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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

This is what finally prompted me to move to Fastmail after being on G Suite since 2007. Even though I have to pay for Fastmail and was grandfathered into free on G Suite. Pretty happy with it so far.

Now going through the process of reducing all the places I use Google services. Moved my personal stuff from GCP to Digital Ocean. Gmail to Fastmail. Chrome to Firefox / Safari. Currently seeing if Zoho is a good substitute for Google Sheets and Docs.

Not sure I'll go so far as use DuckDuckGo fulltime, but maybe i'll give it another try.

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I switched to DDG a few weeks ago, and it's surprisingly better than I remember. Though for technical searches I have to add a second context parameter "go programming FOO" instead of "golang FOO" etc. But that isn't so bad. I've only fallen back to google a couple times, easy enough with ddg `!g search`.

May switch my browser to Brave, Opera or Edge too... though there are aspects of each of them I'm not fond of. The new Edge is decent.

> I've only fallen back to google a couple times, easy enough with ddg `!g search`

You should use !s instead of !g. !s sends your search to Startpage, which uses Google search but in a more privacy-protective way.

Fastmail is unfortunately very bad too now due to recent Australian legislation.

Does this include Fastmail use in other countries?

Fastmail was amazing until that law. Now, I’m not sure what to do. ProtonMail is decent but doesn’t provide calendar.

Edit: apparently they do provide email export to paid users now via a new application that is in beta. I had not realized this

What happened?

Australia passed a law requiring companies doing business in Australia to provide a way for the government to access encrypted communications:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46463029

> As of December 2018, FastMail and all other Australian companies are subject to the Assistance and Access Bill, which compels them to assist law enforcement in accessing encrypted communications if warranted during an investigation. FastMail stated that while their services were not "materially affected" since they already complied with warrants per the Telecommunications Act, concerns have been shown by customers over the bill's effects, which has led to losses of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastMail

I've been using MXRoute¹ for the past year and it's gone really well. I've never had a dropped e-mail. They use MailChannels² as a blacklist fallback. They're affordable, reliable, with quick support.

¹ https://mxroute.com/ ² https://mailchannels.com/

miss any flights yet?

I find this feature insanely useful. Google is doing something useful with my email. I learn about delayed flights way way in advance of anyone else as a result.

So let's just be clear here: - you get an email, to you, privately - gmail used to offer making a calendar for certain keywords in an email - google will now automatically do said calendar entries - on your PRIVATE calendar btw - google will also combine real-time flight info with your flight info, and tell you useful things via PRIVATE push notifications to you only.

This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric. It's totally privacy protecting - the calendar entries, push notifications are private.

This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy? Because they notified you a dozen times, via email they were going to do this, and you ignored it?

Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly.

Email misses most of my appointments. Doctors? Dentists? Picking a family member up at the airport? Your kids' karate classes? Playdates? Anything else arranged by text message?

Although maybe the problem is they don't know enough about my and my kids' life.

> This is what everyone has been trying to build for years.

No, not everyone by a longshot.

I like how you redefine PRIVATE from "something I can see" to "something I can see and Google machines can add to and edit at whim, and Google employees hired by strangers for profit, an unknown number in unknown places, with no individual accountability, can potentially access" and then use your new definition of PRIVATE-which-isn't to bludgeon other people as luddites.

This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric.

This isn't your mind being expanded, this isn't you thinking new thoughts.

This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy?

Kurzweil VoicePad and Dragon Naturally Speaking tried to build Voice Recognition on-device for years and it was a bright and techno future. Then Google Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa got people to send speech samples over the internet to a foreign, perpetual-record, datacenter. The voice recognition part is better, but now it's creepy.

Why doesn't Google forward their itinerary to Uber and have someone else pick them up at the airport, so you don't have to be involved in your life at all?

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