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Comment by thedevil | Hacker News Reader

Because of these, Alexa O'Brien, Microstopped, and a few other incidents I've seen on HN, I've become very concerned about Google's power over my life, arbitrary moral decisions, and lack of customer service.

Within a week I will take my phone number out of Google Voice. I plan to change emails in the coming months as well. I've started to do regular backups of my Google Drive. I've also started to do any searches on controversial topics in Firefox on DuckDuckGo. If any of my side projects become valuable enough, I'll probably move them off GCS as well.

I'm a little weird in the way I think, so maybe I'm the only one so concerned. I'm probably too paranoid. But sometimes I lose a little sleep thinking about the potential consequences of Google randomly closing my account.

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Post a blog on how you pull it off, I'm looking to go this route too. I knew when google bought YouTube it would eventually go down the tube. I got rid of my television years ago but all the standard ads rolling into YouTube makes it closer to old broadcast tv ad experience in one off fashion.

How do you plan to change emails? I'm thinking of moving out of Gmail too but didn't decide on a service yet. Office 365 with Exchange sounds good but it's like moving from one monopoly to another I guess.

How about fastmail.com?

Be prepared for a long transition period while their spam filter warms up. Couldn’t handle it myself, I’m back with gmail.

Could you explain what this means?

I assume gp is referencing the necessity of training the spam filter.

I didn't have big problems with it, except for a monthly student loan payment confirmation email that fastmail refused to classify as not spam no matter how many times I so marked it.

In general, I found gmail's spam filter to be the best. If, however, you don't need to regularly interact with lots of new email addresses, fastmail will work fine for you.

This is exactly it. I found myself having to manually classify spam/notspam for the first time in over a decade.

This might be fine for some or even most people but if like me you’d prefer to spend less time on email not more it may not be the best choice as an email provider.

Nothing against the service, just be prepared to manually train a spam filter

Fastmail user here. I had problems with spam too when I first signed up, but then I discovered I could change the spam protection level from "Standard" to "Aggressive" in the mail settings screen (the default is "Standard"). That immediately solved almost all of my spam problems.

Unfortunately the problem wasn’t just spam in the inbox it was also non-spam in the spambox

I never had that problem, unless you mean things like the occasional Facebook or Twitter notification ending up in spam, but I didn't care about those.

Also, Gmail definitely has a problem with false positives. At the small agency where I worked a few years ago, a lot of our internal company emails were ending up in spam folders. It got so bad that I had to go around adding our company email domain to the spam exclusion filters just to make sure that my co-workers were receiving my emails.

I'd rather be convinced by the benefits of something than the disadvantages of what I'm already using. For me, Gmail works. Fastmail did not.

I'm not attacking Fastmail. I just didn't want to put in the effort to train the spam filters.

Fastmail is the best of the non-gmail email providers imo. Plus they're a simple business: you give them money and they give you email. You should check them out.

I only skimmed their website, but I didn't see user aliasing[edit: they do aliasing & wildcards], or shared accounts. In fact any real mailbox features?

I am becoming concerned about the power Google has over my life (have been for a while). They know what you're reading (Chrome, even in incognito mode via DNS), what your thinking (web searches), who you're in contact with (Gmail, Android + their Apps), not to mention maps and what they do with your photos/ drive data. Even patient data with the NHS sharing data with Deepmind[0]. The company needs to broken up as the Did with Microsoft years ago.

[0]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40497020

Likewise, I try to completely avoid Google as much as possible now too. When I have some free time I'm going to finish moving off of GMail to most likely Fastmail. Ditto for using DDG too.

I've done exactly this. Moved to Fastmail for my email; Dropbox, and Resilio Sync, for my cloud storage; DDG for searches in general, with google as a backup (it really is the best unfortunately).

The general rule for me is to use paid, or free and open source[0], services. As long as I'm either a community member or a customer, and not a product, I feel safer.

I worry too and have also started to migrate my data offline.

What are you using to replace Voice? I've not found any good alternatives.

I'm just switching to regular wireless service and giving up the things I like about Google Voice.

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