[HN Gopher] Moving Away from Gmail
___________________________________________________________________
Moving Away from Gmail
Author : rolisz
Score : 108 points
Date : 2020-04-11 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rolisz.ro)
(TXT) w3m dump (rolisz.ro)
| akssri wrote:
| Gandi may also be an option here - a domain registered with them
| comes with two free mailboxes, each with a few GBs of space and
| calendar support.
|
| (Yes, yes, this is the same company that lost the data on their
| cloud servers.)
| gpanders wrote:
| Gandi is what I use as well and have for years. I follow all
| these new up-and-coming email services, but I've never had a
| reason to switch.
| Daegalus wrote:
| 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.
| crispinb wrote:
| GYOB?
| meagher wrote:
| The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people
| don't own their own email address. Their address is tied to the
| client.
|
| 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/
| svnpenn wrote:
| You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?
| [deleted]
| wwweston wrote:
| 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).
| dehrmann wrote:
| > it's a single point of failure
|
| If Google blocked your Recaptchas, deleted your Gmail account,
| and disabled you Android phone...wow.
| downerending wrote:
| 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.
| hysan wrote:
| 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.
| beart wrote:
| I just kept my Gmail account but receive virtually zero email
| on it.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| This is also true for sites that use Google accounts for OAuth.
| Your account has a one to one mapping to your Google account.
|
| 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.
| wheresvic3 wrote:
| 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 :)
| vinni2 wrote:
| I switched to posteo in 2015 and never looked back!
| https://posteo.de/en
| vzaliva wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| 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.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| > 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.
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| 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.
| battery_cowboy wrote:
| 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.
| rakoo wrote:
| 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.
| jacobroyquebec wrote:
| I second this, i've been using it for a few years and it's very
| easy to setup. Reliable and cheap.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I've tried Migadu and I much prefer FastMail:
| https://www.fastmail.com
|
| They have full DNS capabilities and very nice UI (minimal JS,
| loads super fast).
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > Copyright (c) 2016 AdVite GmbH
|
| 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?
| gpanders wrote:
| 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".
|
| [1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html [2]:
| https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html
| wheresvic3 wrote:
| 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.
| feistypharit wrote:
| 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.
| sbuccini wrote:
| Same experience here.
| sbuccini wrote:
| 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.
| kh_hk wrote:
| 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.
| yokto wrote:
| Then again, that's potentially an additional attack surface
| that you need to be mindful of: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-
| lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
| javagram wrote:
| 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.
| crispinb wrote:
| G suite is pretty expensive for email, presumably because you
| can only buy it bundled up with all the other stuff.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Indeed, it does. Until suddenly it doesn't. The posted article
| explains with examples how it happens to some people.
| beagle3 wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| Keep in mind that in G-Suite you can also enable email
| routing which will enable you to create full backups of
| emails
|
| https://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.
| rolisz wrote:
| 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.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Pretty sure a PurelyMail account will also not work for these
| things.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| yumraj wrote:
| 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.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| 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.
| rolisz wrote:
| The bus factor of PurelyMail is a valid concern and I hope it
| will be solved in the future.
| starpilot wrote:
| 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?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Also if cost is a concern for Fastmail, there's Mailbox.org
| which is a very reliable alternative.
| mindracer wrote:
| Been a customer theirs for 3 years not and they've been
| excellent
| rv-de wrote:
| They don't provide a practically working implementation of
| MFA. More like a cargo cult version of it.
| hinkley wrote:
| And yet we tell each other that if you run a small business
| it's important to remember you can fire a customer.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I've used Fastmail for almost five years now, and I think it's
| been hit by a bus at least twice :)
|
| A bit tongue in cheek, but always have a back up strategy and
| move on whatever seems best to you, not to someone else.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| crispinb wrote:
| 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.
| bmarquez wrote:
| 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.
| beagle3 wrote:
| 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).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| Talanes wrote:
| The majority of people are probably also only using that
| e-mail to have somewhere for their Netflix receipts to go.
| Felz wrote:
| 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.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| 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.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Static IPs aren't getting easier to acquire.
| mihaifm wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault
| tolerance.
|
| 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.
| ozim wrote:
| For personal mail?
|
| 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).
| johnklos wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| fludlight wrote:
| 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?
| dpwm wrote:
| Two years ago I felt the same way.
|
| 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 from other accounts
| online 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.
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(page generated 2020-04-11 23:00 UTC)