It seems like G Suite meets all the requirements listed on the blog post, but is not discussed. G Suite or Office 365 also work well as personal email providers - they fulfill all the requirements mentioned such as a custom domain, text search, and IMAP access.
The author talks about the risks of single point of failure being Google/a Google account, and their lengthy and regularly amended Terms of Service. This would arguably be true of Office 365 as well.
> These options include rejecting, quarantining, or delivering email with modifications. For example, you can route mail to Gmail and an external server or set policies that vary by organizational unit.
That way Gmail becomes a single point of failure like any other service; you will only lose the mail which didn't arrive during the outage, which will then usually be resent at a later time. But you wouldn't care that much if they lock you out, since you then can change the MX records to point to the external server.
GSuite has some quirks when it comes to personal usages. For example, you can't use it for Family Groups, which allows me to share a YouTube Premium account with my wife.
Sure, but I will keep my GMail account - for YouTube Premium. But at least if it gets banned for whatever reason, I lose only my Youtube history and nothing more.
G-Suite charges by mailbox address. It is possible to have a catchall, but when you send other emails from it you sometimes get the dreaded "on behalf of ..." tag.
I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone.
But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.
EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
I think it's very important for customers to be able to trust the business though. This means the business relationship should have clearly defined terms and both parties should be expected to follow them. Unfortunately, the trend is for services to have take it or leave it terms and to essentially be written to hold them blameless while letting them do whatever they want.
A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
There is definitely still an upside from Gmail: The author can redirect his email address to any other service on a whim and all his inbound email comes with. So as long as his archive is backed up he does have a good strategy to restore access.
Zoho Mail only costs $2 more per year vs PurelyMail (it's shown on PurelyMail's website along with other competitors) and also avoids the "one man show" problem.
I'm not sure saving $2 a year is worth using a self-proclaimed (according to its website) beta service. Then again Gmail was in beta for many years.
Last I checked, Zoho was per address; This guy specifically looked for domain support (meaning, potentially hundreds of addresses).
PurelyMail seems to charge by storage, not mailbox address; and AFAIK so does Migadu (which, up until reading this post, I thought was unique in that).
I will admit it's unfortunate to have to pay per inbox on FastMail. I can't even pay less for my second box to be smaller and more limited, it must be at the same rate as my main box.
They do allow infinite aliases which covers most of my needs, but when I wanted to use a FastMail box for my home automation system's service account it didn't make sense to do so.
Zoho is per user/inbox but a single user/inbox can receive emails for multiple domains and email ids. You can also set up individual sending identities. I am currently receiving email for 7 domains while paying for one.
There is an undocumented limit though. You can generally only have upto 30 aliases.
Indeed. I honestly would never go cheap on email again. People have traditionally expected it to be free, but it's the most crucial point of my online presence: I need to be able to rely on it and it needs to be good.
In my opinion, the fact that people would pay more for Netflix than their email provider is kinda crazy, when you think about their relative importance.
Email is obviously really important, but the cost of running Netflix is extremely different to running an email service and I would take that into account with the pricing.
But I think Netflix is extremely cheap/good value if you enjoy the content.
Fair comment, but all of those concerns are mitigated if you:
1) use your own domain(s)
2) take frequent backups
so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.
How many people are actively backing up their email on their own? Backing up email seems much simpler than running your own email server, but it's still going to require some technical know how.
To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
I would strongly recommend against using POP3 for such purposes. It doesn’t contain the entire history, for two reasons:
• POP3 doesn’t have the concept of mailboxes. All you will get is the messages that exist at the time of request, not any folders you’ve put them into or labels applied.
• If you delete a message on the server, it won’t be deleted locally, which means that your backup does not represent the current state of affairs.
Also POP3 is definitely designed for the “download and delete on server” approach, and various tooling may have limits on it because of that. For example, if you get Gmail to fetch from some other server over POP3, it stops working after there are 50,000 messages. This undocumented limit bit me some years back when I used Gmail in this way, and it didn’t even notify me that fetching had stopped working! It was two weeks before I noticed that no new messages had been coming in from that source.
> POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
I refute this. IMAP is a synchronisation protocol. Clients can choose to operate fully online (performing every operation on the server), fully offline (downloading everything from the server and operating locally) or a hybrid (e.g. keep only the last 30 days of messages locally). The protocol, and most clients, are fully capable of creating a continuous local backup containing the entire current state of the server. Is this “the entire history”? Depends on your definition. I’d argue it’s more true of IMAP than it is of POP3. But it’s not like a Git repository showing what happened and when. I know of no email protocol that provides that. But you can make it so yourself, e.g. sync IMAP into a maildir that happens to be a Git repository and commit after every sync. That would have the entire history, at the resolution of IMAP fetch.
Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.)
As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
Hey! I feel like ensuring you clarify you'll only shut down an account if they break the rules you set out is a really good practice and there are examples, like FastMail's, you could borrow from. I know the standard boilerplate is to give a service the right to do whatever it wants, but as a small indie service operator you can be better than the fairly standard! ;)
Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.
I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.
No offense taken! I think you're broadly right that I could be doing a better job on reassuring messaging, and I'll put that on my work queue.
I also hope to solve any bus factor problems before leaving beta. Right now if I were struck down, I think I'd still have about 9 months worth of free AWS credits on the account running the service, plus any profits. (It's not quite a self sustaining business yet, but it's not that far from it either.)
@Felz, hey mate, I love what you are doing. I will get Purelymail featured on SaaSHub for a few months. Hopefully that may bring you a few new sign ups. Please just get it verified there and improve the listing.
Your responsiveness on these questions is seriously making me consider picking up an account. I, too, am looking for an excuse to migrate off GMail (It's a significant project once you have 30+ accounts) and your product might just be the straw needed to get me moving.
Could you also commit to notifying users when the privacy policy or terms of service change? I suspect you already do this, but it would be good to have it in writing.
Hey Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience, hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam (unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough email volume?
I don't think it matters even with all that stuff. The first time you email anyone, it's going to go to spam. Once you have established a mail flow, then it will continue. The best setup is to have them email you first, then your replies will already be well scored.
Seeing this thread prompted me to sign up - I've been procrastinating over ditching gmail and consolidating on one IMAP provider for ages.
I shelved my one main doubt (I don't think much of Roundcube) and started the process today. Seems like you've done a really good job. Recipients have been getting all my emails, and I have found the integrated migration tool invaluable in getting set up.
I'm more worried that PM is still fairly new and in beta. These hobby businesses come and go, and changing one's email is a huge pain. What's saying that PM will be around for 10+ more years, like Gmail has?
This is mostly because changing your email address is a huge pain. Once you're using your own domain, changing email providers is like changing web hosts or domain registrars: Some work but not a big deal.
Or, as an easier solution, a dedicated email forwarding service. I've been using one for about 15 years now and changed the actual email service provider a couple of times just by updating the forwarding address.
Of course then the problem is to identify a reliable email forwarding service that won't go anywhere.
The bus factor is a potential issue. Legal terms & conditions probably aren't as the corrupt civil law systems of nearly all polities make legal redress unavailable or hopelessly impractical to all but the wealthy (who probably aren't looking at $10 pa mail). Ordinary people don't read legals, partly out of laziness, but partly from a (correct) judgement that they are irrelevant to them.
Unaffiliated, I found migadu (https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need.
As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.
The company is based in Switzerland and is French speaking. Any chance "AdVite" means something different in French?
Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here.
I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes".
Perhaps they pivoted from inception. There are references in their company registration to advertising and marketing though the entire company plan is /very/ broad and encompassed pretty much any IT/online service.
I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc.
Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.
They did a full UI update and have a bunch of new features. Some are still buggy but support is responsive. Some of the new cool things they have are identities: different logins to send and receive all to the same mailbox, but externally looks different.
They were shuffling services around and I think they had a notice in Feb on their portal to the effect but, yeah, they definitely need to start using a status page and twitter for updates; most customers just want a heads up and be informed of what is happening.
Service is reliable, considering the cost, but communication isn't their forte esp for an email company. :)
I would caution everyone considering Migadu. My biggest issue revolves around support — they don’t have a public status page so when the service goes down it’s impossible to know if the issue is on my end or on theirs. They're averaged one big outage (~24 hours) a year over the past 3 years, not counting smaller outages, so this isn’t a generic thought experiment. They don’t respond to most of my emails to support, either. Do not recommend.
In my case, they have always replied to my emails. I think it would be much better if they were actively using their twitter account in order to keep us informed.
I've been using Migadu for a year now. Multiple aliases, works well.
Only problem so far: a service interruption of a few hours "due to the COVID-19 situation" apparently. I haven't lost any e-mails but, to be honest, since I'm paying, I don't know if I'll accept a second interruption for a service I'm paying for.
The only thing that makes sense is getting your own domain first. There after you can look into email providers, but to avoid lock in, first you need your own address, owned by you. Only by then, you can rent the email service into it if you want, or run your own.
I have been using it for few years now and so far have been reasonably happy. Works fine with Thunderbird, on my phone however i have recently noticed a substantial delay in getting new emails, sometimes even more than couple of hours...
I've lost one of my (two) Gmail accounts. Attempting to get it back was an existential exercise in looking into the maw of nothingness. Kind of like that thing from The Fifth Element or something. Even know a ranking insider, but... nothing.
Relying on any company for more than one divisible service in 2020 is insane. Use Google for search? Don't use them for anything else.
There are lots of little guys out there doing great stuff. Put a few bucks in their direction. Shutouts are fascist.
This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes for.
Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains!
Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)
Purely mail does look like a very attractive mail host, filling an interesting niche between the SMTP sever you get from your ISP (or someone like zoneout from zoneedit, which is $1/month for up to 50 outgoing email per day) and a full on webmail like fastmail.
Honestly for me the $50/year to fastmail to worry about worrying about my mail is worth it, and their webmail/mobile clients are great if that is your thing.
Really the main thing here is to move your mail over to a custom domain, and these guys really make that a lot cheaper. $15/year for the domain and another $10/year for mail is absolutely worth it to remove your mail provider as a single point of failure in your email.
PS - if you are looking for a good android mail client, I have had good luck with K-9. It takes a bit of getting used to when migrating over from the built in android mail, but if you stick with it and figure out how to configure it correctly it works great. The main configuration changes I had to make were putting a shortcut for 'move to archive' and getting android configured to let it run in the background so notifications work correctly.
I love fastmail, I use them for my email and my DNS servers, it's so easy. I understand some people want to run their own email, but ever since you have to set up SPF records and all kinds of other shit, and you still rush Gmail black holing your emails, I'd rather pay 50 bucks a year.
It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option.
Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
You only need a public IP, not necessarily static. My ISP offers public IPs via pppoe and dynamic DNS. I was able to install my mail server with docker-mailserver [1] without much effort. There are some quirks, but it's worth trying out.
I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process for whatever I needed mail.
Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care. Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with. Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap.
I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?)
DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap).
That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM, SPF, DMARC and stuff.
If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid.
When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not tell that to your sister).
Yes if you send 1k mails a day, if you send 1 a day or 1 a week even google will pass it through no problem.
I send all kinds of test stuff to my own gmail accounts and other providers. Unless you send really a lot email or unless someone marks you as a spam it is not an issue.
Blocking spammers is about rate limiting, if you are "nigerian prince" - one email a day - is not going to help you finding a person who wants to help you. Ideally you would like to send emails to everyone at once to find that one special person who wants to help you.
You don't need fault tolerance. It's nice, but not necessary. How often is your VPS or colocated server going to go down, anyway? Email is meant to deal with transient issues.
Web interface? Again, you don't need that at all.
Constant monitoring? No. Maintenance? Certainly not constant.
It may not be difficult, but it's not trivial, either. It's an enormous time sink. The older you get, the less free time you have. Is this how you want to spend it?
Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was great.
Then we started having bizarre deliverability problems to a growing provider of corporate emails. So after trying a number of solutions, we settled on SES. All was great again.
Then we started having weird deliverability problems that resulted in bounced emails to an accountancy firm. One of the public IPs ended up on a blacklist. This got fixed fairly swiftly. Things were good again.
Then it happened again.
Yes, deliverability can be solved – the question is for how long. Maybe we chose poorly with SES, but it seems other providers have had problems. I ultimately concluded that it's really not worth the hassle, and we ended up with the email provider that was causing us the bulk of the problems. It was a difficult pill to swallow, and I realize that I've done my part in making the problem worse. But sometimes, life is too short.
The world was different a decade ago. We didn't have overzealous spam filters by default that self-reinforce their awful decisions. I appreciate that spam is a really hard problem. But the solution we have is worse than the problem: we've just made an oligarchy of email, where not even all the big players have the clout to keep themselves out of blacklists all of the time.
And with all that said, for a personal email server, I still might self-host – but I'd be prepared for emails to not get reliably delivered.
Out of interest, were you using a dedicated IP address with SES? As I understand it you've doomed to deliverability issues unless you have your own IP address which nobody else is sending from.
That said, by no means am I claiming that email deliverability is easy!
If you’re a small-time sender, having your own IP address is probably actually a bad thing, because now the IP address never builds up enough positive reputation.
I briefly looked into running my own mail server, but from what I've heard, sometimes you run into issues with deliverability, which are quite hard to fix.
Otherwise I run plenty of own infra, both on VPS's on DigitalOcean and on my home server.
This is some good info, I personally still use GMail and used to use GSuite. Migrating from GSuite -> Gmail was a nightmare in of itself, but I found a service that helped me keep my custom domain emails and no longer feel like a second class citizen. So even if someday Google decides to kill my Account, I can just reroute my domain to a new service with not issue.
The service I used is ImprovMX. YOu just setup your DNS records, and they handle your domain emails. Any number of aliases and redirects you need. Their free tier is very generous with 10 domains, and I think 15-20 aliases per domain. Super easy to get my family on there for our family domain and my other custom domains.
I then made a new standard gmail account, migrated everything I could, repurchased apps, and then just forwarded my email to the gmail account after detaching it from GSuite. It was fairly painless on this front.
You can do email alias sending of emails with any provider, but ImprovMX has SMTP services now that get rid of that pesky "on behalf of" label of your emails. It is part of their Pro feature set, but that's just $9 a month for a ton of features and peace of mind. Full DKIM support and the such.
You can even setup a custom domain as a login email for your GMail and most other services, so you can login with it just like you would with GSuite.
Now I know this is a post about moving away from Google, but this could be a stepping stone, because once you do all this. If i decided I want to use Fastmail, PurelyMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or whatever the hell else I want. I can just change the target email in ImprovMX and it goes to the right place. The rest is all just import/export from gmail.
You can just GYOB to make detailed Maildir format backups of Gmail, and either restore them into another gmail account, or find a way to import them into your new service using similar tools.
Or just keep a local backup, use NotMuch or a NotMuch UI like Neit Viel to search/lookup your old emails, and start fresh in your new place.
One little gotchya if you do this. Gmail saw the initial set of ImprovMX emails as spam or fraud for a few emails as they would come from 1 email, but had ImprovMX redirect info. SO be sure to double check spam folders for a a few days for miscategorized emails. Once the spam blocker learns ImprovMX is ok, it will start working as normal. (Thought I think ImprovMX improved something on their end as I have even seen this particular thing happen in a while.
sorry for the late response, but reason is you can't do a restore with takeout. I can backup from GSuite, and restore into consumer gmail. Its how I did my migration. Or any other combination. It also backs up in Maildir format, which is more compatible with more tools than in mbox format that takeout gives us. So it's just a more versatile tool. You can always convert mbox to maildir, there are tools like mb2md. but ive had issues where it mangles HTML emails and images.
As the recent changes to .org show, though, after a while the domain owns you rather than the other way around!
I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing.
Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in spam.
I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching!
> The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion).
If you're on paid G Suite, you can tweak the Default routing setting [1] in Google Admin to forward all emails to a different domain.
I believe this bypasses Gmail's spam filter (Google might reject some mail during SMTP — I've never had a problem with mail delivery to Google though, unlike to Hotmail).
Huh? If you're trying to move off of G Suite, why not just change your domain MX to your new mail provider? Google doesn't need to get involved at all.
Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or other event (I don't mind paying for a good service along these lines, but I'm reluctant to get into a metered situation).
I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll something with asterisk. Although I saw https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms the other day.
Yeah, JMP supports picture messaging and short codes, so works for most SMS-based 2FA. Group texting support will be completed in the next month or two, which would give JMP feature-parity with Google Voice. And you can run your own instance if you don't trust the one at https://jmp.chat/
I would love to have a trustworthy alternative to using GV for all my SMS 2FA needs. I switched to custom domain email a while ago, but definitely feel I am still way too exposed to Google in that area.
One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accounts tied to gmail.
I just progressively went through all my accounts in my password manager, and changed the email. I used my Gmail account to register to everything for more than a decade, but since I also kept a complete list of all my accounts, it wasn't an issue to change it one by one.
I still have my Gmail account, it just sits empty (in case). There's no need to delete it.
email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in features and UI.
So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are:
1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies?
2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe with them.
3. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc.
4. Spam filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are, just do not have access to such amount of data.
That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving to ProtonMail.
Considering the importance of email that you mention: What is your plan if google suddenly bans your account?
Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse-- they won't even respond to you.
I considered doing that, but decided against it because domain names are rented and not permanently yours. If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or pass away, anyone can grab it and password-recover their way in all my accounts... I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off...
> If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or pass away, anyone can grab it and password-recover their way in all my accounts... I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off...
If you have the cash available to do so, the best practice is to renew your domain for 10 years, and then add an extra year every year.
I'm surprised there aren't nonprofits that an individual can entrust a lump sum payment to, to keep our domains renewed for tens or hundreds of years.
Sure, but people who are using free Gmail accounts (not you, of course) have limited recourse if they are locked out. If you're paying for something directly at least you can expect to be treated like a customer.
For me there are two distinct worries and corresponding solutions. I pay 50 bucks to fastmail every year for the peace of mind that I won't lose access to my data. I pay an 8 dollar registration fee every year for the peace of mind that I'll never have to change my address.
> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop
Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).
Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.
I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email providers because of 20 seconds a day.
That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.
Can you send me a zip file containing all of your emails then? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Funny how even people who claim they don’t care about privacy actually really value privacy.
I'm really looking forward to what DHH can do with https://hey.com/. My aim with an email provider is that I trust it. A non-bootstrapped company with a founder outspoken against privacy issues seems a good place to try.
Hey sounds promising but out of the gate it sounds like it will be missing a lot of features I need, eg
no migration path, you start with a clean slate
web based only, no imap access (not sure of smtp)
no custom domains on day 1
Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its missing crucial elements.
I've been using iCloud email for more than a decade, no problems, and much better privacy. It allows 3 aliases per account (that you can replace) without exposing your primary address unlike Google's primary+alias suffix, so you can have up to 4 addresses per account.
I also don't think they require you to give them your phone number.
Keeping years and years of old emails on the server is a bad idea whilst subjected to the third party doctrine, which holds that the government snoops can access your emails without a warrant due to the fact that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are storing your emails on a hosted server.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadhttps://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en
> These options include rejecting, quarantining, or delivering email with modifications. For example, you can route mail to Gmail and an external server or set policies that vary by organizational unit.
That way Gmail becomes a single point of failure like any other service; you will only lose the mail which didn't arrive during the outage, which will then usually be resent at a later time. But you wouldn't care that much if they lock you out, since you then can change the MX records to point to the external server.
But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.
EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
Since a billion people use less trustworthy providers, apparently not.
A bit tongue in cheek, but always have a back up strategy and move on whatever seems best to you, not to someone else.
I'm not sure saving $2 a year is worth using a self-proclaimed (according to its website) beta service. Then again Gmail was in beta for many years.
PurelyMail seems to charge by storage, not mailbox address; and AFAIK so does Migadu (which, up until reading this post, I thought was unique in that).
They do allow infinite aliases which covers most of my needs, but when I wanted to use a FastMail box for my home automation system's service account it didn't make sense to do so.
Not exactly the same as hundreds of individual addresses/inboxes, but may fit some people's needs.
I've been using Zoho like this now for a little while and I am pretty happy with it considering the price.
There is an undocumented limit though. You can generally only have upto 30 aliases.
In my opinion, the fact that people would pay more for Netflix than their email provider is kinda crazy, when you think about their relative importance.
But I think Netflix is extremely cheap/good value if you enjoy the content.
1) use your own domain(s)
2) take frequent backups
so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.
To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
but someone who cannot do that is definitely not going to move off of free Gmail/Yahoo mail/...
Installing Thunderbird and configuring the account, while more involved than the above, is still within reach of many non-technical users.
I think most people don't backup because they don't think they need to, rather than because they are unable. Unfortunately, they're wrong.
My argument is that people really should use POP3 (not IMAP) for this reason.
POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
• POP3 doesn’t have the concept of mailboxes. All you will get is the messages that exist at the time of request, not any folders you’ve put them into or labels applied.
• If you delete a message on the server, it won’t be deleted locally, which means that your backup does not represent the current state of affairs.
Also POP3 is definitely designed for the “download and delete on server” approach, and various tooling may have limits on it because of that. For example, if you get Gmail to fetch from some other server over POP3, it stops working after there are 50,000 messages. This undocumented limit bit me some years back when I used Gmail in this way, and it didn’t even notify me that fetching had stopped working! It was two weeks before I noticed that no new messages had been coming in from that source.
> POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
I refute this. IMAP is a synchronisation protocol. Clients can choose to operate fully online (performing every operation on the server), fully offline (downloading everything from the server and operating locally) or a hybrid (e.g. keep only the last 30 days of messages locally). The protocol, and most clients, are fully capable of creating a continuous local backup containing the entire current state of the server. Is this “the entire history”? Depends on your definition. I’d argue it’s more true of IMAP than it is of POP3. But it’s not like a Git repository showing what happened and when. I know of no email protocol that provides that. But you can make it so yourself, e.g. sync IMAP into a maildir that happens to be a Git repository and commit after every sync. That would have the entire history, at the resolution of IMAP fetch.
As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.
I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.
I also hope to solve any bus factor problems before leaving beta. Right now if I were struck down, I think I'd still have about 9 months worth of free AWS credits on the account running the service, plus any profits. (It's not quite a self sustaining business yet, but it's not that far from it either.)
Keep up the good work!
Anyway, good luck getting away from gmail!
"could" or "would"? Is there something in place, and have they agreed to this?
https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverabi...
Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers. You'll have to be persistent.
I shelved my one main doubt (I don't think much of Roundcube) and started the process today. Seems like you've done a really good job. Recipients have been getting all my emails, and I have found the integrated migration tool invaluable in getting set up.
Good luck with the venture.
Of course then the problem is to identify a reliable email forwarding service that won't go anywhere.
As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.
They have full DNS capabilities and very nice UI (minimal JS, loads super fast).
This sounds like an advertising company. A person's inbox is the holy grail of info about them.
I don't think I want to use this company for my email. Change my mind?
Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here.
I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes".
[1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html [2]: https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html
No, it doesn't mean something different in French.
Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.
Service is reliable, considering the cost, but communication isn't their forte esp for an email company. :)
(Yes, yes, this is the same company that lost the data on their cloud servers.)
If Google blocked your Recaptchas, deleted your Gmail account, and disabled you Android phone...wow.
Relying on any company for more than one divisible service in 2020 is insane. Use Google for search? Don't use them for anything else.
There are lots of little guys out there doing great stuff. Put a few bucks in their direction. Shutouts are fascist.
Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains!
Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)
Honestly for me the $50/year to fastmail to worry about worrying about my mail is worth it, and their webmail/mobile clients are great if that is your thing.
Really the main thing here is to move your mail over to a custom domain, and these guys really make that a lot cheaper. $15/year for the domain and another $10/year for mail is absolutely worth it to remove your mail provider as a single point of failure in your email.
PS - if you are looking for a good android mail client, I have had good luck with K-9. It takes a bit of getting used to when migrating over from the built in android mail, but if you stick with it and figure out how to configure it correctly it works great. The main configuration changes I had to make were putting a shortcut for 'move to archive' and getting android configured to let it run in the background so notifications work correctly.
Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
[1]: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web interface, ...
Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much.
Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires constant monitoring and maintenance.
I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process for whatever I needed mail.
Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care. Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with. Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap.
I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?)
DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap).
That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM, SPF, DMARC and stuff.
If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid.
When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not tell that to your sister).
DKIM matters if you want to not have to tell people to check their spam box whenever you correspond with them via email.
I send all kinds of test stuff to my own gmail accounts and other providers. Unless you send really a lot email or unless someone marks you as a spam it is not an issue.
Blocking spammers is about rate limiting, if you are "nigerian prince" - one email a day - is not going to help you finding a person who wants to help you. Ideally you would like to send emails to everyone at once to find that one special person who wants to help you.
You don't need fault tolerance. It's nice, but not necessary. How often is your VPS or colocated server going to go down, anyway? Email is meant to deal with transient issues.
Web interface? Again, you don't need that at all.
Constant monitoring? No. Maintenance? Certainly not constant.
Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was great.
Then we started having bizarre deliverability problems to a growing provider of corporate emails. So after trying a number of solutions, we settled on SES. All was great again.
Then we started having weird deliverability problems that resulted in bounced emails to an accountancy firm. One of the public IPs ended up on a blacklist. This got fixed fairly swiftly. Things were good again.
Then it happened again.
Yes, deliverability can be solved – the question is for how long. Maybe we chose poorly with SES, but it seems other providers have had problems. I ultimately concluded that it's really not worth the hassle, and we ended up with the email provider that was causing us the bulk of the problems. It was a difficult pill to swallow, and I realize that I've done my part in making the problem worse. But sometimes, life is too short.
The world was different a decade ago. We didn't have overzealous spam filters by default that self-reinforce their awful decisions. I appreciate that spam is a really hard problem. But the solution we have is worse than the problem: we've just made an oligarchy of email, where not even all the big players have the clout to keep themselves out of blacklists all of the time.
And with all that said, for a personal email server, I still might self-host – but I'd be prepared for emails to not get reliably delivered.
That said, by no means am I claiming that email deliverability is easy!
Otherwise I run plenty of own infra, both on VPS's on DigitalOcean and on my home server.
The service I used is ImprovMX. YOu just setup your DNS records, and they handle your domain emails. Any number of aliases and redirects you need. Their free tier is very generous with 10 domains, and I think 15-20 aliases per domain. Super easy to get my family on there for our family domain and my other custom domains.
I then made a new standard gmail account, migrated everything I could, repurchased apps, and then just forwarded my email to the gmail account after detaching it from GSuite. It was fairly painless on this front.
You can do email alias sending of emails with any provider, but ImprovMX has SMTP services now that get rid of that pesky "on behalf of" label of your emails. It is part of their Pro feature set, but that's just $9 a month for a ton of features and peace of mind. Full DKIM support and the such.
You can even setup a custom domain as a login email for your GMail and most other services, so you can login with it just like you would with GSuite.
Now I know this is a post about moving away from Google, but this could be a stepping stone, because once you do all this. If i decided I want to use Fastmail, PurelyMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or whatever the hell else I want. I can just change the target email in ImprovMX and it goes to the right place. The rest is all just import/export from gmail.
You can just GYOB to make detailed Maildir format backups of Gmail, and either restore them into another gmail account, or find a way to import them into your new service using similar tools.
Or just keep a local backup, use NotMuch or a NotMuch UI like Neit Viel to search/lookup your old emails, and start fresh in your new place.
One little gotchya if you do this. Gmail saw the initial set of ImprovMX emails as spam or fraud for a few emails as they would come from 1 email, but had ImprovMX redirect info. SO be sure to double check spam folders for a a few days for miscategorized emails. Once the spam blocker learns ImprovMX is ok, it will start working as normal. (Thought I think ImprovMX improved something on their end as I have even seen this particular thing happen in a while.
Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations.
I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/
I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing.
Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in spam.
I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching!
Basically, everything is terrible.
If you're on paid G Suite, you can tweak the Default routing setting [1] in Google Admin to forward all emails to a different domain.
I believe this bypasses Gmail's spam filter (Google might reject some mail during SMTP — I've never had a problem with mail delivery to Google though, unlike to Hotmail).
[1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en
I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll something with asterisk. Although I saw https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms the other day.
You can keep the old address and auto-forward emails from the old to the new. I think that's the best you can manage.
I still have my Gmail account, it just sits empty (in case). There's no need to delete it.
So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies? 2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe with them. 3. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc. 4. Spam filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are, just do not have access to such amount of data.
That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving to ProtonMail.
Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse-- they won't even respond to you.
If you have the cash available to do so, the best practice is to renew your domain for 10 years, and then add an extra year every year.
I'm surprised there aren't nonprofits that an individual can entrust a lump sum payment to, to keep our domains renewed for tens or hundreds of years.
That is key, and really good advice. People with that setup are massively better off.
For me there are two distinct worries and corresponding solutions. I pay 50 bucks to fastmail every year for the peace of mind that I won't lose access to my data. I pay an 8 dollar registration fee every year for the peace of mind that I'll never have to change my address.
Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).
Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.
That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
Can you send me a zip file containing all of your emails then? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Funny how even people who claim they don’t care about privacy actually really value privacy.
no migration path, you start with a clean slate web based only, no imap access (not sure of smtp) no custom domains on day 1
Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its missing crucial elements.
Any domain name provider will allow you to create personalized mail addresses for a total cost of around 10$/y.
Then -> imap -> Thunderbird.
And you're set for life with a nearly unlimited set of features.
It's easy to backup.
It can sync between different computers and mobile phones.
I don't get why he would chose something else.
I also don't think they require you to give them your phone number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
How often do you need the mails from years ago? Archive them to a local mailbox and include it in your normal backups.
Which competing services (apart from Outlook) offer Gmail-like labeling for individual messages?