"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
"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.
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.
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.
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)
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 )
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)
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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
+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.
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.
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 :)
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.
"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.
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.
"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 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).
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
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.
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 :/
> 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.
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.
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].
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.
Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform, which is why it has dozens of apps on iOS and Android, and supports Linux on Azure.
Microsoft's Windows strategy is to be cross-platform, with Windows 10 for "internet of things", phones, tablets, games consoles, all types of PC and servers.
Windows phones didn't sell well enough and the hardware lagged what was needed for Windows 10 (eg Hello and Continuum). However, there's still an ARM/smartphone version of Windows 10, so that door's not closed yet. There are always rumors about a business-oriented Surface phone
Also, Windows 10 was and is free for smartphones, so there's still room for Asian manufacturers to have a go. Even if they don't ship many units, it provides a fall-back if Google gets too aggressive on Android.
> 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 ;-)
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.
I back all my Gmail, Google Drive, contacts, etc. to S3 each year. Essentially I've got a yearly snapshot of each year's data, encrypted with GPG, in a rather redundant form of extremely cheap storage. Knowing this, deleting old years' emails from Gmail doesn't bother me.
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 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
I did that for a year on a 10 dollar box with Digital Ocean. In the end, the cost wasn't justified, as I can pay FastMail 120 a year for a lot more than what I was getting with Digital Ocean, and I don't have to worry about maintenance (updates, ssh configuration, etc)
I'm not saying that running your own server is for everyone. If you think FM is worth it for you, then by all means, have at it. I'm just saying that running your own server is pretty easy, and all the supposed spam-maintenance work is overblown
Yeah I agree. If running it yourself works for you, then by all means, you should do it. For me, I'd rather spend the 4 hours it takes to configure on something else.
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!
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:
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah? And where is your server hardware located? If it's on a VPS somewhere, well, how can you trust them? If it's at home, it's extra space and electricity that's being used.
At the end of the day, email IS NOT secure. If you're paying for a service and they can say they're not reading your emails and they will respect your privacy, well that's good enough for me.
Why do you think they'll respect your privacy any more than gmail? I think that's a serious misconception. They have no way to guarantee that to you, so believing it is a rather bad idea. They could be sitting back and reading the latest issue of your personal emails and you'd have no way to tell, so I don't see how it can be argued that FastMail is at all superior in that regard.
At home servers are extra space and electricity, AND potential outages if your ISP isn't 100% stable. I had outages sporadically for 2 weeks because a squirrel chewed through some coax outside my house. Im glad I didn't sporadically bounce emails for 2 weeks during that time. I'm sure a major provider has redundancy and controls in place for failovers... a single server in your house probably doesn't.
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.
And ensuring it stays running and updated and secure and backed up. Docker isn't magic. A server instance and the associated apps still need to be maintained. And you're either trusting the creator of that Docker image or digging into every security setting anyway.
Updated is usually barely a problem, there hasn't been a serious postfix vulnerability since 2011 or a dovecot one since 2013 (and even the 2013 one wouldn't necessarily affect you as an individual user). One update every 3-5 years is not exactly something I'd call a problem. I don't update unless there's a major vulnerability and it's one I'm affected by.
Rebuilding your docker when you hear about that is not exactly something I'd consider a big deal, but I guess if 2 minutes work every 3 years is worth giving away your privacy, then you do that.
Backup is a set and forget cron job (tarsnap mail dir), so I don't see how that's an issue.
You still have to update the OS or whatever you're running the mailserver on. You have to make sure it's not compromised nor DDosed, it doesn't run out of space, it doesn't crash or get stuck for whatever reason, etc etc.
Updating the OS... usually a fairly rare occurence again, kernel vulnerabilities that affect you with minimal services exposed are quite rare, most vulnerabilities are local escalations and such which wouldn't affect just a mail server. When was the last remote root exploit in the linux kernel? Maybe SSH which would be the only other thing you might run... Neither is within my memory. I suspect these would be ever less frequent than mail service updates, if ever.
As for the rest those aren't really issues you need to actively watch, you'll just know when something goes wrong to take a look. I can't see running out of disk with just a mail service, crashes are... never and compromise/DDoS isn't really a risk if you secure it properly to begin with and update it that once every few years. It's really very hands off if you're not running any other services and just review the vulnerabilities.
I'm guessing this is even less of a problem for most of us though because I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server which is kept up to date regularly, so I was speaking simply to adding mail functionality to an existing system previously.
> I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server
Oh yeah, me too, and tbh it's enough of a pain already without having to deal with mail, spam and the likes.
There is a reason that companies like Heroku exist and prosper; it's the same reason personal mail servers never saw mass-adoption, despite being one of the first things you could do on the internet. The anecdote that you find it easier than most doesn't change the reality of the matter.
I just don't understand where the difficulty some people have in mind comes from so I'm trying to understand it better. You don't have to be bleeding edge to be secure against remote attacks, most of the configuration is trivial, I think more people would do it if it wasn't made out to be such a difficult thing for no real reason.
Maybe if someone made an integrated mail server it'd be more common.
> I just don't understand where the difficulty some people have in mind comes from so I'm trying to understand it better.
It's a pain in the ass from time to time, especially if you don't administer Linux boxes for a living. I've been running my own MTA for well over a decade, and have dealt with every one of the issues cited by the other people responding to you in this thread, as well as most cited by other people discussing this article in general, and a few (such as the advent of deliverability/spam-fighting tools like DKIM and DMARC) which I haven't seen anyone else mention. I haven't kept close track, but I'd say it's cost me altogether somewhere between one and two weeks of time over the years - and that doesn't count initial setup, because I did that back before you could just pick any of a dozen HOWTOs that'd take you through the whole process end-to-end.
For me, and apparently also for you, that tradeoff is worthwhile. (For me, not least because the amount of effort required has gone nearly to zero in the past few years. If that weren't true, I'm not sure I'd feel the same way.) For a lot of people, that tradeoff makes less sense than spending about the same, or a bit more, money, in order to have their mail infrastructure looked after by professionals who do it for a living. Granted, they have to deal with risks that we don't, like Google's habit of surprising its users with rather stupid UI changes, only some of which fail to last. But we have to deal with risks that they don't, too. We prefer control to convenience and are willing to spend time and effort to get the result we want, and that's okay. Others prefer convenience to control and would rather spend money to get the result they want, and that's okay, too. Different people have different needs.
If that's still confusing, I don't really know what to tell you. Sorry.
E-mail deliverability is one of my top concerns, and I don't trust myself to handle it as well or better than the experts working on Google's email platform. SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc. are fairly basic concepts to learn but I wouldn't call myself an expert in their implementation by any stretch of the imagination. That's to say nothing of the non-standard oddities that pop up with deliverability to certain networks, ISPs, etc. that require ongoing attention and that I don't want to have to deal with.
If you are willing to deal with the occasional hiccup and learn about the odd issue as it comes up, the above is not really a huge concern. But if you are like me and would give up a lot to avoid the horror of realizing some email(s) have not gone through at the worst possible time (i.e. on the day of an important business deadline, with no time to troubleshoot the root cause), entrusting your mail to a platform like Google or FastMail is a must.
The "tinkerer" aspect of me would like to run my own mail server and would enjoy knowing that it's fully within my control and configured exactly the way I want it. The pragmatist in me says, "No way!"
> [...] 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
Not really. Try running a service where you charge users. $40 per account is near the lower bound considering transaction costs and other overheads, before you add in the actual cost to provide the service. Any less and you may as well make it free since you don't need to provide reliable service or support for freeloaders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\",
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.
I read that forum rant and the linked content, and there is still no evidence that Gmail is deleting emails immediately by default. I read two possible causes:
- Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox
- Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail?
Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?
The quarantine folder you mention is part of the content compliance settings. Mail that matches content compliance rules goes into a quarantine that only admins can access.
This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver.
That's actually an incredibly annoying fallout of gmail's deduplication that cannot be disabled. I believe gmail de-duplicates your list echo because it sees a copy in your sent folder. I wish it could be disabled :-/
Agreed. Whenever I mail a list if I have an important message I have to ask someone if the message appeared or not. I can't verify by receiving my own copy. I use mail lists every day.
If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)
It will frequently gobble up multi-lingual emails. I discovered this when I ignored a customer in Chile for a while because he had a Spanish email signature.
> 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....)
I'm afraid to test it out with my personal account, but I wonder what would happen if you sent a test to a gmail account with the GTUBE spam signature? You know, the one that scores 999 points with Spamassassin.
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.
I have the same problem. At one time, more than half the Gmail spambox was legitimate email, so I had to check it every day. (It was so bad, I kept screen grabs as evidence.)
This year, things got much better for a few months, and now they are getting worse again....
The middle of last year is when it started for me. It only affects my personal Gmail account, though. My Google for Business account seems to work fine, and I get a lot more mail there. I can't imagine they use two different filters, but it seems to almost be the case. Either that or there is a bug in one platform with the Not Spam button not working properly.
I definitely had this problem. I moved from a metal server to a VPS which had a different IP address, and it's taken probably 3 months to finally have a decent enough email reputation so that Gmail isn't automatically dumping email into spam. And you have to drill down to even get to that Spam folder too.
It was at the point where I really couldn't effectively communicate with anyone on gmail because of that. The answer I kept getting was "Well, why don't you just use Gmail instead of your own email stuff?"
It's kind of scary to me sometimes just how well Google has managed to get people to equate email with Gmail.
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.
I, too, have run into this. One email setup was moved to Google Apps, and it flagged JIRA email as spam. Once that was fixed, I figured I was good, but more recently it flagged a document share request... from Google Docs... originating from within the same organization (i.e. same Google Apps account). Left hand, meet right hand.
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..
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 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.
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.
Because they aren't free, there is always a cost. Not only that, a single Gmail tab can take up 350-500 mb RAM. Lastly, getting Gmail on a custom domain is not "free" anymore.
Now a days there aren't actually good free providers. Google charges a yearly fee if you want to use a custom domain.
This wasn't true when I originally switched to fastmail. Back then google still had a free personal google apps account which supported custom domains. I pay fastmail because I know what the deal is. I pay them $50 a year and they host my email with my domains. There is no question about what trade we are making. In addition I'm getting to pay a very small amount and support fellow developers building a good product.
The old saying is that with google you are the product. Your information is being parsed, stored, tracked, and used to advertise to you. I'm happy to pay a bit of money and not be the product. I don't do this everywhere but there are more then a few places it is true. I also despise ads and will pay money to opt out of them almost everywhere. YoutubeRed, iOS games, etc.
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 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.
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.
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.
378 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadMigrating away from GMail for privacy reasons and he still ends up with Google for functionality...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/...
I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/
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 ...
Totally agreed. I'm a Fastmail's happy user, glad to pay for such a great service.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...
Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/639
I haven't found a workaround yet and still use Linux VMs for a lot of tasks.
On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.
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.
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...
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.
[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/
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.
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.
Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform, which is why it has dozens of apps on iOS and Android, and supports Linux on Azure.
Microsoft's Windows strategy is to be cross-platform, with Windows 10 for "internet of things", phones, tablets, games consoles, all types of PC and servers.
Windows phones didn't sell well enough and the hardware lagged what was needed for Windows 10 (eg Hello and Continuum). However, there's still an ARM/smartphone version of Windows 10, so that door's not closed yet. There are always rumors about a business-oriented Surface phone
Also, Windows 10 was and is free for smartphones, so there's still room for Asian manufacturers to have a go. Even if they don't ship many units, it provides a fall-back if Google gets too aggressive on Android.
Now, when Windows Mobile turned out to be a failure. But not couple years ago and definitely not when they were buying Nokia.
UPDATE Note: Office 365 already supported Macs, and alternative browsers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12170771
https://9to5mac.com/2016/05/25/microsoft-windows-phone-dead/
Current market share mobile OSes: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
Optimism is fine, but after so many years...
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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
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
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!
[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
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...
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.
Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.
Did you delete the Gmail account?
These are just some of the reasons.
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.
At the end of the day, email IS NOT secure. If you're paying for a service and they can say they're not reading your emails and they will respect your privacy, well that's good enough for me.
Configuration (at least using dovecot and postfix) is easy too once you get started.
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.
Rebuilding your docker when you hear about that is not exactly something I'd consider a big deal, but I guess if 2 minutes work every 3 years is worth giving away your privacy, then you do that.
Backup is a set and forget cron job (tarsnap mail dir), so I don't see how that's an issue.
Again, Docker isn't magic.
As for the rest those aren't really issues you need to actively watch, you'll just know when something goes wrong to take a look. I can't see running out of disk with just a mail service, crashes are... never and compromise/DDoS isn't really a risk if you secure it properly to begin with and update it that once every few years. It's really very hands off if you're not running any other services and just review the vulnerabilities.
I'm guessing this is even less of a problem for most of us though because I and probably many others around here already run a personal dev server which is kept up to date regularly, so I was speaking simply to adding mail functionality to an existing system previously.
Oh yeah, me too, and tbh it's enough of a pain already without having to deal with mail, spam and the likes.
There is a reason that companies like Heroku exist and prosper; it's the same reason personal mail servers never saw mass-adoption, despite being one of the first things you could do on the internet. The anecdote that you find it easier than most doesn't change the reality of the matter.
Maybe if someone made an integrated mail server it'd be more common.
It's a pain in the ass from time to time, especially if you don't administer Linux boxes for a living. I've been running my own MTA for well over a decade, and have dealt with every one of the issues cited by the other people responding to you in this thread, as well as most cited by other people discussing this article in general, and a few (such as the advent of deliverability/spam-fighting tools like DKIM and DMARC) which I haven't seen anyone else mention. I haven't kept close track, but I'd say it's cost me altogether somewhere between one and two weeks of time over the years - and that doesn't count initial setup, because I did that back before you could just pick any of a dozen HOWTOs that'd take you through the whole process end-to-end.
For me, and apparently also for you, that tradeoff is worthwhile. (For me, not least because the amount of effort required has gone nearly to zero in the past few years. If that weren't true, I'm not sure I'd feel the same way.) For a lot of people, that tradeoff makes less sense than spending about the same, or a bit more, money, in order to have their mail infrastructure looked after by professionals who do it for a living. Granted, they have to deal with risks that we don't, like Google's habit of surprising its users with rather stupid UI changes, only some of which fail to last. But we have to deal with risks that they don't, too. We prefer control to convenience and are willing to spend time and effort to get the result we want, and that's okay. Others prefer convenience to control and would rather spend money to get the result they want, and that's okay, too. Different people have different needs.
If that's still confusing, I don't really know what to tell you. Sorry.
If you are willing to deal with the occasional hiccup and learn about the odd issue as it comes up, the above is not really a huge concern. But if you are like me and would give up a lot to avoid the horror of realizing some email(s) have not gone through at the worst possible time (i.e. on the day of an important business deadline, with no time to troubleshoot the root cause), entrusting your mail to a platform like Google or FastMail is a must.
The "tinkerer" aspect of me would like to run my own mail server and would enjoy knowing that it's fully within my control and configured exactly the way I want it. The pragmatist in me says, "No way!"
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 ??
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?
Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.
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.
[0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html
https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html
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.
Curious, do you think you would have perceived the price differently if it had been presented as $3/mo?
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.
[0] https://www.hushmail.com/
[1] https://protonmail.com/
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...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...
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
[0] https://unseen.is/
[1] http://lelantoss7bcnwbv.onion/
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
- Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox
- Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail?
Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?
(Or was your comment tongue-in-cheek?)
If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)
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....)
I'd rather get spam once in awhile than turn my spam folder into a de facto secondary inbox.
http://spamassassin.apache.org/gtube/
This year, things got much better for a few months, and now they are getting worse again....
It was at the point where I really couldn't effectively communicate with anyone on gmail because of that. The answer I kept getting was "Well, why don't you just use Gmail instead of your own email stuff?" It's kind of scary to me sometimes just how well Google has managed to get people to equate email with Gmail.
I guess many users don't complain about it as they never look in their gmail spam folders and see emails that they should have received.
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.
Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.
It also supports training a filter on your specific email/spam patterns which works very well in my experience.
Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.
Now a days there aren't actually good free providers. Google charges a yearly fee if you want to use a custom domain.
This wasn't true when I originally switched to fastmail. Back then google still had a free personal google apps account which supported custom domains. I pay fastmail because I know what the deal is. I pay them $50 a year and they host my email with my domains. There is no question about what trade we are making. In addition I'm getting to pay a very small amount and support fellow developers building a good product.
The old saying is that with google you are the product. Your information is being parsed, stored, tracked, and used to advertise to you. I'm happy to pay a bit of money and not be the product. I don't do this everywhere but there are more then a few places it is true. I also despise ads and will pay money to opt out of them almost everywhere. YoutubeRed, iOS games, etc.
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 found pointing my MX records straight at Fastmail helped a lot with spam. See "If you use your own domain" in those instructions.
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.
But I am trying to move out of it.