
Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail - cpbotha
https://cpbotha.net/2016/08/06/moving-12-years-of-email-from-gmail-to-fastmail/
======
bad_user
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.

~~~
curt15
>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.

~~~
bad_user
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.

~~~
alanh
1password keeps a history of edits, too. I don't know any way in which it's
not a full history… hmm… maybe because they expose previous passwords, but if
you change your username, they don't keep the old username unless it was a
separate entry?

~~~
bad_user
Yes, the username and all other fields besides the password are not kept in
that history.

------
kennell
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.

~~~
olalonde
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.

~~~
brightball
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?

~~~
malyk
Just a heads up. I hate badmouthing companies, but... I wanted to use them
instead of Google but my standard .com domain kept error int out in there
interface and multiple support emails and posts in their support forum went
unanswered so I bailed back to Google.

I wanted to like them, but their signup and support experience was terrible.
Their other products seemed to work well, but they've lost me as a customer.

~~~
sridharvembu
(Zoho CEO here) I am sorry to hear this. If you can email me your issue I will
have it taken care of. svembu at Zoho dot com.

~~~
zhte415
Hi. On a tangent, but email related. To you sub-contract the system to Alibana
in the form of Alimail. The UI looks completely identical.

------
rfrey
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.

~~~
exhilaration
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.

~~~
wcunning
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.

~~~
jlg23
> bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently

Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I
cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by
google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users
chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share
your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one mis-
classified mail once a month.

EDIT: I have had many user reports about this but when checking mail server
logs I always could pin-point the problem at either the local server config or
being caught in some "you are evil" classification - the latter much more time
intensive to fix....)

~~~
nxc18
From the end user's perspective, silently putting email in 'you are evil'
classification isn't much different from just deleting.

I'd rather get spam once in awhile than turn my spam folder into a de facto
secondary inbox.

------
m0nty
> 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/](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.

~~~
bdavisx
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.

~~~
m0nty
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.

------
ynak
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](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html)

~~~
Illniyar
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](https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html)

~~~
ViViDboarder
It says no custom domain support. I only see it at the enhanced option, just
like personal.

~~~
lorenzhs
Uh, it says "Use your own domain or one of ours" at the top. That sounds to me
like you can use a custom domain with any family plan, Lite and Full included.
Are you sure that isn't the case?

------
rasmusei
+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.

~~~
aibara
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/](https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/)

~~~
rasmusei
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 :)

------
unicornporn
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...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-
to-run-your-own-mail-server)

~~~
alicewales
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.'

~~~
BoringCode
Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I
personally use [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/) to
handle configuration for me and that works great.

~~~
throwanem
If you're concerned about deliverability, you can also use a service like
mail-tester.com [1], which receives a message you send and analyzes it for a
wide variety of potential problems. I've found it to be a good guide.

[1] [https://www.mail-tester.com/](https://www.mail-tester.com/)

------
dave_atx
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.

~~~
petemc_
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.

~~~
dave_atx
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.

~~~
whacker
The default I have seen everywhere (qmail, postfix) is a week.

~~~
monkeywork
that's assuming no one changes defaults... if your a large enough provider you
are tweaking these settings.

------
readhn
"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.

~~~
bad_user
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.

~~~
magicalist
> _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"

~~~
brokenmachine
What about lavabit? They were forced to shut up shop because of a secret order
that was for much more than metadata.

------
bartkappenburg
"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...

~~~
lorenzhs
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.

~~~
bartkappenburg
You would still have some meta-data :-)

~~~
lorenzhs
Well yeah but if all Google knows is when you're getting push notifications
about email, then that's a lot better then them having all your email. I mean,
there's a good chance that the person who just emailed you is using Gmail so
they still have a lot of your email even if you don't use it at all. It's all
a trade-off.

~~~
_RPM
Civilians think Gmail IS email. I gave my landlord my email the other day, and
she was like oh, isn't there supposed to be gmail at the end of it? I had a
custom domain.

~~~
lorenzhs
It always confuses the hell out of people when I give my email as
"<companyname>@mydomain.foo". I've gotten responses from "oh do you work
here?" to just confused looks. It's really just to help me with filters (and
null-route things should the email get too much spam)

~~~
_RPM
What was quite ironic for me is that I bought a ".mobi" domain name, because
it was the only TLD that I was able to get so it can be $first_name + "." \+
$tld. - It seems that the .mobi TLD is more confusing than ever for people. I
originally got it as a shorthand to my actual domain ( routing all emails to
my primary domain )

------
im_dario
_" 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.

~~~
EGreg
About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?

~~~
douglasheriot
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.

~~~
Noseshine
Given that ~90% of Google's revenue is its search business (AdWords and
AdSense) that's true for pretty much everything they do apart from that core
business.

[http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-6-most-
profitable-lines-business-googl.asp)

------
mrmondo
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.

------
reacharavindh
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](https://protonmail.com)

~~~
stryan
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/](https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/)

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> 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.

~~~
dublinben
>Do desktop clients support decrypting email?

This is the traditional workflow for PGP-encrypted email, and has been for
decades. Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> Protonmail chose to be incompatible with this established standard.

They've supported receiving PGP-encrypted emails[1] and are working on IMAP
support currently[2]. Would be nice for you to cite sources before making
strong claims like "chose to be incompatible". Everything is a feature and
needs time to implement.

[1] [https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/using-
protonma...](https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/using-protonmail-
with-facebook-pgp/)

[2]
[https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...](https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/suggestions/7180858-imap-
smtp-tls-support)

------
abtinf
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?

~~~
zafiro17
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.

~~~
thelibrarian
There is also the benefit of being able to use one custom domain, and have
multiple accounts attached to it.

------
rufugee
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.

~~~
kingosticks
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.

------
matt_wulfeck
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.

~~~
honkhonkpants
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?

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I feel it's a liabilty to keep it online. Storing it offline is useful.

~~~
victorhooi
Why not just download your old mail and archive it then? Google provides an
easy way to do this (Google Takeout).

As in, I don't see the problem with having more storage - you use only as much
as you want.

Personally, I find having all my mail searchable from any computer useful. And
Google does provide lots of security features (2FA, suspicious login
detection, new login alerts, login audit logs etc)

------
ultramancool
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.

~~~
Avshalom
because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of
having literally none of your mail ever delivered.

~~~
ultramancool
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.

------
tomfitz
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...](https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eba5316f874)
.

------
_RPM
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.

~~~
msh
Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.

~~~
_RPM
Must you be connected to an Exchange service to get real push?

~~~
msh
No, they both support at least some imap servers.

------
mlinksva
Any news on JMAP since
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894)
?

------
readhn
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.

~~~
cpbotha
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.

~~~
readhn
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...

~~~
gkya
Fastmail is paid service.

------
preek
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.

~~~
honkhonkpants
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.

~~~
travisr
> 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.

------
snemvalts
But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's
servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?

~~~
dingaling
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.

~~~
unhammer
Dreamhost and Facebook both let you receive PGP-encrypted emails. (And it
seems "all" major news sites now have PGP-keys listed somewhere …)

------
confounded
Very happy recent convert to KolabNow!

    
    
      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)

~~~
aorth
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).

------
outcoldman
I also did this trick 2 years ago
[https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/](https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/),
happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.

------
0xmohit
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/](https://www.hushmail.com/)

[1] [https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/)

~~~
dublinben
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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_privacy)

~~~
0xmohit
Thanks, this is interesting.

So, ProtonMail [0] and Tutanota [1] appear to be better choices.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota)

~~~
tribby
On the data-privacy front, you may also be interested in Unseen[0], which has
servers in Iceland, and Lelantos[1], which routes over Tor. I haven't used
either service but they've come recommended. ProtonMail looks interesting.

[0] [https://unseen.is/](https://unseen.is/)

[1] [http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/](http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/)

------
joshstrange
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.

------
jhwhite
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?

~~~
pmyjavec
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.

------
graffitici
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..

~~~
EduardoBautista
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.

------
jonsjanssens
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](https://soverin.net/features)).

------
cm3
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.

~~~
alanh
Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite
instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently

------
Theizestooke
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.

------
mungoid
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.

------
godzillabrennus
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.

~~~
stevejohnson
> 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.

------
manigandham
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?

~~~
skummetmaelk
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.

------
AdamN
"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!!!

~~~
0x0
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](https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon)

------
peb
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).

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
timdeneau
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.

~~~
z3t4
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.

~~~
timdeneau
The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean.

From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as
suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by “safely”
marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored,
which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.

------
arenaninja
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

~~~
superuser2
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.

~~~
extropic-engine
They actually do accept bitcoin.

------
estrabd
I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back
tbh.

------
magicfractal
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).

~~~
dividuum
No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to
Google servers.

------
greenspot
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.

------
tanqueray
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?

------
agrafix
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.

------
moeirs
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.

------
voltagex_
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.

~~~
josteink
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.

~~~
voltagex_
Unfortunately that requires me to keep paying $6AUD/month for Google Apps.
That may be the way to go, ultimately.

~~~
josteink
Fair enough. I have a grandfathered Google Apps account which costs me zilch
and nada, so it's easy to forget that for other people it costs money.

------
mastazi
Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not
UK)? I would like to have my data there.

~~~
tirant
they are hosted in the Netherlands:

[https://soverin.net/](https://soverin.net/)

~~~
mastazi
Thank you so much, exactly what I was looking for!

------
Tergmap
Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are
communicating with.

------
poushkar
Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.

------
noja
I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.

~~~
whamlastxmas
I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.

------
bbrik
How do you handle changing your email address?

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

------
size12font
How good is the search in fastmail?

~~~
lorenzhs
Very good. See
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html](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.

------
ucaetano
Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa.

[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html)

~~~
richardkeller
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.

------
Zelmor
Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.

------
mankash666
Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email
like protonmail is the right option against snooping

------
childifchaos
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.

~~~
lorenzhs
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.

------
joering2
> [...] 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 ??

