Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail (opens in new tab)

"the mobile web interface is actually good"

This is true of their interface as a whole. I keep it pinned as my first tab and avoid using a native mail client at all. It barely uses any memory or cpu, is always responsive, and has never crashed on me in 2 years of constant usage.

It's an amazing product and I'm always happy to see people leaving GMail for it.

If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/private-contacts-and-calendars-...

Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!

I second these points and would add:

- support for U2F/FIDO second-factor authentication (among other, lesser beasts of similar burden).

I also find their blog interesting and informative, at https://blog.fastmail.com/

* edit: Google/Gmail supports U2F as well, so it's not a distinction - just a baseline benefit.

   - can import email by IMAP

We recently migrated to GApps sat work, and this is exactly how we imported old mail, so the feature is definitely there. I'm not sure if it's only available for GApps users or only available during some unspecified migration period, though.

>Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.

Which to me has always been kind of weird because Google uses Linux internally for most of their workstations.

I've been thinking about moving to FastMail for quite some time now for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned.

What still keeps from switching though is that I rely on services like SaneBox and Unroll.me for organising my email. Unfortunately, the last time I looked only GMail is properly supported by these services and there doesn't seem to be a vendor-independent alternative either.

Does anyone here use services like SaneBox with FastMail?

> Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic

When using Gmail with Google Apps you can set up wildcarding, I have it setup so I can put anything I like before the at symbol and it all funnels into my inbox, no plus required. I use this typically to set the email address used with a given company to their name @ my domain.

I wonder how long before Google buys Fastmail.

One of advantages of using google products now is that all of their products can be controlled with a single account without much hassle. Since one is going to use at least one of their products, it makes to use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of advantages, although Fastmail does provide more flexibility.

For Google Drive you can just use insync. I used to use them before I went with my self hosted solution.

How is search compared to Gmail? I would expect Google to implement a better search.

"the mobile web interface is actually good" That's funny you should say that. I use gmail on its mobile web interface exclusively (using chrome on ios), while my wife who is a fastmail user can't make heads or tails of their mobile site. What is it you prefer about fastmail's mobile site?

I'm using;

1) https://kolabnow.com/ (just the lite version for webmail)

and

2) https://posteo.de/en

both through Thunderbird and K9 clients. Perfectly happy with them.

> 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...

That's not a valid comparison, the economies of scale Gmail benefits from means it can't be compared with a smaller email provider like Fastmail which has to ammortize the fixed overhead costs over a much smaller user base.

Gmail has over 1B monthly active users, at $40 /user would generate $40B a year on gmail alone, they made $75B Revenue in 2015 (16.3B profit). Google don't break their revenue numbers down but they have 7 properties with over 1B Users where I expect an overwhelming majority of their revenue still comes from Search when users are in the "actively searching" frame of mind and are more likely to purchase goods rather than in Gmail where their primary use-case is email.

I have about 20gb of messages in gmail that I'm considering moving too. But really, I can't think of a single time I've needed to look at a message that was more than a couple of years old. Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.

My plan is to move to fastmail but and only migrate across the last year or so of messages. Google's data liberation front[1] lets you download the complete data set as an archive. Then I'll just import the most recent year into fastmail (or one of the competitors) and ask google to delete its copy of my mail archive.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'

I'm happy with Zoho Mail [1]. Even their free tier comes with a custom domain and 5 GB mailbox.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Why not use that transfer as an excuse to delete old email? I try to limit my accounts to hundreds of MBs, despite having far more capacity. Reduce the weight you carry around rather than hire a bigger backpack.

Probably you using Gmail makes you more likely to use other google services, also they have scale, so if they get $10 of value per Gmail customer that's a lot more than Fastmail.

Also google is very bad at monetizing their products in general e.g. Google Docs has been around for years before Microsoft's cloud office offering, but they never seem to have bothered to turn that into a subscription based software package - which they almost certainly could have.

I on the other hand have a mailbox that is not even 100 MB, but I would have to pay $40 a year just to use my own domain. That's also a bit too expensive for my low mail volume.

25 gigs at mailbox.org will run you EUR 3.50/month. Plus you get calendaring/contacts, proper CardDav/CalDav and GPG built in. They've been providing email for 27 years and run the email infrastructure for many companies large and small. Plus, your email would be running on renewable energy and their bank account is with a socially responsible bank (yes, such things exist).

What is reliable email worth to you though? $40/yr is a pittance for something I use every day...the analysis is harder when you have more data though, like you say.

Depending on what your threshold for needs is, Rackspace Email is a pretty solid solution for about $2 / user / month.

Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.

It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.

Spam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels.

As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps).

In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country.

That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!

The spam threshold is adjustable: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html#settings

It also supports training a filter on your specific email/spam patterns which works very well in my experience.

I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much).

Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.

I have the opposite issue with GMail. I spend the same amount of time removing things from the spam folder.

I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.

It's a similar thing on Rackspace's email. Their spam filter never learns anything. Marking something as "Not Spam" just adds a whitelisting rule for that sender for that particular email account. You can bypass all of Rackspace's email filters simply by UTF8 encoding the from address and subject.

Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.

Worth following all the instructions on https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html

I found pointing my MX records straight at Fastmail helped a lot with spam. See "If you use your own domain" in those instructions.

Is their spam filter deliberately design to be too conservative?

Because I have interests other than running my own email server. I am capable of running my own email server. I'm also capable of taking my own garbage to the dump every week. I'm capable of removing my own appendix if that is required (under self administered local anesthesia). I hire those things done because I have better things to do with my time. I got tired of keeping up with the latest anti-spam best practices. I can pay someone $15/month to make the weekly trip to the local dump saving me an hour every week (I believe the dump charges a dumping fee as well which makes the math more in my favor). I can pay someone else to go to medical school thus saving me the time it takes. I would rather play with my kids, and if I can ever get them to sleep I have plenty of other things I enjoy doing.

FastMail is a cheap and easy option to email. They provide some services that I value over what free accounts have. It is a compromise, but everything is. I freely admit that I was failing at administering my own email servers: I never did get some anti-spam thing in place so a few domains rejected everything I sent. I got about 100 spam messages in my inbox every day (my filters caught 3 for each they let through). With Fastmail everyone accepts my email, and I get about one spam message a week which I can handle.

Gmail scans your email to show you ads. That's how Google makes money from it. Fastmail doesn't show ads, you pay them money to do your email. Moving email off Google could also be a move towards not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think there's a valid incentive to move away from Gmail.

That, and all the complications that running your own email server brings with it. If you read the article, the author explains it very well.

because if you run your own mail server apparently you have a 50/50 shot of having literally none of your mail ever delivered.

Security, Spam Filtering, Better web interface, native apps, two-factor auth, DR, etc.

These are just some of the reasons.

The post specifically mentions the maintenance overhead associated with running a self hosted server.

I've always wondered about using OS X Server to handle my email on a Mac Mini. Looks like a pretty clean solution to run your own.

The author mentioned in the beginning that maintaining a server and fighting to keep it off of spam lists was too painful.

Or if you can't pay the 5$/month, you can get a free Zoho mail account with custom domain and connect Gmail to it.

You have to be careful with that. If an attacker can gain access to your DNS provider, then they have access to your email: à la https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

Just beware of trying to use this as your main google account. You will be waiting months or years for new features that become available to @gmail.com users.

Also, you can add email aliases - even for other domains. This is how I have my email setup. For $5 a month it's worth it for me.

And...this is why nobody can make any money providing decent services on the Internet, and as a result we're all subject to a constant onslaught of intrusive and scammy advertising. And those of us who might have been creating useful services are instead spending our time building ever more bogus advertising platforms...

What about the family or business plans? They seem to have custom domain even at the lite option.

https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html

100 domains / 500 aliases is just a limit to prevent abuse in my opinion. What the step from full to enhanced earns you is 15 times the storage, the ability to use your own domain(s), and full mobile sync, at twice the price. It seems rather fair to me (I'm on enhanced, ~3GB of email, 1 custom domain, mobile sync).

Fastmail has a family plan that costs $5/year (in addition to your normal account cost) and lets you use personal domains. That is the reason I'm looking at them as it was the best price I could find for such a service.

> $40 USD per 1 year

Curious, do you think you would have perceived the price differently if it had been presented as $3/mo?

Was in the same boat, when looking to leave Gmail.

Now I pay 18€ per year for custom domain support, 10 aliases, 10GB mailbox, 50MB attachment, IMAP, ActiveSync, CardDAV, CalDAV. Webmail is handled by sOGO, roundcube, squirrelmail, support is fast and tickets get answered in couple hours max. Service is in EU.

This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed.

Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.

I don't think they are, as mentioned, Australia doesn't have the equivalent of a National Security Letter. FastMail has a very short and very easy to understand privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).

Sounds like negative SEO. I remember reading about one particular spam tool "XRumer" which would register fake forum posts and run amok spamming for SEO backlinks. Google caught up and running xrumer became almost a guarantee for being de-listed. Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is bad guys turning the tool against their competitors. A random story from googling xrumer negative seo is this story about blackmail threatening to spam the victim's URL: http://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/11499...

I think it's a mistake to think of this as a long-standing policy for a spam blacklist. They are constantly evolving, just as the spam is, and there will be hiccups and problems as new detection techniques come online. At one point, identifying all domains listed in the content of definitively identified spam might have been very useful. Then spammers could have realized this and started peppering their content with random domains to poison this technique. In the short time between this technique being poisoned and discontinued (in this hypothetical scenario), quite a few people were probably affected, and while it was a short period, it would probably also account for 99% of the problems related to this.

Perhaps it wasn't a spammer, it would seem like a really "good" (in an underhanded, evil manner) for for a competitor to try to hurt your business.

I had a problem with the smileys as well. They don't actually appear by default, but if you view your email in plain text and not HTML (as I do) there they are.

I made this for Stylish to fix the issue: https://userstyles.org/styles/106482/fastmail-hide-smileys/

You could use the excellent Chrome add-on Resource Override[1] to make this change yourself if you really want to.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/resource-override/...

This doesn't happen for me, so I assumed there must be a setting to turn that off. But looking through the FastMail settings I cannot find anything like that. Still, I don't see any yellow smiley face icons in FastMail when I send or receive ":)" in emails.

Obviously it would be better if there was no downtime, but the sending MTA should really have queued that mail and delivered it when Fastmail was back up.

Mostly because it doesn't defeat the issue with data collection. Google Apps doesn't, as far as I've ever been told, bar Google from using it's privacy-invasive "features" on your data. And while you can justify Gmail as a free service that violates your privacy to pay for it, Google Apps offers no such justification.

Do you know what data is transmitted via GCM? It could be a simple "hey check your email" ping to trigger a sync. I doubt the message size allows for much more anyway. It might also be encrypted, whatever it contains.

The problem with GCM is that there's no real replacement for it. It's just too absurdly efficient.

I have an account but don't really use it. The lack of support for desktop clients, while understandable, kills it for me. Also, for the record, they're now the maintainers of OpenPGPjs not OpenPGP [0].

[0]:https://protonmail.com/blog/openpgpjs-email-encryption/

I use Protonmail and I like it.

Their web client is open source and MIT licensed. For more security it might be worth running it locally:

https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient

> 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.

See: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

Furthermore, there are actual trade agreements between countries and if the NSA would access the servers of foreign companies on simple whims, the US can lose a lot of money if customers find out. I know of at least one big German multinational company that banned the usage of several US-based services and tightened security, after the Snowden revelations, for fear of industrial espionage.

In other words, the price for breaching users' privacy is significantly higher, because in Google's case, they just have to ask for it and Google can't even disclose such breaches to their customers even if they wanted.

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.

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

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.

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.

Downgrade?

There's benefit that comes with the family account. I use one with wife and kids. You get shared address books and easy read/write access to others' folders you can configure as needed. So I have a folder in my IMAP tree that my wife can read (for bills etc.) and we both have read access to the kids' accounts. And we all share a family address book that I update once for everyone's benefit. In my experience, a family account is more than just a couple of individual accounts under one billing mechanism - it has technical advantages as well.

You would probably be paying for convenience (1 bill, contact sharing, etc...)

K9 for Android does immediate push notification. You just need to configure IMAP IDLE.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9

Outlook for android gives you real push. So does the blackberry hub.

Hushmail should be considered compromised. They have turned over plaintext emails to US law enforcement in the past.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_...

Hush user here for 2y already. I've the desktop paid account and I'm very happy with it (POP+IMAP)

They seem to be more privacy oriented than popular ones. Web UI is nice but maybe not "so nice"? (I do not use it so freq.)

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_provider...

I'm a paid Hushmail customer since 2010 I think.

Their web interface is sub-par and sometimes it's pretty slow to connect.

I was thinking to change for Fastmail but they're a bit more expensive and the mails are stored in the US I think (I'm French).

I'll probably investigate this in December when my hush subscription is due.

About the last part: isn't the Google Apps model the same?

You feel that it's a liability compared to storing the 12 years of email elsewhere, or compared to just not storing 12 years of email? What about the utility of the archive compared to the liability?

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.

> If you want a custom domain don't bother with the pro account go business when you sign up.

I have the Enhanced plan (not business) and a custom domain. Works great.

What did you switch from where the customer service was decent?

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.

Privacy != anonymity

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.

Android is nice that way.

You can use Fastmail for email and still keep your Google Apps account, that's what I've done it seems fine.

they are hosted in the Netherlands:

https://soverin.net/

By the way I obviously meant "similar to FastMail", sorry for the typo

I had exactly the same experience.

The final straw for me was finding a solid android experience. Specifically, a client that didn't eat my phone battery whilst still providing the near instant notifications I've come to expect from Gmail. When using fastmail via imap in the 'gmail' app it didn't seem to get any push notifications and the polling was either too slow or too battery draining depending on the time interval configured. When I tried fastmail's webapp thing I found the searching and offline experience lacking. Maybe it's moved on. All the (free) 3rd party android imap clients I tried were horrible to use.

So I also came crawling back to Gmail. Which was a shame as fastmail's calendar is so much better, almost worth it alone.

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).

Yes, all you need to do when moving to Fastmail is update the DNS MX records for your domain so that email is routed to your Fastmail Inbox.

Then all you need to do is, visit to docs.google.com and login using your Google accounts credentials.

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.

Fastmail's web app is blisteringly fast. Admittedly their search is not quite instant, but I don't use that feature super frequently

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.

I wonder how that works? I found an "open source" project that apparently requires OSX server to generate "com.apple.servermgrd.apns.mail" push gateway certificates: https://github.com/st3fan/dovecot-xaps-daemon

I had this opinion, until I changed IP addresses.

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.

No. That's not possible. The MX records for gmail.com will always point to Google servers.

I get far less spam at fastmail than I did at gmail.

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.