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Comment by luxuryballs | Hacker News Reader

Stop using gmail, it seems daunting but it really only took me a few solid hours to switch all my important accounts to a paid provider like fastmail.

Think about how many important accounts you link through email and then think about how, if you don’t pay for gmail, Google doesn’t owe you access to your email or any service at all.

It feels great being free and you can setup forwarding so you can pick up the stragglers.

You also get the added spam freedom and security benefit of changing both your email and password which is great since we have no idea what leaked email/password lists are floating around out there... it’s like the ultimate unsubscribe!

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I've switched to fastmail, and am staying with it. However, almost every aspect of it is objectively worse than Gmail; browser UX more awkward, Android email clients besides Google mail are awful and Google mail itself has very broken behaviors with it, spam filtering is poor, i had to give up things like nice calendar and address book integrations, etc.

However, as i pay Google for many other services, that means I am vulnerable to total and permanent account lock out if someone steals my credit card and gets it flagged by Google as fraudulent, as has been reported by more than one blog post. As long as Google does not address the issue of customer service being within their top 25 list of priorities, it is insane for anyone to use Gmail for important mail identities.

For me, after switching to fastmail my load time in browser went from around 30 seconds with the "new" gmail to under 5 with fastmail. Using HTML view on gmail the speed is more comparable

>Android email clients besides Google mail are awful

I still use K-9 Mail to handle my non-gmail accounts. I find it very usable with how it threads my work emails.

Although from what I understand its not actively developed anymore and the last post I see on the playstore says Sept 2018. I'm open to suggestions if anyone has them, especially if they are available via F-Droid.

Looks alive to me https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/releases , F-Droid has the most recent pre-release from last week.

Releases were stalled for a long while, and then, past week, released a really big update, both technical and cosmetic.

Ah sweet, thanks for the correction.

I'm using BlueMail and like it quite a bit. Easy to setup and attractive UI.

Have you tried Fastmail's own app? Seems pretty decent to me (though I don't use it that much: I don't often read/write mail on my smartphone).

You mean the horrific skinned version of their website that has no offline capabilities?

That’s hardly an app. I love fastmail and have been a happy paying customer for years. But that’s their biggest pitfall.

Have you reached out to Fastmail about the things you don't like? I use them and like the UI, but anytime Ive had an issue and have contacted their support I got a quick response from a human.

They love their product and making it better so I think constructive criticism is welcomed there.

their UX is still really really good, compared to every other web UX I've ever used.....except for google's. I'm not sure how much better it can get unless they had google-amounts of resources to put into it. There are few fundamental assumptions in the gmail UX that make certain things possible that couldn't work in Fastmail's design, like being able to read messages while I'm selecting them, expanding / contracting threads at once, having drafts inline with the thread that I can leave and return to seamlessly, all using keyboard controls. I have a very specific email reading style and I also have to deal with folders that have hundreds of new messages daily.

> being able to read messages while I'm selecting them

You can do this in Fastmail (presuming you don't have the reading pane turned on, i.e. are in the same layout as Gmail).

> expanding / contracting threads at once

Shift-click a message header to apply to all at once, or "Shift-E" kb shortcut to expand all.

> having drafts inline with the thread that I can leave and return to seamlessly

We take a slightly different approach, but using Cmd-Shift-S will toggle you instantly between your draft and the thread you are replying to, preserving your scroll position in both.

> You can do this in Fastmail (presuming you don't have the reading pane turned on, i.e. are in the same layout as Gmail).

EDIT: this message alerted me to the fact that there is a "hide reading pane" option so I am experimenting with that to see if this solves my problem. Also it would be SUPER helpful if the arrow keys would navigate through the message list like gmail does, J/K continues to be less comfortable for me.

If I check one of the messages/threads in the messages pane, such that I'm selecting it for being marked as read or deletion or something like that, in the right hand "read" pane, the message/thread on the right side turns into a single bar that is unreadable. in gmail I can select as many messages as I want and move back and forth between the "messages" and "Read thread" panes, using the enter key to read, semicolon to expand thread, and "u" to return to the message list, and the selections remain.

I have not been able to identify any similar flow in Fastmail; it forces me to deal with only one thread at a time, and I cannot read a message/thread that is also selected; clicking on it deselects it. So I can't select a series of messages and also read them, it would take a rethink of Fastmail's UX architecture for it to be possible.

> Shift-click a message header to apply to all at once, or "Shift-E" kb shortcut to expand all.

OK, Gmail's semicolon / colon toggle is much easier to use and also includes collapsing the thread also can this be added?

> We take a slightly different approach, but using Cmd-Shift-S will toggle you instantly between your draft and the thread you are replying to, preserving your scroll position in both.

OK, that is definitely more awkward. in gmail I can just scroll up to read the other messages in the thread, which is important because I often have to go back and read messages I'm responding towards. In fastmail, this would mean the "edit draft" button would give me an inline composition window that scrolls with the thread. This could be added to Fastmail with a lot of work but the UX at least does not prohibit this from being graphically feasible.

Google's UX is the reason why I switched to Fastmail. Gmail became unusable on the web, even with a gigabit fiber connection it was impossibly slow, I was waiting 10 seconds+ for things to happen. And Gmail on android still doesnt have darkmode.

For sure to each their own and no app is perfect. (I would love Fastmail on android to have offline functionality for instance)

How does fastmail compare to protonmail, regarding encryption and data privacy?

ProtonMail is better for privacy, and I think fastmail could read your emails if they wanted to - even if they don’t want to after the Australian data access laws. However, the fastmail privacy policy is quite good (I emailed them about it once), they come with calendar, and their system works really well. Fastmail is nice for imap too, ProtonMail requires extra software for it. Fastmail also gives you a free website via their hosted files features

If ProtonMail did a calendar though I would be using ProtonMail right now

Given that Fastmail is Australian, it is fundamentally untrustworthy in much the same way any US company is. Of course, Protonmail is pretty untrustworthy also. Most of that is down to them making claims that are patently untrue (the encryption keys are stored serverside, so their encryption is not better than symmetrical for one), but some of it is also just because they are not in a country with strong privacy guarantees (for that I tend to look at Scandinavia or Germany).

Personally, I don't usually use the broswer UI, but I like it much more than Gmail - simple, easy to navigate, does what I need. Though I mostly go there only for settings and it's always been easy.

I use IMAP and SMTP, and it just works. I can move and delete mail. No weird All mail folder, semi-automatic weird Trash, resurrecting messages and duplicates that are annoying to get rid of.

Overall, I hope they don't add complicated gimmicks or weird behaviours like gmail.

I have tried switching to fastmail and it was incredibly painful. In a nutshell, Microsoft/Hotmail and possibly other providers started to throw my emails to people to spam. I've missed out on important things in the physical world because of this. I've invested a lot of time trying to debug the issue. To their credit, Fastmail's customer service was excellent and they really tried to resolve the issues but in the end could not.

Also, fastmail web UI was okay but not great. I do like the new GMail UI better.

I had this problem in the beginning (specifically and only with hotmail), but it solved itself at some point. No idea if it was something that fastmail did or that hotmail did.

I have been using fastmail for one year and had zero other problems. If we don't move away from gmail, we will lose email, which is one of the only true decentralized and free protocols still left.

I had the reverse problem, stopped accepting my mails, after decade of non issue.

I think it's time we organise ourselves as small mail provider organisation. Anybody feeling the same please ping me.

I have used fastmail for all my business accounts for years. I have never had problems with deliverability. But I did warm the accounts using best practices recommended online to start.

What do you mean by "warm" and "best practices" ?

Email spam detection is hilarious.

Basically, you have to take a set of ritual steps to "warm" various email resources (such as domains, addresses, and IPs) to be flagged as "known" and "legitimate". For example, IP addresses: you should send warming emails to a valid address that you control for a few weeks to just show up on lists without having spam marks against you.

It's insane.

Is this for your own custom domains you mean?

Microsoft is particularly annoying. If I send mail from my domain via my server in Rackspace's cloud to my @outlook.com address, Microsoft classifies it as spam. I tell it that the mail is not spam--and the next one still gets classified as spam. I've done this several times now, and it is still classifying them as spam. How many freaking times do you have to tell Microsoft that something is not spam before it learns?

Compare to Yahoo. The first one to my @yahoo.com address was classified as spam, but then after I told Yahoo that it was not spam, subsequent ones come through fine.

I know right? Seriously, Office 365 spam management is a joke. Not only do Microsoft's OWN HOLIDAY PROMOTION EMAILS get marked as SPAM.. but whenever I mark an item or whitelist a domain at the Exchange level it completely ignores the rules.

Has anyone ever successfully got SPAM management working using the native O365 tools?

Well, the holiday promotion emails are spam, so it is sort of working as intended in that regard

Was about to say this. The fact that MSFT even throws their own promo emails into spam just tells me that there is no special preference kind of bias towards their own stuff, which is imo a feature, not a bug.

I have a custom domain in Fastmail, and after I did all of the DKIM/SPF and other email validation stuff (took an afternoon via their helpfiles) and got a green light from a couple authentication verifier services, I haven't had a single problem with being labeled as spam.

I found the transition to be painless, but I did discover Microsoft was spam-labeling some of my emails too. I was using a custom domain though

Better just use a mail client instead of browser. It uses standard protocols, has no ads and you decide what interface it has.

This is what I do. I use a mail client and forgo web interfaces unless forced. Fastmail is a fine mail provider (I'm cheap and I'm not giving up my 4 grandfathered GSuite custom domain accounts, especially since 3 of them have support for 50 "users" b/c moving the same setup to Fastmail would cost hundreds of dollars a year), but even with them, I would still much rather use a mail client.

I use Superhuman and I enjoy it.

which only works with a Google Account

Happy Thunderbird user here, and do occasionally send my donations to help keeping my favourite mail client alive.

I'm literally locked out of two of my Gmail accounts and there's no recourse for me. I'm not going to pay them to regain access. I'm just never going to use any of their services, paid or not.

I did something easier than moving to Fastmail, I just paid for Gmail.

How does that change Google from disallowing access to Gmail from your browser (if you use a non-mainstream browser)?

It is responding to the parent comment, which says:

> if you don’t pay for gmail, Google doesn’t owe you access to your email or any service at all.

This gets at the fundamental question of trust. Do we inherently trust fastmail more than google because fastmail does not offer a free service? Do we trust google to give any amount of service to their paying customers? It’s a hard question and I don’t have the answer. My gut says fastmail is likely more trustworthy because of their non-evil business model and lack of horrible customer service. Idk though. If I still use google domains for an email alias domain is that an acceptable risk? What if the technocrats decide that their emails are the only Real Emails and block out any email that isn’t in the gmail/iCloud/hotmail/etc circle? Email is too important of an identifier to play games with. Losing my primary email without a chance to migrate is something I will try to avoid at great cost.

Which is still relevant, because Google won't give you access to your email unless you use a major browser (or imap, etc) regardless of whether you pay.

I'm sure you get some other benefits for that, but I'm also sure you're still being tracked.

Any evidence for that or are you going on gut feel?

Do you use google docs and other office tools? I've tried to switch to Dropbox Paper and Microsoft but they feel clumsy or incomplete or spammy or slow compared to Doc and Sheets. I'm looking for a relatively straightfoward set of changes to my major web activities away from google.

Apple's office suite is really nice, if you're in that world. I dunno if they do collaborative editing, but Notes does, so they might. If it's gotta be in a browser—IDK, it bugs me having a document editor or spreadsheet program eat so much memory and so many background cycles that I don't feel like I can leave it open and forget about it while doing other things even on a pretty powerful machine without slowing things down and killing my battery, plus they all feel really laggy, so I've mostly stopped using browser-based office tools, period, whenever I can avoid them.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote do collaborative editing, even across devies:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181

"Invite others to your documents and work on them together in real time. Collaboration is built into the iWork apps on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and iCloud.com"

I just like how lightweight they are, and (this may be silly, I know) I like how good-looking and useful the included templates are. Also they rarely crash or do anything weird, which you'd think would just be normal by now, but very much is not.

Last time I remember using modern-ish GUI Office-type programs that felt this respectful of system resources was years ago when I used Linux, and I dropped OpenOffice (too damn heavy and slow) for some of the single-purpose alternatives like Gnumeric (is that even around anymore?). Apple's various utility and basic productivity programs are really damn good (god I love Preview) and a big part of what keeps me suffering through all the bad things about Apple products.

I'd be curious how you're using MSFT Office, but I've been bouncing between a Surface Pro for work and Mac Mini at home, and love the Office 365 suite.

Virtually 100% of my clients can open Word / Excel / Powerpoint documents, and you'll have to pry Excel from my cold, dead hands =). I personally love the power features of Excel, and even do some VBA scripting to automate some workflows in Excel and Outlook.

I don't do much real-time collab on documents at the same time with other folks on my team, so I can't attest to that - though I hear that Msft has come a long way here and the Fluent roadmap looks really promising.

I can't stand excel. It thinks it knows what I mean and actually edits my data destructively, mistakenly, especially when I enter dates in day/month/year format. If you just import a CSV and then export it directly, it mangles the data. I will not tolerate such behavior.

If you have a column of phone numbers with leading zeroes, coming in from a csv, it decides it's a number and drops the leading zero, which breaks the phone number.

I paste the data via Text Import Wizard, choose Text for the date columns, & then later split & join again as correct date format.

I figured out that you can technically specify type in Excel to prevent destroying the data, but by that point I’d much rather just load a data frame in R or Pandas.

Maybe you just suck at Excel ;)

https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c

This. Microsoft Office and O365 are magnitudes more useable and mature compared to GSuites. This wasn't clear to me until I'm now at a shop that only uses Google - its like a giant step back tech and usability wise. A year in now, and slowly getting some O365 shadow IT going to improve everyones life. Lol

And everyone knows, Microsoft Office isn't perfect...

In the case of Gmail vs. Fastmail I’m not so sure it’s a downgrade, but if you switch away from Google Docs etc. you will indeed lose things you were used to (great collaboration, speed etc.)

However you also gain something. For me personally actually three things:

* I no longer feel like the service I’m using is like a rug that can be pulled from under my feet at any moment

* My data (mail, documents, etc.) are now actually under my control and not in some “arbitrary“ format on a server I can’t reach except from my browser

* As a bonus feature, my mail is only read by me and my behavior is tracked by no one

I am not sure how you use Word and Excel but google's offering are like tinker toys compared to what MS has put out for the desktop and web.

Google can still affect you by not delivering your emails. I've had my own domain for personal, noncommercial use for 15+ years the past few with Rackspace as the email host. I accessed my email account with Thunderbird, webmail, BlueMail on the phone. As of a few days ago I cannot send email to friends with Gmail or businesses that subscribe to Gsuite. My messages are rejected at their servers. I think the domain name itself is triggering the block since Rackspace says their servers and IP addresses are clean.

I found out about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and set them up, followed all the other instructions on assorted Google sites, and still no go. Apparently the blocks can take weeks to clear or may even be permanent. The reject emails say to contact postmaster@google.com which, of course, is pointless since I can't email the domain. I don't even think there's anything behind it if I could. There's no way to contact any person or group regarding the block which I think must have happened due to spoofing.

From what I can see, domains these days are assumed to be commercial for mass mailings and having one's own for incidental use is an outlier.

Totally. And a lot of people don't realize you can remove Gmail from your Google account, and then use your new non-gmail address as the username for your existing Google Account. That way folks can still share Google docs with you, etc. Works seamlessly.

> It feels great being free and you can setup forwarding so you can pick up the stragglers.

Then if you create a rule at the new provider that files those messages into a dedicated folder, that folder essentially acts as a todo list for accounts that need updated.

Let me just go further with this, not only moving emails to another provider, get raspberry pi, get a domain, get a certificate, get static ip, take some time to read one of tutorials on internet and set up postfix/dovecot. It is really liberating to run your own mail server, defining aliases/mail accounts on the fly, let me give you just one example, I am using a different alias specifically crafted for each service. I have cought numerous of sites selling it for spam (or it was hacked). Getting rid of spam? Just /dev/null the account/alias. Annoying newsletters? /dev/null. Need another account on service? Generate new account/alias. Not to mention the amount of knowlidge you will gain from running your own server.

Get rid of dependancy on others, you dont need it. And with some basic knowlidge it is not even hard. You dont need google or anyone else for email communication.

It’s a neat idea, but mail server availability needs to be 100%. I’m not going to buy and maintain server hardware if I can help it.

I have a dual CPU workstation and the jump to a proper server is just insane, even to me.

I am doing it for 10 years, with almost 0 downtime, also smtp server that hands over mail to your server will retry and wait so - no, it doesnt need to be up 24/7. Actually rejecting email with try later is a way of fighting spam.

Also with a $100 worth UPS, raspberry pi lasts forever. And pi is all you need.

Completely agree with this. In my case, I have a domain at namecheap. I've been using their hosted email for a while now and love it! So glad I left Gmail.

The main reason why I hate gmail nowadays is because it blocks me from login in from other device because they say someone hacked my account

> if you don’t pay for gmail, Google doesn’t owe you access to your email

Could you provide some examples where a user was denied access to his/her email?

I'm locked out of two of Gmail my accounts. There's no way to recover the accounts as far as I can tell. I'm not going to pay them and just hope they can get me back in.

There has to be a reason for that (e.g. breaking the terms of service).

You’d think that, but nope. Signed up during the beta by invite, never used them. Unless not using them violates the terms of service? I have all the recovery info too and original passwords. It accepts the password and recovery stuff, but just won’t let me in.

Just 5 minutes ago, when I tried to log into my Google account with a browser not "approved" by Google.

If it works for me then why should I?

Google have been blocking lots of youtube accounts recently for no reason, which means getting locked out of gmail forever

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