I'm a FastMail user for about a year now. The one thing about the android app is that you get real push notifications. This is a great feature, that you don't get with ANY OTHER mail app for android. The interface of the android app seems to be a web-view, and I don't like it at all. The resolution is low, and it takes a long time to load. Overall, the push notifications is huge for me. I tried using the Gmail app connected to FastMail's backend, but emails would be delayed up to 15 minutes sometimes.
If you're a big Google Drive user, you'll most likely miss Gmail's built in integration with Drive, but FastMail has a simple file storage feature, where you can save attachments to your allocated space, and attach files from your files.
Another advantage for using FastMail, is that they do Email as their primary business, so it seems.
If you are concerned about privacy and gov tracking and getting their hands on your email then whats the point of migrating from one "unsecure" email provider (gmail) to another one (fastmail)? With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
> With some of the fastmail servers in US jurisdiction your email is just as safe as with gmail.
That's not really true. The servers themselves and their provider may be under US jurisdiction, but not FastMail itself, which means they can take measures against unauthorized access (e.g. encryption) and they can detect breaches and take steps.
Nothing will be foolproof, of course, since the NSA is the worst enemy you could have and if they have physical access to those servers, you simply can't claim you're 100% protected, but it's much better than nothing.
Furthermore, there are actual trade agreements between countries and if the NSA would access the servers of foreign companies on simple whims, the US can lose a lot of money if customers find out. I know of at least one big German multinational company that banned the usage of several US-based services and tightened security, after the Snowden revelations, for fear of industrial espionage.
In other words, the price for breaching users' privacy is significantly higher, because in Google's case, they just have to ask for it and Google can't even disclose such breaches to their customers even if they wanted.
In this case it was less about gov tracking, and more about the depth of the machine learning profile GOOG builds of its users.
That being said, decentralising a bit to providers that don't specialise in user profiling but more in email handling, is a step in the right direction.
gotcha! noone can guarantee fastmail wont be doing the same thing.
We get what we pay for. Free email is not free. The price is the security that we give up. Gmail and Fastmail are equivalent to me. Both own your privacy that you consciously give up for free...
That was exactly my initial thought and then I read " after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire."
yes, I see no real gain in migrating Email to Fastmail. Especially not for privacy against (US) government in any meaningful way. He should have moved to e.g. Switzerland based https://kolabnow.com
Honest question: How is it that GMail is perceived faster than a locally running MUA like mu4e which is quoted in the article?
I'm actually using mu4e for exactly this reason: It's so much faster than any web client could ever be. And I'm saying this as a professional web dev^^ And yeah, I know GMail - I was an early adopter and have seen two companies migrate to it in the last five
years.
Of course, running mail within Emacs has its additional awesome benefits, but that's a different kind of argument I'll leave out for now. I'm honestly curious why people think/believe/know that GMail is faster than a well engineered locally indexed app. It just doesn't seem to be the case for me, but I hear this time and time again.
If your mu4e is backed by a maildir on disk then it's pretty much assured to be slower than gmail or fastmail. One disk seek is very very expensive, and for many people a round trip to gmail's frontends is going to be faster. Gmail's speed will remain constant no matter how busy your local disk is. If you're compiling firefox on the same single disk that stores your mail, mu4e is going to take multiple seconds just to go to the next thread.
On the other hand if you have a good SSD then a local MUA running from local storage can look competitive.
There's no way of answering this without people perceiving that I am "attacking" mu4e.
Let's just say that mu4e gets its efficiency from memorisation (e.g. hotkeys) and a quirky way of working ("all organisation is a query"). Gmail and FastMail get their efficiency from standard UI elements that most computer users will already know how to use, and discoverability is via UI elements not manpages.
mu4e undeniably has a maximum higher speed. But you'll spend a lot of time fighting the tool until you reach that nirvana.
Some MUAs are pretty slow. It isn't hard to do better than a few of the MUAs I've used, and webmail often is better just because more people use them so more optimization has gone into them. I think this is the main one.
Webmail often has a really fast pipe to the email storage, which means it can get the headers faster and then extract only the parts it needs. Webmail is not required to use IMAP (though many do) an optimized protocol can offer advantages.
I wanted to get this setup going a while back but I'm usually stuck on Windows for most of the day. I got Bash on Windows setup this weekend and I think I'm going to give it another shot.
Nevermind, bash on windows sucks for Emacs. The very first thing I tried to do was set a mark (c-space) and it doesn't work. Maybe there's a workaround but it's just not worth the effort. I'll get myself 100% on Linux one of these days :/
> 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.
Yes, even if you blacklist mail explicitly outbound to Gmail a huge number of companies still use it under the covers through Google Apps. I suppose you could blackhole their MX through local DNS.
Other than that the only real protection is encryption but aside from my pension provider and a former ISP I have not encountered companies that advertise a PGP key.
Pros:
- 100% green energy
- 100% Free Software
- Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
- Server for your contacts (CalDAV), calendar (CalDav), and
notes (IMAP)
- Swiss privacy laws
- They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm
glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.
Cons:
- No 2FA :(
- Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for
the above)
- Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)
I've been using Kolab Now for a year or two as well, primarily for the peace of mind of them being Swiss — who knows how far the famed "Swiss privacy" goes in reality though, especially these days. In any case, they are a Swiss entity and their servers are in Switzerland, so it's outside of the Five Eyes at least.
I'm happy with the service, though it's nothing fancy. No major downtime, other than two or three times over the years where sending a message over IMAP from Mac OS X Mail.app was rejected for an hour or so (webmail worked fine). The fact that they support open-source software development is an added benefit (and gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside).
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 tried a number of times to make the jump but the cost is so much higher for me $0 -> $120. I am grandfathered into google apps but even if I wasn't I'd rather pay $50/yr. Google is far from perfect but it does just work and I don't have to ever think about it. That might be the same with fastmail but switching is a non-zero cost (in time, and money and I mentioned above). I have 25GB of email in gmail and another 10GB archived off (from other accounts that I'd love to have all in the same place but worry I'd screw up all my email). I won't self host my email due to all the issues with that but I'm also not going to switch to another provider when the costs are 2X google and I'm not sure what happens if/when I hit 60GB as that is their biggest plan.
I'm also a big fan of Fastmail, and I've been using it for a while with great pleasure. However, I've come to realize that Gmail is really two things: an e-mail service, and and e-mail platform. Fastmail is more than enough to replace the service aspect. But there are so many plugins and startups that use Gmail, that at some point one feels like one's missing out. I'm thinking of things like Streak, Mixmax, Boomerang..
At some point I asked them whether they could "emulate" Gmail's UI, so that these apps and Chrome extensions could run on Fastmail. But understandably this is quite a big task. If they could pull it off, it would be quite phenomenal though..
This exactly. I moved from Fastmail back to Google Apps (I have an account grandfathered into the free version) because of all the integrations from third party services such as Polymail, Evernote, etc.
As founder of Soverin I'm definitely biased, but it's great to see that awareness is growing and this discussion seems to strike a nerve. Some great insights here, thanks for that. Moving from Gmail was actually one of the reasons for my new startup. Wanting to build an honest alternative and decreasing my data footprint. A Gmail importer was one of our first things we build to make switching as effortless as possible (https://soverin.net/features).
It's great that we can do this, and I might have a use case sometime, but:
Am I alone in finding web-based email too slow for day to day use? The responsiveness of a local MUA w/ or w/o a fast index (notmuch, etc.), once you're used to it, is hard to live without, at least for me. I find it messes with my workflow if I click on an email or folder and have to wait for the browser to return and render the XHR result. Or did Gmail just become slower and slower with time? I haven't tried FastMail yet.
I've recently came across the same problem, and decided to go with runbox.com. Servers are located in Norway, and I think they have reasonable pricing.
Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.
With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.
Just switched an account to fastmail and found customer service sucks and the service is misleading. First, if you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up. Second, tech support didn't have a clue on how to migrate a pro account into a business account.
That said, once I figured it out the service seems solid.
From the article > "use my data to customise adverts around the web"
Why is this always a bad thing? Is it just an innate feeling against having your information "used"? Personalization is an ever more important and much wanted feature in everything else in life so why should ads just be generic and irrelevant?
For many people, personalization is not a wanted feature because it implies that information about you is being gathered and stored. This storage may not be problematic right now, but it can potentially be used to cause you problems in the future. Some people simply do not care or believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, while others do not mind the small inconvenience of non-personalized offerings if it means they might avoid a large inconvenience in the future.
"If you use any Apple iOS devices to read your mail, you’ll be pleased to know that FastMail, with help from the big A, fully supports iOS push." This is huge! I thought it was just Apple being idiots. I didn't realize that third-party non-Exchange servers could push to iOS!!!
I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon
In regards to the discussion around migrating from Google, does anyone have suggestions for an analytics alternative? I've looked at Piwik, gauges, and clicky but curious if there is anything else out there I've missed that is as simple and affordable as GA (but not Google).
E-mail is a solved problem. I run my own e-mail servers and I love it. It's a beautiful decentralized and distributed system. Every time self-hosting e-mail is brought up many ppl say they have problems with the big players, but that is not my experience at all.
It doesn’t matter to Google that I have DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records that practically guarantee the mail server is legitimate. The domain isn’t blacklisted and I don’t send bulk mail. But ever since the IP address changed, for the past six months all my messages have been marked as spam in Gmail (so for almost everybody).
There’s zero recourse. You simply don’t matter when it comes to the big players, and it sucks when it happens to you.
The IP address change was from spinning up a new server on DigitalOcean.
From what I could gather, changing the IP on a mail server is seen as suspicious and resets your reputation level. Google handles this by “safely” marking all of your mail as spam, I guess until your reputation is restored, which is nearly impossible since nobody will see your mail.
I checked out FastMail but it's too bad that while they promote privacy, they require a mobile number to sign up. I understand it's probably used to prevent abuse, but if I'm truly in it for privacy I would imagine this is a non-starter
Privacy and anonymity are different things. It's also primarily a paid service and doesn't take cryptocurrency - credit cards are more traceable than phone numbers.
Probably a dumb question, but if I have a @gmail.com email, there's anyway of redirecting that to another email provider without it touching google's servers? (i.e. Without just using automatic e-mail forwarding).
Would love to leave Google Mail but eventually, the ecosystem around Google Apps got so strong, in particular all the extensions for Google Sheets and Google Mail, it makes switching quite hard.
Have been using tutanota (free). Servers are in Germany and have been quite happy but would like them to add a few features. Am going to upgrade anyway I think.
My private and my business emails run with FastMail and I am very happy with it! I also use the DNS for some smaller projects and it works like a charm. Thanks for that.
Unfortunately I can migrate my email to FastMail, but years worth of paid Android apps will be lost if I migrate away from my Google Apps for Work account.
No need to. You can have a different email account than Google account on your Android devices.
Android allows you to have almost unlimited accounts fort unlimited things, and you can yourself control what gets synched for each individual account.
Just keep using the old Google Account for play services and the like and your new email account for fastmail email.
Can't speak for the OP but I recently changed address. My solution was to forward mail from my old Gmail account to my new account. Any newsletters I got I either unsubscribed or hit the link to update my details with them. Anytime I logged into a website that required my old email I took a minute to update it to my new one. And after I replied to a contact from my new email they naturally just hit the reply button so started replying to my new account. I've changed emails a few times now and I just keep the forwarding going for a year or two. Then I check in and once then only stuff coming into that account is spam for a few months I feel it's safe to delete the account. The one thing you lose out on is old email (what if I want to search emails for 5 years ago for example). AFAIK FastMail has an import system that will import all your email for you. I'm not using FastMail but I found over time I'm just not going back to old emails often enough for it to matter.
Very good. See https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html for an overview of what it can do. It's also quite fast, I have a decade of email in my account (tens of thousands of messages) and a search through all of these messages takes only a second.
Google don't have their own datacenter in Africa, but they do have nodes in existing datacenters in South Africa as part of the Google Global Cache infrastructure. Whether GMail forms part of the Global Cache infrastructure though, I'm not sure.
Who cares? Why go through all that effort just to move your data out of the US, if they really wanted to read that they would, but they most likely would not care.
Silly over reaction. Your going to use a service that is not as good, waste a bunch of on importing/exporting for reasons that would have made no difference to your life.
So your actively choosing to downgrade your life to spite someone else. Smart move.
FastMail's servers are in the US. The company is based in Australia.
I recently moved my email to FastMail and I really like it. I even prefer its web interface over Gmail's. Please explain why you feel that FastMail's service is inferior. My experience has been to the opposite.
I appreciate the attitude that making changes like this can often be imbalanced with regard to cost/reward. However it is beyond time for some alternatives to show up and compete.
We have stagnation right now and Google is being allowed to make mistakes.
It has reached a point where I don't want my data on their servers. Then you start to notice how ubiquitous their servers are, it should make anyone uncomfortable that there aren't more options.
FastMail is an upgrade from GMail. It's good enough, that after swearing never to pay for a webmail service at one time, I remain a paying customer of FastMail after 10+ years.
> [...] I moved all of my data out of the US and of course [...]
I don't think you can move your data out of Google right? They will keep it even if it looks like deleted to you.
Google (Alphabet now right?) has changed their TOS so many times can someone actually educate me on how long they keep my deleted emails and then if they truly ever delete those, or there is some 160TB compressed tape archived in their basements so that if they truly want to, they can open it and read my emails from today in year 2056 ??
I outlined the factors in this decision in https://gist.github.com/tomfitzhenry/d73fef19752cbf6ccdda3eb... .