Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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The only main Google service I still used was Gmail (and occasionally search when DDG doesn't return something immediately useful). I'd seen comments about Fastmail over the years, but moving seemed like it would be a hassle.

With more at home pandemic time I decided to just do it and have been super impressed. The Fastmail docs are really good, setting up DNS to use my custom domain had explicit steps and pictures for my specific provider (gandi.net) along with a ton of others.

They have super easy to setup import from Gmail to get things over initially and to keep things coming as you convert accounts.

They have really good instructions for all IMAP clients and it's been painless to set those up.

I did have to spend a day going through every account in 1Password and changing emails, but the super simple aliases you can setup in Fastmail make this great. I have a bunch of different ones for different types of sites (some very specific, some general catch-alls) on my domain which I can now blacklist in the future if I need to.

The main issue is that you realize a lot of sites are just terrible, many don't let you change your email at all and require contacting support. Some don't even let you change after contacting support (postmates just says to 'create a new account under your new email and abandon the old one').

In general though I'm happy I did it and the Fastmail site has been pretty impressive. I like paying for software I think is high quality and valuable (where the business and customer have aligned incentives).

There's a fairly general way to do mail import that works fine with Fastmail, and might be more flexible if you would like to combine the import with reorganization your mail folders. This assumes both providers support IMAP.

1. Set up both providers on an IMAP client that supports multiple simultaneous accounts.

2. Copy messages from the old provider to the new by simply selecting them in the old provider's folders in your IMAP client and dragging them to wherever you want them in the new provider's folders.

As long as you pick an IMAP client that supports copying between IMAP servers, this should do it. I used either Apple Mail or Outlook for this. I don't remember which.

I went through a similar process during quarantine, but for bluehost.

I found the process of changing emails over meant I also was able to make Pass entries for them (another way I'm taking control of my data), and at the same time delete my account for websites I don't need anymore. It's been very cleansing.

What is a pass entry and what do you use it for?

Another thing I should mention is I wanted to try hey.com since it looks like they’re doing some interesting things (alerting users to tracking pixels to push back on clients like superhuman, whitelisting incoming mail, etc.) but they make it hard to get an invite so I gave up trying and paid for fastmail instead.

Not GP, but I’m assuming https://www.passwordstore.org/. Pass is a CLI password manager using Git and GPG to store and manage your passwords. I use it and sync passwords across devices through a git repo on self-hosted Gitea. Works really well if you’re comfortable with the CLI.

Also switched away from Google to Fastmail with my own domain about a year ago. Happy with the move, although Gmail still sees some activity because I never took the effort of migrating historic mails and all non-primary accounts.

Thank you, this is what I meant.

Makes sense - thanks, I thought it was some domain level thing.

Re: Tracking pixels - disable images by default in your email client. I get emails now from people like "we've noticed you haven't been opening our emails..."

Hey, i recently switched to Fastmail too! It's been surprisingly painless, even with importing mail, calendars and what not. Like you mention, the most time consuming part has been going through my accounts to update the email address to the new one.

What is a truly private European based alternative to Fastmail? Other than Proton ail.

I've started to switch all my email stuff to https://uberspace.de/en/

It's a kind of shared hosting with full ssh (non-root) access. They offer a pre-installed Roundcube Webmailer, but you can host your own one as well.

I run my own Roundcube with my own Domain and configured a maildrop instance to sort incoming mails.

So far it works as a charm. The hoster is based in Germany and I trust them to be privacy-aware.

I like

https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html

You pay based on traffic rather than per account/domain.

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