data. And while you can justify Gmail as a free service that violates your privacy to pay for it, Google Apps offers no such justification.
"The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence."
Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.
This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed.
Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.
> the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches.
National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"
I don't think they are, as mentioned, Australia doesn't have the equivalent of a National Security Letter. FastMail has a very short and very easy to understand privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).
"I do have FastMail’s Android app on my telephone. The app is a Cordova / PhoneGap / CrossWalk style unit with real-time email push and notification via Google Cloud Messaging (this is a relatively energy-efficient way for android phones to get push notification and is natively supported by FastMail)."
Migrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...
Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.
It's just an edge trigger - pretty much a modseq counter on the entire user (though we have plans to split it up into categories a little more so you know if it's just a calendar change or just an email arrival)
"So far, my conclusion is that this is a service that is technically more than capable of replacing GMail, even for power users. Furthermore, FastMail’s primary (and in fact only) business model is to charge you money for making sure that you can keep on emailing like a boss. Together, this makes for an offer that I could not refuse".
Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.
Google Apps isn’t Google’s primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.
I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email.
The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use.
So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.
Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail.
Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better.
These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.
Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends).
They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now.
(1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and
(2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw.
I do like :
(1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App.
(2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp.
I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me.
Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0].
Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels?
I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.
There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.
I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.
You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?
Because I have interests other than running my own email server. I am capable of running my own email server. I'm also capable of taking my own garbage to the dump every week. I'm capable of removing my own appendix if that is required (under self administered local anesthesia). I hire those things done because I have better things to do with my time. I got tired of keeping up with the latest anti-spam best practices. I can pay someone $15/month to make the weekly trip to the local dump saving me an hour every week (I believe the dump charges a dumping fee as well which makes the math more in my favor). I can pay someone else to go to medical school thus saving me the time it takes. I would rather play with my kids, and if I can ever get them to sleep I have plenty of other things I enjoy doing.
FastMail is a cheap and easy option to email. They provide some services that I value over what free accounts have. It is a compromise, but everything is. I freely admit that I was failing at administering my own email servers: I never did get some anti-spam thing in place so a few domains rejected everything I sent. I got about 100 spam messages in my inbox every day (my filters caught 3 for each they let through). With Fastmail everyone accepts my email, and I get about one spam message a week which I can handle.
So is spinning up a docker container with this all already configured... I just don't see the argument I guess, it's just too easy to do yourself. Instead you're getting ripped off and losing privacy. There's no reason to believe fastmail is any more private than GMail, staff can just as easily read and deliver your mail to whomever they please.
A medical degree takes years to get, this takes 10 minutes for a basic setup, an hour or two for a more advanced one, assuming you're in the industry already and know your way around.
Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail.
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.
> 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.
I bought a house and run all my bills from my own mail server, so that certainly hasn't been my experience. You just need to configure it correctly and make sure your IP doesn't have a bad rep.
Not really true. I've been running my own email server for years, and it's actually really easy. After the initial setup, I don't think I've ever had and email end up non-delivered.
I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.
If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.
Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.
If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
> With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
That's not really true. The servers themselves and their provider may be under US jurisdiction, but not FastMail itself, which means they can take measures against unauthorized access (e.g. encryption) and they can detect breaches and take steps.
Nothing will be foolproof, of course, since the NSA is the worst enemy you could have and if they have physical access to those servers, you simply can't claim you're 100% protected, but it's much better than nothing.
Furthermore, there are actual trade agreements between countries and if the NSA would access the servers of foreign companies on simple whims, the US can lose a lot of money if customers find out. I know of at least one big German multinational company that banned the usage of several US-based services and tightened security, after the Snowden revelations, for fear of industrial espionage.
In other words, the price for breaching users' privacy is significantly higher, because in Google's case, they just have to ask for it and Google can't even disclose such breaches to their customers even if they wanted.
In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users.
That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.
gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing.
We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...
That was exactly my initial thought and then I read " after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire."
yes, I see no real gain in migrating Email to Fastmail. Especially not for privacy against (US) government in any meaningful way. He should have moved to e.g. Switzerland based https://kolabnow.com
Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article?
I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five
years.
Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.
If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.
On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.
There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e.
Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages.
mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.
Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one.
Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.
I wanted to get this setup going a while back but I'm usually stuck on Windows for most of the day. I got Bash on Windows setup this weekend and I think I'm going to give it another shot.
Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort. I'll get myself 100% on Linux one of these days :/
Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS.
Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
Pros:
- 100% green energy
- 100% Free Software
- Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
- Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and
notes (IMAP)
- Swiss privacy laws
- They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm
glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.
Cons:
- No 2FA :(
- Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for
the above)
- Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)
I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least.
I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).
I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang..
At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..
This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.
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).
It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but:
Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.
I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.
Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.
With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.
Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account.
That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.
From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web"
Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?
For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.
"If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you’ll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third-party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!
I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.
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 when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.
I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non-starter
Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.
Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).
Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard.
Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think.
My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices.
Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account.
Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email.
Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.
Very good. See https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care.
Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life.
So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.
FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia.
I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.
I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete.
We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes.
It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.
FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.
> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...]
I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you.
Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??
I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.
On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.
And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.
In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.
"the mobile web interface is actually good"
This is true of their interface as a whole. I keep it pinned as my first tab and avoid using a native mail client at all. It barely uses any memory or cpu, is always responsive, and has never crashed on me in 2 years of constant usage.
It's an amazing product and I'm always happy to see people leaving GMail for it.
If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/private-contacts-and-calendars-...
Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!
I'm interested in keeping my data private, and willing to pay for it, I'm just not interested in maintaining a server, and dealing with 1) keeping it up, and 2) keeping it secure.
I'd just rather pay someone a small monthly/annual fee to do it for me, along with keeping my data private.
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I second these points and would add:
- support for U2F/FIDO second-factor authentication (among other, lesser beasts of similar burden).
I also find their blog interesting and informative, at https://blog.fastmail.com/
* edit: Google/Gmail supports U2F as well, so it's not a distinction - just a baseline benefit.
We recently migrated to GApps sat work, and this is exactly how we imported old mail, so the feature is definitely there. I'm not sure if it's only available for GApps users or only available during some unspecified migration period, though.
It's only available to GApps users in the Admin panel. And when I tried it I had about 30% of my email missing in Gmail, so the import misfired. I ended up copying email manually with an email client. Maybe they fixed it, as I says, these days I'm on FastMail. But it's still a pita that the import has to be handled by admins.
>Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.
Which to me has always been kind of weird because Google uses Linux internally for most of their workstations.
Well, for me that's not weird, it's just a big fuck you, totally consistent with what other companies are doing. Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS. And the market I'm in is too small for them to bother, so might as well sit on that pile of cash and not want my business.
The weird part is that Linux is mostly about the server, being a really good home server for many people. And setting up a home server that synchronizes your files, for cheap with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard-drive, is a no-brainer. It's almost like they don't want people to do that.
But anyway, I'm voting with my wallet as they say. Currently paying €13.98/month for Dropbox, because I included the 1-year versioning add-on.
I also just gave up on 1Password for the same reason, even though I was happy with it on my Mac, switched to KeeWeb + Keepass2Android + MiniKeePass. In some ways it's even better - I now have a full history of all my edits and it can never switch on me or die.
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That plus the whole Android and ChromeOS thing. If you have Google Drive on a Chromebook, you have Google Drive on Linux.
They are probably dogfooding the office suite that works fine in Chrome on Linux, and anything that's not a Doc/Sheet/presentation is source code under version control. I doubt they felt a pressing need for a desktop app supporting arbitrary kinds of files.
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I've been thinking about moving to FastMail for quite some time now for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned.
What still keeps from switching though is that I rely on services like SaneBox and Unroll.me for organising my email. Unfortunately, the last time I looked only GMail is properly supported by these services and there doesn't seem to be a vendor-independent alternative either.
Does anyone here use services like SaneBox with FastMail?
Happy SaneBox + FastMail user for two years now. SaneBox works great with any standard IMAP connection.
> Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
When using Gmail with Google Apps you can set up wildcarding, I have it setup so I can put anything I like before the at symbol and it all funnels into my inbox, no plus required. I use this typically to set the email address used with a given company to their name @ my domain.
I wonder how long before Google buys Fastmail.
Fastmail was previously bought out by Opera, then a few years later the original owners bought themselves back.
So now they are independent again I expect they are a bit more averse to being bought out.
That's my hope :-)
One of advantages of using google products now is that all of their products can be controlled with a single account without much hassle. Since one is going to use at least one of their products, it makes to use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of advantages, although Fastmail does provide more flexibility.
For Google Drive you can just use insync. I used to use them before I went with my self hosted solution.
Any suggestions for Google Docs users?
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How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.
Search within emails is good and supports advanced search with "from:", "to:", "after:" and things like that. And if you're using a desktop client, like Thunderbird, search through IMAP with FastMail feels faster.
The only difference I found is that Gmail also indexes attachments, like PDFs. Which is a cool capability, but I wished for that only once in the last year and that's only because somebody sent me a PDF without a textual description of what it is. So it can be useful, but not a deal breaker.
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I find myself in a minority on this one, but a big part of why I switched to FastMail is Gmail's search was always slow and typically insufficient for me. E.g., Gmail didn't (doesn't?) do stemming, meaning I needed to memorize exact phrases to find messages. I've had no such problems with FastMail search and it's remarkably quick.
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90% of the time I'm just searching for messages from a particular sender. Like GMail, FastMail autocompletes contact names in search so this works great for me.
"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. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.
Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.
And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.
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HN and FastMails mobile interfaces are the only mobile interfaces I am able to use on the entire Internet
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Funny, one of the reasons I switched to fastmail was because my mum could understand their interface but gmail kept changing every month! I haven't had a support call asking where the new email button has gone since.
One of the biggest benefits to fastmail for me is the buttons are labelled with text on desktop.
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 account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.
Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.
Holy crap...
So I read your comment and strolled on over to Zoho, who I'd never heard of before. They have a lot of products...just wow. That's a lot of stuff.
It's just such a jumble. I find myself wanting to know more about what they have to offer but yet completely overwhelmed by everything that's there. Can anybody speak to the quality of these products? How well do they interact? Is Creator any good? It looks like a BPM offering that could fit for small businesses?
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Pretty happy custom domain + free Zoho mail user. 25 free users with 5 GB of email storage each is a pretty amazing deal you get without paying a dime.
Although, to be perfectly honest, I don't use any other product offered by Zoho.
You can use a custom domain using a personal gmail account if you forward email to the gmail account from the registrar and then setup send mail as using gmail.
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Too bad they only support SSL ports 110 and 995 when setting up POP3, my registrar uses 465.
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You have to be careful with that. If an attacker can gain access to your DNS provider, then they have access to your email: à la https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
And if they get into your email account on gmail, you lose your email account. (possibly permamently) Just evaluate and choose your risks.
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.
I'm a Google apps 10-users-free legacy user from when it was free, what am I missing? I'm using inbox since the moment it came out, not sure what else there should be?
Also, you can add email aliases - even for other domains. This is how I have my email setup. For $5 a month it's worth it for me.
My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter.
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
Actually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.
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GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.
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Gmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder.
The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was.
The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.
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Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
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It’s the top comment right now because it was only posted 5 minutes ago.
It pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
The challenge with spam filtering isn't in stopping all spam, but rather with nother filtering that one random email that turns out to lead to a life-changing opportunity..
The spam folder is the only place I can find email personally addressed to me these days. (Always from that nigerian royal member, unfortunatelly...)
I still think about it when it (albeit VERY rarely) marks legitimate emails as spam.
Spam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels.
As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps).
In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country.
That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!
The spam threshold is adjustable: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html#settings
It also supports training a filter on your specific email/spam patterns which works very well in my experience.
I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much).
Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.
Serious question - why would you pay for email when there's plenty of good free providers? (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)
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I have the opposite issue with GMail. I spend the same amount of time removing things from the spam folder.
I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.
The more, the better. I've 1600 learned spam and 7677 learned non-spam. The spam filter works pretty well for me. Occasionally one slips through, but that happened on gmail as well. So I'm very happy with FastMail.
Sounds like the SpamAssassin default settings.
It's a similar thing on Rackspace's email. Their spam filter never learns anything. Marking something as "Not Spam" just adds a whitelisting rule for that sender for that particular email account. You can bypass all of Rackspace's email filters simply by UTF8 encoding the from address and subject.
Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.
Worth following all the instructions on https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html
I found pointing my MX records straight at Fastmail helped a lot with spam. See "If you use your own domain" in those instructions.
Is their spam filter deliberately design to be too conservative?
> I had to deal with keeping my server out of over-enthusiastic spam blacklists
My domain got blacklisted once. I contacted the service concerned (i.e. the people running the blacklist) and they said my web domain had appeared in the footer of a spam email.
"So, do you have any evidence I put it there, or paid someone to put it there?"
"No."
"So you'll blacklist random domains a spammer puts in their email? Because that's what happened here."
I was surprised (and still am) that this kind of service could be so naive. My domain was literally just a bare http://domain.com/ in the footer, no link or advertising associated with it at all. Domain blacklist successfully polluted, as far as the spammer was concerned.
Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.
Perhaps it wasn't a spammer, it would seem like a really "good" (in an underhanded, evil manner) for for a competitor to try to hurt your business.
Non-commercial domain, in this case, on a .org address. But there's all sorts of evil can be done with this kind of thing, yours is another example.
FastMail is great and their web interface is really light and fast, but the pricing[0] doesn't fit me. I want to use my custom domain as an email address, so I have to choose the `Enhanced` plan ($40 USD per 1 year). That also provides 100 domains and 500 domain aliases, it is a bit overwhelming for personal use. I hope they would make a new middle-class plan between `Full` and `Enhanced` with Cal/Card DAV features.
[0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html
And...this is why nobody can make any money providing decent services on the Internet, and as a result we're all subject to a constant onslaught of intrusive and scammy advertising. And those of us who might have been creating useful services are instead spending our time building ever more bogus advertising platforms...
There's a pretty big gap between $40 and "nobody can make any money".
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What about the family or business plans? They seem to have custom domain even at the lite option.
https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html
Oh, that's interesting. I've been wanting to use a custom domain just for forwarding, and the enhanced personal plan seemed like overkill. I'll have to look into the limitations of the lite family plan.
It says no custom domain support. I only see it at the enhanced option, just like personal.
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100 domains / 500 aliases is just a limit to prevent abuse in my opinion. What the step from full to enhanced earns you is 15 times the storage, the ability to use your own domain(s), and full mobile sync, at twice the price. It seems rather fair to me (I'm on enhanced, ~3GB of email, 1 custom domain, mobile sync).
Fastmail has a family plan that costs $5/year (in addition to your normal account cost) and lets you use personal domains. That is the reason I'm looking at them as it was the best price I could find for such a service.
> $40 USD per 1 year
Curious, do you think you would have perceived the price differently if it had been presented as $3/mo?
Was in the same boat, when looking to leave Gmail.
Now I pay 18€ per year for custom domain support, 10 aliases, 10GB mailbox, 50MB attachment, IMAP, ActiveSync, CardDAV, CalDAV. Webmail is handled by sOGO, roundcube, squirrelmail, support is fast and tickets get answered in couple hours max. Service is in EU.
Where's that?
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+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 else has to see it. Have been in contact with FM tech support and they seem to be uninterested in adding a checkbox to turn this nuisance off. Otherwise an excellent, excellent service.
I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.
I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/
Thanks! Stylish style installed and seems to work. But it's still bewildering why Fastmail does that. Anyway, I must say it's impressive that they make an email service where this is my biggest complaint :)
You could use the excellent Chrome add-on Resource Override[1] to make this change yourself if you really want to.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/...
This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.
> 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 ...
The shortcuts are .u and .r (note the dot). Hover over the "Mark" button to see it. Maybe they don't communicate the shortcuts in the best way but your post is overly inflammatory. This kind of language has no place on HN.
Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year).
15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...
One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1].
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may...
I'm using;
1) https://kolabnow.com/ (just the lite version for webmail)
and
2) https://posteo.de/en
both through Thunderbird and K9 clients. Perfectly happy with them.
Thanks, couldn't find info on storage space over at kolabnow. Posteo I've looked at before, it would cost me 6€ for 22GB, which is not too bad.
> 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...
That's not a valid comparison, the economies of scale Gmail benefits from means it can't be compared with a smaller email provider like Fastmail which has to ammortize the fixed overhead costs over a much smaller user base.
Gmail has over 1B monthly active users, at $40 /user would generate $40B a year on gmail alone, they made $75B Revenue in 2015 (16.3B profit). Google don't break their revenue numbers down but they have 7 properties with over 1B Users where I expect an overwhelming majority of their revenue still comes from Search when users are in the "actively searching" frame of mind and are more likely to purchase goods rather than in Gmail where their primary use-case is email.
I have about 20gb of messages in gmail that I'm considering moving too. But really, I can't think of a single time I've needed to look at a message that was more than a couple of years old. Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.
My plan is to move to fastmail but and only migrate across the last year or so of messages. Google's data liberation front[1] lets you download the complete data set as an archive. Then I'll just import the most recent year into fastmail (or one of the competitors) and ask google to delete its copy of my mail archive.
[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
> Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.
It does look intimidating, but it's not. I've been doing it for years with little effort. Once you get dns set up, and set up spam-assassin (which is super easy), It's been pretty much just sit and watch it work, IME
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Why delete from Google? They already crawled the hell out of it. You don't have much privacy to lose from them, even if they actually do delete the messages.
There is some risk that your gmail gets compromised in the future I suppose, but the chances of your backup being borked might compete with that.
I plan to move away from gmail but I'll probably keep the old stuff there. Convince me otherwise!
Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'
Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I personally use https://mailinabox.email/ to handle configuration for me and that works great.
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that's only semi true, and probably true if you hadn't checked DO given IP address whether it was previously blacklisted in which case you need to create new server with hopefully pure IP.
In case of my own DO mailserver, Yahoo will put you into deferred state for a while eventually will see other emails are not similar enough and give you a chance to go into main mailbox. Unless you have nasty friends who mark each of your email as spam, Outlook Gmail and Yahoo will let it thru to their main mailbox. Also most of my friends are checking spam folder once a week or so, and then its enough for Yahoo to get you to reply to that email once, to consider it being 2-way conversation and all my future emails go to their main inbox without any issues, helping my IP get better reputation.
TLDR: most stories of personal mailserver being bad idea because big guys will put you in spam are grossly overstated, unless you plan to use your server to send large amount of emails that contain marketing stuff.
You can configure the MX record of your domain to point to your server (receive mail) but you can still send mail using a well known SMTP service.
I'm happy with Zoho Mail [1]. Even their free tier comes with a custom domain and 5 GB mailbox.
[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
Zoho is pretty good and a serious company, but I've had some trouble with them a few months ago (they were dealing with severe flooding) and it was on a really bad timing for me (I was expecting several critical emails).
After evaluating the alternatives, I'm still with them (both Google and Microsoft were too expensive or didn't support what I expected), I only wish they'd been more upfront with their issues. They did write a blog post later, and I think they've learned:
https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/zoho-customer-supp...
Why not use that transfer as an excuse to delete old email? I try to limit my accounts to hundreds of MBs, despite having far more capacity. Reduce the weight you carry around rather than hire a bigger backpack.
My tax returns are emailed to me. Even though I have never needed them I'm legally required to save them for 7 years just in case. I have a number of other emails in the old list that I don't expect to ever need again but they are still relevant to something and I need to keep them just in case. Odds are my house will not burn down, but I still have fire insurance - most of my old emails are like that: I don't believe I will ever need them but I can't prove it.
At work I've discovered outlook has an expires after tag that I can set on each email - I set this on everything I save which keeps my saved messages clean. I haven't found a convent way to do that with anything else though I understand something like it exists.
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Probably you using Gmail makes you more likely to use other google services, also they have scale, so if they get $10 of value per Gmail customer that's a lot more than Fastmail.
Also google is very bad at monetizing their products in general e.g. Google Docs has been around for years before Microsoft's cloud office offering, but they never seem to have bothered to turn that into a subscription based software package - which they almost certainly could have.
Google has been trying to monetize its online suite since 2007, when it introduced Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 per user account per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps_for_Work
> very bad at monetizing their products in general
I'd guess that it's a support problem. It's quite hard to deny users support for paid-for products, and Google tries hard not to provide human support. It's expensive.
Obviously I'd be pleased if anyone has a better explanation ;-)
I think that's easier said than done. AFAIK Microsoft gets the real bucks from big business using their stuff. It would have been a very steep hill for Google to climb to compete with Microsoft in the office software market, doesn't matter that they had the web product sooner. You can see the same in reverse with the Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.
In addition, the difficulties of monetizing websites and software that seem to be doing great when offered for free IMHO shows how much stuff we don't actually need and only like to play with.
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I on the other hand have a mailbox that is not even 100 MB, but I would have to pay $40 a year just to use my own domain. That's also a bit too expensive for my low mail volume.
I don't believe so... you could use the Family Lite account for $10/year (250MB, custom domain) - https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html
25 gigs at mailbox.org will run you EUR 3.50/month. Plus you get calendaring/contacts, proper CardDav/CalDav and GPG built in. They've been providing email for 27 years and run the email infrastructure for many companies large and small. Plus, your email would be running on renewable energy and their bank account is with a socially responsible bank (yes, such things exist).
What is reliable email worth to you though? $40/yr is a pittance for something I use every day...the analysis is harder when you have more data though, like you say.
Depending on what your threshold for needs is, Rackspace Email is a pretty solid solution for about $2 / user / month.
Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.
But if I remember things correctly they don't sell to a single user..?
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I went the opposite direction -- FastMail to Google Apps -- several years ago when FM had ~3 solid days of downtime. Really long time ago, but still a bit of a sore spot for me as I missed at least a day and a half of incoming email that wasn't deliverable during that time. My sense is that they're a much more mature company now though.
That said, I'm not sure why more people don't consider upgrading to Google Apps from free GMail. $50 a year gets you an SLA, support, and no ads. It's been extremely reliable for me and I've not had any downtime (that I've noticed) for 5+ years. No performance problems either that I hear folks complain about with free GMail either.
Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.
It was down long enough that it blew through the queue for several (most? some?) MTAs which were about ~36 hours if I remember correctly.
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Mostly because it doesn't defeat the issue with data collection. Google Apps doesn't, as far as I've ever been told, bar Google from using it's privacy-invasive "features" on your data. And while you can justify Gmail as a free service that violates your privacy to pay for it, Google Apps offers no such justification.
Google apps can be free if you have a old account. Only reason I still have a account.
But I am trying to move out of it.
"The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence."
Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.
This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed.
Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.
> the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches.
National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"
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#tinfoil hat on#
So the NSA could be spying on Fastmail and sharing that with Australia?
Anyway, you'd have to be crazy to expect privacy on cloud services with the way governments are ignoring laws left and right.
FastMail's servers are in the US.
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I don't think they are, as mentioned, Australia doesn't have the equivalent of a National Security Letter. FastMail has a very short and very easy to understand privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).
"I do have FastMail’s Android app on my telephone. The app is a Cordova / PhoneGap / CrossWalk style unit with real-time email push and notification via Google Cloud Messaging (this is a relatively energy-efficient way for android phones to get push notification and is natively supported by FastMail)."
Migrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...
Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.
It's just an edge trigger - pretty much a modseq counter on the entire user (though we have plans to split it up into categories a little more so you know if it's just a calendar change or just an email arrival)
You would still have some meta-data :-)
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The problem with GCM is that there's no real replacement for it. It's just too absurdly efficient.
"So far, my conclusion is that this is a service that is technically more than capable of replacing GMail, even for power users. Furthermore, FastMail’s primary (and in fact only) business model is to charge you money for making sure that you can keep on emailing like a boss. Together, this makes for an offer that I could not refuse".
Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.
About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?
Google Apps isn’t Google’s primary business – they could neglect it and have unhappy customers, but their bottom line would hardly notice the difference.
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I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email.
YMMV.
I had exactly the same experience.
The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use.
So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.
Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail.
Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better.
These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.
Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends).
They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now.
(1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and
(2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw.
I do like :
(1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App.
(2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp.
https://protonmail.com
I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0].
[0]:https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/
> The lack of support for desktop clients
Their servers do not decrypt your email, thus doing so requires support from the client. The browser currently does this on your machine. Do desktop clients support decrypting email? Can we trust these clients won't store your emails in plain-text on your machine? Or that they won't mistakenly leak your information via some other channels?
I agree desktop client support is a nice feature to have, but I am not sure it is trivial to make happen.
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Thanks for correcting me. HN won't let me edit my comment though :-(
Curious though, assuming usage as a personal email account, what would desktop clients get you that a good responsive web UI can't?
I use Protonmail and I like it.
Their web client is open source and MIT licensed. For more security it might be worth running it locally:
https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient
Why does FastMail charge a family account fee, thus making it more expensive to have two accounts under a family account than two individual accounts?
There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.
There is also the benefit of being able to use one custom domain, and have multiple accounts attached to it.
You would probably be paying for convenience (1 bill, contact sharing, etc...)
I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.
You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?
I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.
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Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.
Because I have interests other than running my own email server. I am capable of running my own email server. I'm also capable of taking my own garbage to the dump every week. I'm capable of removing my own appendix if that is required (under self administered local anesthesia). I hire those things done because I have better things to do with my time. I got tired of keeping up with the latest anti-spam best practices. I can pay someone $15/month to make the weekly trip to the local dump saving me an hour every week (I believe the dump charges a dumping fee as well which makes the math more in my favor). I can pay someone else to go to medical school thus saving me the time it takes. I would rather play with my kids, and if I can ever get them to sleep I have plenty of other things I enjoy doing.
FastMail is a cheap and easy option to email. They provide some services that I value over what free accounts have. It is a compromise, but everything is. I freely admit that I was failing at administering my own email servers: I never did get some anti-spam thing in place so a few domains rejected everything I sent. I got about 100 spam messages in my inbox every day (my filters caught 3 for each they let through). With Fastmail everyone accepts my email, and I get about one spam message a week which I can handle.
> FastMail is a cheap and easy option to email.
So is spinning up a docker container with this all already configured... I just don't see the argument I guess, it's just too easy to do yourself. Instead you're getting ripped off and losing privacy. There's no reason to believe fastmail is any more private than GMail, staff can just as easily read and deliver your mail to whomever they please.
A medical degree takes years to get, this takes 10 minutes for a basic setup, an hour or two for a more advanced one, assuming you're in the industry already and know your way around.
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Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail.
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.
> 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.
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because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of having literally none of your mail ever delivered.
I bought a house and run all my bills from my own mail server, so that certainly hasn't been my experience. You just need to configure it correctly and make sure your IP doesn't have a bad rep.
Not really true. I've been running my own email server for years, and it's actually really easy. After the initial setup, I don't think I've ever had and email end up non-delivered.
Security, Spam Filtering, Better web interface, native apps, two-factor auth, DR, etc.
These are just some of the reasons.
Spam filtering?
The post specifically mentions the maintenance overhead associated with running a self hosted server.
Maintenance is minimal, it's pretty much set and forget, add a cron job to update spamassassin, I get maybe 1 piece of spam in my inbox a week.
Configuration (at least using dovecot and postfix) is easy too once you get started.
I've always wondered about using OS X Server to handle my email on a Mac Mini. Looks like a pretty clean solution to run your own.
The author mentioned in the beginning that maintaining a server and fighting to keep it off of spam lists was too painful.
I was a Fastmail customer for 3 years (2012-2015), but have since migrated to Gmail.
I outlined the factors in this decision in https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb... .
I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.
If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.
Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.
K9 for Android does immediate push notification. You just need to configure IMAP IDLE.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9
Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.
Must you be connected to an Exchange service to get real push?
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Any news on JMAP since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 ?
If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
> With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
That's not really true. The servers themselves and their provider may be under US jurisdiction, but not FastMail itself, which means they can take measures against unauthorized access (e.g. encryption) and they can detect breaches and take steps.
Nothing will be foolproof, of course, since the NSA is the worst enemy you could have and if they have physical access to those servers, you simply can't claim you're 100% protected, but it's much better than nothing.
See: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
Furthermore, there are actual trade agreements between countries and if the NSA would access the servers of foreign companies on simple whims, the US can lose a lot of money if customers find out. I know of at least one big German multinational company that banned the usage of several US-based services and tightened security, after the Snowden revelations, for fear of industrial espionage.
In other words, the price for breaching users' privacy is significantly higher, because in Google's case, they just have to ask for it and Google can't even disclose such breaches to their customers even if they wanted.
In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users.
That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.
gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing.
We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...
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That was exactly my initial thought and then I read " after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire."
yes, I see no real gain in migrating Email to Fastmail. Especially not for privacy against (US) government in any meaningful way. He should have moved to e.g. Switzerland based https://kolabnow.com
Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article?
I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five years.
Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.
If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.
On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.
> If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.
I don't know what kind of machine you're using, but that's not true for any CPU/disk from the last 8 years or so.
There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e.
Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages.
mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.
I've been using mutt for a few years before switching to gmail and finally to FastMail. Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en or https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/kbshortcuts.html) I wasn't really slower than using mutt locally. Since they are both single page apps you can't "outrun" them by using shortcuts too fast. It works pretty well for me.
Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one.
Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.
I wanted to get this setup going a while back but I'm usually stuck on Windows for most of the day. I got Bash on Windows setup this weekend and I think I'm going to give it another shot.
Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort. I'll get myself 100% on Linux one of these days :/
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But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...
Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS.
Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)
Very happy recent convert to KolabNow!
I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least.
I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).
I also did this trick 2 years ago https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/, happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.
Has anybody used HushMail [0] or ProtonMail [1]? How does it stand against both free services like GMail/Yahoo or paid ones like FastMail?
[0] https://www.hushmail.com/
[1] https://protonmail.com/
Hushmail should be considered compromised. They have turned over plaintext emails to US law enforcement in the past.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...
Thanks, this is interesting.
So, ProtonMail [0] and Tutanota [1] appear to be better choices.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota
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Hush user here for 2y already. I've the desktop paid account and I'm very happy with it (POP+IMAP)
They seem to be more privacy oriented than popular ones. Web UI is nice but maybe not "so nice"? (I do not use it so freq.)
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_provider...
I'm a paid Hushmail customer since 2010 I think.
Their web interface is sub-par and sometimes it's pretty slow to connect.
I was thinking to change for Fastmail but they're a bit more expensive and the mails are stored in the US I think (I'm French).
I'll probably investigate this in December when my hush subscription is due.
I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
How does this work with Google Docs? I have a Google Apps account and I don't want to lose all my documents.
Is it possible to have my email usage through FastMail but keep my email address to log in to google so I can still access all my docs?
Or do I need to create a gmail address and move my docs over, then move my email over?
Yes, all you need to do when moving to Fastmail is update the DNS MX records for your domain so that email is routed to your Fastmail Inbox.
Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.
I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang..
At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..
This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.
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).
It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but:
Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.
Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently
I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.
Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.
With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.
Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account.
That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.
> If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up.
I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.
What did you switch from where the customer service was decent?
From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web"
Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?
For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.
"If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you’ll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third-party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!
I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.
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 when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.
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.
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I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non-starter
Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.
They actually do accept bitcoin.
Ah I see. The distinction wasn't clear until you brought it up. In that case, it makes sense
Privacy != anonymity
I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.
Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).
No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to Google servers.
Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard.
And you get the Google Apps at a good price.
Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think.
Did you delete the Gmail account?
My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.
It took me an hour to read all of the comments and replies on this post. But I just noticed that "iCloud" Mail wasn't mentioned in a single word.
Interesting.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices.
Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account.
Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email.
Android is nice that way.
Unfortunately that requires me to keep paying $6AUD/month for Google Apps. That may be the way to go, ultimately.
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You can use Fastmail for email and still keep your Google Apps account, that's what I've done it seems fine.
Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.
they are hosted in the Netherlands:
https://soverin.net/
Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!
By the way I obviously meant "similar to FastMail", sorry for the typo
Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are communicating with.
Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.
I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.
I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.
How do you handle changing your email address?
Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.
How good is the search in fastmail?
Very good. See https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa.
https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...
Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.
Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email like protonmail is the right option against snooping
Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care.
Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life.
So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.
FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia.
I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.
I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete.
We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes.
It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.
FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.
Downgrade?
Excellent sum up!
What's the point of Fastmail if the servers are in the US??
The author starts his "poem" with Snowden and privacy concerns, but he ends up with exactly the same solution as Gmail.
> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...]
I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you.
Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??