The report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail.
Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx
Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)
Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there.
Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise.
I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.
And backup your emails of course.
So, I use my personal domain for all mail except anything that's "vital" like government websites, banking, paying rent, etc. for which I use my email provider's domain. And of course I'm registered with my domain registrar with a different email domain.
Your ISP, the hardware not failing, needing to do routine maintenance and (expensive!) upgrades, having room in your house, having consistent power to your servers, possible theft, natural disasters causing you to lose your home, etc.
There's a reason I use a VPS for hosting a lot of things haha. Mostly because I live in a small apartment and don't have room for a server rack.
For me and my partner was enough when Google started collecting info about purchases/delivery orders on gmail and dumping it in some separated page without any consent nor notification.
We moved to Proton but once they changed branding and starting introducing additional services beside mailbox we knew they enter milking-out path. Their newest AI plaything was reason to leave.
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
Phone number is just a user number. Email addresses are a user name at a server name. A little harder to do if you're looking for something as ubiquitous as phone number porting.
The closest thing to a server name when it comes to phone numbers, would be the network it is on. For example, there is the public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)
- set up new email address, hosted where you like
- https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en (forward your email)
- update your email address as many places as you can
It’s even easier if you list out the most important senders in a checklist and move those first. But give yourself at least a few months time. It’s certainly possible.
Once you have your own domain, future migrations to another email provider would be a matter of moving the emails and updating DNS.
I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works.
How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?
As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.
Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail;
(3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks.
(4) keyboard shortcuts that work
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail
I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day.
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP.
Here's my (7):
Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.
I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)
If you use your own email client and your own domain name, you don't really need to worry about UI with email providers at all (as long as your provider supports those features). And your own domain name makes it easy to move around in future if you need to.
I don't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed.
It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ok, so now you have two problems.
I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.
If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.
Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)
Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).
Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.
Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.
Once you realize this, the "just keep whatever I have right now" is often the best solution.
Happy customer over a couple of years.
Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.
ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).
I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.
For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.
For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data.
In which country do you live, if I might ask?
Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
There's a reason even large corporates that can easily afford the resources to run email their email themselves decide against it.
There are a handful of good providers, not just Google and Microsoft, but the two hyperscalers do have very good offerings, so of course they have a lot of the market.
I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services.
But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.
Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.
Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing.
This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.
dustinfarris•3h ago
giuliomagnifico•3h ago
Anyway I wrote the details in the post.
Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org
buran77•2h ago