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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

Just pay for Fastmail, I finally did it and its so nice. Easily worth the money.

A month ago I finally switched away from G Suite to FastMail and have been very happy. I also transferred my domains over to Gandi so I am basically Google free from a services perspective (with the exception of a Google account for YouTube subscriptions).

I have to say FastMail works really well on my Apple devices. iOS and macOS have worked perfectly so far for mail, calendar and contacts.

The only pain point was 'losing' my custom domain Google Account when I cancelled G Suite. Migrating mail, etc. wasn't an issue as FastMail has a pretty solid import tool. However one area that caught me out was export/import of my 800+ YouTube subscriptions (that number shocked me aswell).

Turns out YouTube has no such functionality so I ended up having to hack a semi-automated solution but even that wasn't straight forward as YouTube has limits on how many new subscriptions you can make in a ~6 hour window.

I wish Google had some kind of "convert my G Suite account into a consumer Google Account" function instead the moment you cancel the G Suite plan any accounts simply vanish and you then have to sign up again for a consumer Google Account. Quite the pain in the ass.

Anyway it is nice to be free from Google's core services and I am very impressed with how smooth migrating to FastMail has been. If anyone is thinking of doing the same and wants to know anything specific feel free to drop me an email, info in HN profile.

I'd be happy to switch away from https://domains.google but I'm loving the free, full Whois privacy protection. According to Gandi's Whois Privacy¹: "excluding your state, country, ... and the name of the company..." from the Whois privacy feature. I need full Whois privacy.

Do you have any other registrar suggestions?

¹: https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/common_operations/who...

I admit I don't really pay much attention to my whois privacy outside of my name and direct contact details. I don't have issue with my country being listed for example so I don't have any other suggestions for you sorry.

Not all TLDs allow that anyway.

Namecheap recently started offering free whois privacy, I'm not sure 100% certain if it's full however. I believe it is

I have it! It sets the country to Panama and a generated e-mail which I guess just redirects stuff to my real address? I haven't bothered to check that. It's using whoisguard.com for the garbled email.

The domain is "thelittleshits.net" (I'm absolutely serious, I needed a domain for testing a deployment and couldn't come up with anything)

I switched to AWS Route 53. At least for .com addresses it’s $3 more than google domains but gets (I believe) full Whois privacy.

Cloudflare has full Whois and at-cost domains with their registrar.

Cloudflare is still to open up its registration service for new domain registrations. It allows (and has allowed) only transferring domains from another registrar since it launched nearly eight months ago. New registrations elsewhere also have a lock-in period before they can be transferred (usually 90 days I guess).

Namesilo has free whois privacy

I currently have an old G Suite account with my own domain, the problem you mentioned is the only thing holding me back. All my things (Docs, YouTube, Cloud, Analytics) are currently linked to that domain, if I were to delete it, I would lose everything from the past 5+ years.

Interesting anecdote about FastMail, I was previously C++ dev lead at a company with a large (1~2 mloc) legacy code base. Most of the C++ code was layers of mess but there was also a very well engineered core. One name consistently appeared in comments on these well engineered sections. Out of curiosity one day I decided to search LinkedIn and see if I could find the guy behind this shining light of engineering competence. Turns out he went on to found (/cofound -- not particularly sure of the details) Fastmail.

I find it very satisfying that a good engineer went on to succeed and would definitely trust the engineering competence of Fastmail.

email addresses need to be transferable like phone numbers, it was a mistake to tie them to a domain I think. Too big of a hassle to move email addresses.

Have you considered getting your own domain?

I have my own domain, but doing your own email is too hard. Can I use my domain email address with fastmail? Is it just a matter of setting up mx records? Will I be able to send/receive mail like normal without getting blocked by the big players?

In my experience: yes, yes, yes.

Fastmail not only supports custom domains, they will handle your DNS as well, and they will automatically configure the MX records if you do that. Here are their docs about that: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html

FWIW, it's not that big of a hassle: just set up email forwarding & have everything sent to your old gmail account sent to your new email, done.

Doesn't forwarding require going through the original provider? Can they still read the email? What if they shut down?

Sure, but you don't hand out your old email anymore, and really important things you can migrate as you see fit over time. I used to have a gmail address, and basically nobody uses it anymore (and if they do, it does get forwarded).

FastMail is an Australian company. With their encryption laws, I'd stay clear until they move all their staff and systems outside of Australia.

I want a service that can handle all my domain's traffic on a per domain per month basis instead of per user. PurelyMail is the only one like this that I've found but it's still in beta and the owner has been having some problems getting past Microsoft's spam filters.

Is there any service that will host my email with as many users as I want for a flat (or bandwidth/storage-based) fee?

Look at https://mxroute.com/

They've come in handy for a couple of my colleagues.

I second this! I've been with them for 2 years and they've been perfect.

I took a look at it and liked it (though it doesn't seem to expand much on privacy), but the service being situated and hosted in the U.S. is something I do not prefer at this point. I wish there were services like this outside the five eyes, nine eyes and fourteen eyes countries (I know Migadu the company is in Switzerland but has its servers in France, but it doesn't seem to have adequate staff or the intention to respond to people).

Additionally, mxroute does not seem to provide any trials. Its policies say that payment issues from the customer have to be resolved within 24 hours, but that refunds to the customer may take 72 hours. That seems unfriendly to me.

If the owner is having trouble getting a hold of a human at Microsoft, feel free to point them my way and I'll help get this onto the Outlook team's desk. Details in my profile.

Migadu prices like this; all the mailboxes you want and just pay by daily sending limit. ($4/mo paid annually to send 100 mails a day, for example.) https://www.migadu.com/en/pricing.html

Or if you want to pay for one mailbox somewhere and then have customized forwarding, I found this thing called Forward Email in another thread that looks interesting and I want to try setting it up self-hosted: https://forwardemail.net/#/

Oh, neat: https://www.migadu.com/en/drawbacks.html

Huge props to any service that has an honest list of reasons not to use them. I'm a little concerned that one of those things is "no SLA", though; yes, mail delivery is resilient, but if I can't access email all the time I'm gonna be grumpy.

Unlisted disadvantages are that they do not allow sending with "From" other than primary mail address (which limits usage of catch-all domains) and I had to contact them multiple times to get responses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946607

Beware, Migadu's biggest drawback, which is not listed, is that customer service is non-existent. You contact them about some questions and wouldn't see any responses, not even an auto reply or a ticket. It looks as if it's run by two or three people who have day jobs and other things to take care of and that Migadu is just a hobby project. Email is way too important for me (and I believe for most people), since it's the key to many online services, to let it be served by someone who's not into it full time.

+1 for Fastmail, great service.

I'd love to move over to FastMail, but I'm not sure that 100% of all my outgoing mails will land in people's primary inbox. I've heard Gmail sometimes marks non gmail (and even @google.com) emails as spam and its imperative for my emails send. Does anyone know if Fastmail is reliable?

If that is true and I've never noticed it as a problem with my gmail, it would be another reason to switch providers because you are missing emails from other people.

(Assuming that you are not talking about spam but actual important messages).

EDIT: Oh and as an anecdote I also have a FastMail account and as far as I can tell all my emails "land" on gmail accounts.

In that case, I'll probably switch over. Currently, I use ImprovMX with Gmail integration so I can send emails from my domain through gmail and have a catch all when receiving emails. Works well for free.

I really love Fastmail, just wish the search was better

If you have 40 bucks and some time, try using fastmail with Postman. You're now locked to your mac, but search is amazing

I think you mean Postbox? The only Postman app I see is the API development tool.

(FastMail dev here) What problems do you find with the search? We have pretty comprehensive support for more or less everything Gmail search offers and more (https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/search.html), but if we're falling short for your use case we'd love to know how, to help guide improvements for the future.

Ok, but don't you get the same problem but now on Fastmail?

They don't offer a free service, they offer a paid service, you are indeed the customer. They also don't have another service that even could pull the data from FM.

Ok, good point.

No, because 1) FastMail doesn't make money through advertising so they have no incentive to read your mail and 2) if you pay for an account with your own domain, you are not locked in, so if they start doing something you don't like, you can migrate away without telling all of your contacts to use some new address.

These benefits are broadly true of most paid-for private email hosting providers.

they have no incentive to read your mail

I'm sure they could sell that data (maybe even to Google) even if they don't sell ads themselves.

(I'm not saying they do read emails, but "more money" is a big incentive)

One thing though, customers like me use FastMail specifically because they aren't in the Privacy Farming business like Google.

If they ever do start privacy farming then I'll be incentivised to move my domain to a separate supplier.

If I didn't care about that I'd just be using Google's "free" service already. So FastMail are incentivised to protect their business and to not compete head on with Google.

But then my flights don't automatically show up on my calendar, and my android phone can't notify me when a package is delivered.

Why would I pay for something that gives me an inferior experience?

How long does it take you to add a flight to your calendar manually? A few seconds? Is your privacy worth those few seconds?

What loss of privacy? In both cases the contents of your email and stored on a disk and read into memory for processing.

I took 140 flights last year. I made a larger number than that of online purchases. Adding / tracking all that stuff manually is a pure waste of time.

Use TripIt then. Looks like you’re nitpicking on small reasons.

Okay, so share my email with another company (fastmail + tripit now), and use a separate calendar (unless it integrates with google calendar?)

I trust gmail's security more than tripit, thanks. I think I'd be more worried about the world learning of my trip history if I used tripit than if I used gmail for that.

And also, the average user does not care. They don't want to think about it even to the point of researching a service, they get used to their phone telling them they have a flight the next day, and they want that to keep happening. They don't think about how it works and if they did, "oh no my privacy" is not something they'd think afterward.

Don't most email clients make it pretty easy to create calendar events based on the content of emails?

You have to do that yourself but personally I prefer being in control of that anyway.

I like fastmail and I take full advantage of it all- including the webhosting.

That's stupid. Fastmail still has your purchase data. It just doesn't tell you when purchases are arriving.

Please don't call people or their statements stupid.

It's not "stupid". Caring that your data is not being used to make opaque decisions in other products that you have no visibility or control over is something that people are allowed to care about.

When it's just an email can be deleted and when it is you don't have to wonder if it's purged from 10 other systems. That it's not showing you is what some people want, regardless of whether you do or not.

> Caring that your data is not being used to make opaque decisions in other products that you have no visibility or control over is something that people are allowed to care about.

Whether a product shows that data or not, it can still make those decisions if it has that data. Both Fastmail and Google have that data. It is certainly naive (if not stupid) to conflate data use with privacy and get suckered into spending money on that confusion. Data collection is what matters for privacy.

Are you advocating that every one take on the operational burden of running an email server after everyone takes on the mental burden of learning how to set up and configure a mail server and all the fiddly DNS bits theirselves?

No. I'm advocating that people understand that there is no difference in privacy between providing your email data to one company or another. They can then make their own decisions from there.

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