The most important step for folks that wish to break free for Google: start using a custom domain name as soon as possible. Because the hard part is not moving from one email service provider to another, but getting your new email address in everybody's address books and changing all your site logins.
And if you love your Gmail interface and all the goodies that come with it, thats fine. Get a 1 user Google Apps account ($5/month) and start using your own domain with it. That way you have the freedom to switch to a other provider at any time once you are ready.
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.
> 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.
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.
+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.
Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year).
15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...
One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1].
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may...
I 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.
"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.
"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...
"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.
I moved from Google Apps to FastMail for six months or so. I'm back to Google Apps now. For me, I had a quite opposite experience...FastMail searching was much slower, and the return to folders instead of labels made organizing my mail more difficult. Additionally, GMail's Inbox organizing (slicing in Primary, Social, Promotions, etc) is invaluable when you receive many, many messages a day. Fastmail's interface, along with the increased spam messages which got through, simply didn't provide me with a good user experience and meant I was more likely to miss an email.
YMMV.
Pretty hardcore fastmail fan here, love it, I did something similar about 3 years ago - I migrated my 10GB~ gmail account to Fastmail.
Haven't looked back since and it just keeps getting better.
These guys are the core contributors to so many fantastic open source products, they're transparent, respect your privacy and security above all else and it's resulted in an excellent all-round email service.
Curious what y'all think of Protonmail? I've been using their service partially (just within family and a few friends).
They lack two big (features/caveats?) as of now.
(1) searching for a text within the body of the email is not available (They can't read my email kinda thing.) and
(2) Inline images don't work - pretty bad flaw.
I do like :
(1) Simple and Fast UI for web app, and iOS App.
(2) Knowing that I'm supporting folks that care about privacy and freedom. They do open source some of their stuff and are now the maintainers of openpgp.
Why does FastMail charge a family account fee, thus making it more expensive to have two accounts under a family account than two individual accounts?
I've come around to considering having 12 years of gmail online a liabilty. There's simply too much data there that can be used to steal someone's identity. At some point someone nasty is going to get into your email.
Why would you use FastMail when hosting your own mail server has a much higher privacy level? It seems no better than gmail in this respect.
I was a Fastmail customer for 3 years (2012-2015), but have since migrated to Gmail.
I outlined the factors in this decision in https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb... .
I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.
If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.
Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.
Any news on JMAP since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781894 ?
If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
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.
But in the end won't most of the sent emails still go through Google's servers, thanks to the ubiquity of Gmail?
Very happy recent convert to KolabNow!
Pros:
- 100% green energy
- 100% Free Software
- Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
- Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and
notes (IMAP)
- Swiss privacy laws
- They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm
glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.
Cons:
- No 2FA :(
- Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for
the above)
- Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)I also did this trick 2 years ago https://www.outcoldman.com/en/archive/2014/05/08/fastmail/, happy FastMail customer. Mainly because of a lot of geeky features.
Has anybody used HushMail [0] or ProtonMail [1]? How does it stand against both free services like GMail/Yahoo or paid ones like FastMail?
I've tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
How does this work with Google Docs? I have a Google Apps account and I don't want to lose all my documents.
Is it possible to have my email usage through FastMail but keep my email address to log in to google so I can still access all my docs?
Or do I need to create a gmail address and move my docs over, then move my email over?
I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang..
At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..
As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible (https://soverin.net/features).
It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but:
Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.
I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.
Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.
With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.
Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account.
That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.
From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web"
Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?
"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!!!
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.
I 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
I once went fastmail -> gmail. It's been a while, thinking about going back tbh.
Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).
Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard.
And you get the Google Apps at a good price.
Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think.
Did you delete the Gmail account?
My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.
It took me an hour to read all of the comments and replies on this post. But I just noticed that "iCloud" Mail wasn't mentioned in a single word.
Interesting.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
Can anyone suggest a service similar to gmail but based in Western Europe (not UK)? I would like to have my data there.
Your mails are as private as the mail servers of the other people you are communicating with.
Nothing can substitue inbox.google.com for me so far.
I get far more spam at fastmail than I do at gmail.
How do you handle changing your email address?
How good is the search in fastmail?
Just a small correction: Google has no datacenters in Africa.
https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/in...
Joke's on him about moving out of the US: fastmail has servers in New York.
Why fastmail if your primary concern is snooping? End to end encrypted email like protonmail is the right option against snooping
Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care.
Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life.
So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.
> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...]
I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you.
Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??
I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.
And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.
In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.