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Comment by grandpoobah | Hacker News Reader

This article finally prompted me to do what I should've done a long time ago, which is to create a Fastmail account and begin importing my Gmail into it. I've seen this story far too many times, and no longer will I say "yeah but it'll never happen to me".

Setting up the import was insanely easy, and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail. Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.

Fuck you Google.

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That is why I want something like Time Capsule for our Smartphone ( iOS or Android ).

>Roughley lost data including emails, photos, documents and diagrams that he had developed for his work. "My account and all its data is gone," he said.

Imagine all your photos were in Google Photos and you cant get it any more because you have somehow violated their policy? All the beautiful memories of your boy or daughter when they were young or as a baby.

Imagine the song you make, the video you took.

The Cloud, should be used as an OffSite backup. I should always have the option to have my Data, stored in a box in my house, in my own property. Those who want the convenience of cloud ( iCloud, Google's X ) can do so. But there should always be an option to have your backup not in the cloud. ( And no, iTunes Backup is not that option, it is ridiculously complicated for any average user )

This is why i have setup one of my linux servers to automatically download all photos and videos from my shared google photo albums each night.

This allows me and my wife to easily share photos of our daughter with each other, as well as have a backup of everything we have locally on my NAS.

Next step is to sync this of to several other storage places in case of cryptolocker or the NAS dies.

Do you automatically download all of your photos and videos, or just the ones taken during the day?

I just software that downloads everything from my google photos albums and then only downloads any changes after that. Like rsync.

How do you access Google Photos from Linux? Is it able to detect only the new pictures?

It looks like gphotos-sync is the way to do this.

Must be new as I was looking for a tool like this a few years ago and nothing existed.

I didn't realize this would be possible. Would you happen to have a guide somewhere?

bump. that's sound a good alternative! please get us a note on how to a(r)chieve that :)

You can do it with python - https://pypi.org/project/gphotos-sync. They have docker image too. I have a cron job that starts the docker container periodically to fetch any new photos.

i found gphoto sync is suitable for that. https://pypi.org/project/gphotos-sync/

I have a quarterly reminder set up in my iphone reminders app.

Whenever it goes off, I login to Google Takeout and trigger a full download of my data. I then download the file and put it on the hard drive of my computer, which is itself backed up to multiple hard drives via apple time machine (I have one drive i leave always plugged in, and one I plug in during the quarterly sync and then unplug for protection against ransomware or other attacks against my personal computer).

Simple, effective, and I could only ever lose up to a maximum of 3 months of data if banned from google.

Thanks, I've set it up myself. Most of my Google data isn't really important, but my gmail is super important and it's the backup address for dozens if not hundreds of services.

I did the same, but I never got to like Fastmail so I switched back to Gmail after a year. This time I'm on my own domain though so they can close my account all they want, I'd just setup email with another domain on the same address . Would lose my emails in the process, but that's secondary concern.

I've used a secondary Protonmail account lately and it seems decent. I haven't used it enough to make a fair comparison but if you only gave me 5 seconds to choose I'd instantly choose Protonmail over Fastmail. Same pricing (with custom domain) IIRC.

Edit: Then again as a paying customer I might not be as easily locked out compared to a regular Gmail account? No idea.

I love the experience on Fastmail personally, but you have checked all the boxes to protect yourself if A. You have recent Takeouts or sync of your inbox and B. People know to reach you via the address on your own domain, which you can repoint to a new service if necessary.

If you're doing these two things, you're effectively protected from this issue, even if you use Gmail. Of course, it won't necessarily help you with losses from other Google services you might be cut out of. For an Android user, for instance, there's no real way around potentially losing every app you've ever bought on Google Play.

I migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. I'm really happy with it and I wish I had done it years ago. Many features. The web interface and apps feel a lot faster than Gmail.

Pro-tip: use a custom domain so that you can easily switch e-mail providers in the future without vendor lock-in. It's also very easy to add aliases in Fastmail.

> Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.

Another option is to let Gmail forward your email to the new address.

Another protip: fastmail lets you alias yourname@yourdomain.com as anything@yourname.yourdomain.com. You can use this feature to create a unique email address for every service you sign up for. This is really handy for filtering to folders, or blocking marketing spam.

If you set up your valid emails as *@yourdomain.com, you can also use unlimited foo/bar/bas@yourdomain.com.

Still on the G-Train. While I am thinking about migration back to my own hosted versions, I currently do this with Google Groups. I have many groups (amazon@..., newsletter@..., spam@...) for many different use cases. Though I have not yet created a catch all...

This thread prompted me to dig into it and I found a blog posting describing the process [1]. Will try this - while still digging deeper into the migration topic.

[1]: https://robbettis.com/blog/setting-a-catchall-email-for-g-su...

Suggestion/what I have been practising for the past 20 years:

Get your own domain "lastname.com" or "somethig.com", get it from someone who will give you 1GB catch-all mailbox.

My setup is:

Windows, MS Outlook. The emails go to the 1GB mailbox, I can access them over my phone. Once I fire up Outlook, they are siphoned down and live on my Outlook forever. My emails are around 5-6GB of .pst file(s). I backup my whole disk in two manners: selected files and folders of my C and D drives on Carbonite, and one massive (80GB) Acronis .tib file (clone of my C: - SDD) again on Carbonite. My Carbonite "footprint" is well over 1.5TB.

So my backup is 3-2-1.

3 places: local disk, external drive, Carbonite (not affiliated)(I just love their unlimited storage and ability to encrypt pre-transmit)

2 different physical locations: home/on the move & Carbonite cloud

1 online: Carbonite (nice and encrypted).

I keep some gmail accounts handy, a couple of hotmail accounts, but EVERYTHING forwards to my mail mailbox. These accounts are used for things I don't want to have a real name-surname (like a silly game or other 'stuffs'). I won't cry if I lose them.

I have been operating like this for 20 years. I do have the cost of the domain name and mailbox service, but the cost is nothing to the pain one gets of losing access to ALL the stuff from the "free service".

I do NOT use any of the Google/MS-Hotmail ecosystem, no "online drives". This setup works for me. Perhaps it may work for you/your lifestyle, perhaps not. Just putting it out there to show that one can have a perfect IT lifestyle without using any of the "free" stuff.

Edit: I am not affiliated to any of the companies mentioned above (MS, Carbonite, Google). I just made the decision 20 years ago to stay away from them (incl. Dropbox, Microsoft free or paid storage), and keep everything offline/on me, and of course accepting the risks that come with it (house burning down, burning a CD/DVD as backup method back-in-the-day), etc.

Damn, nice rundown. I will check out Carbonite, looks very promising.

I recently wrote a step by step article about this, for people who might not know how, such as family members, et al. I chose ProtonMail (despite also being a FastMail customer) because I’m a bit concerned about the new Australian encryption key escrow mandate (which I assume affects FastMail) and I like ProtonMail’s “don’t store plaintext” approach, even if it does need special client software.

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

How big a problem is this since emails are transported predominantly in clear text?

If you’re emailing other people on ProtonMail, it fetches their keys from the (presumed trustworthy) server, and does end-to-end encryption.

In that mode it’d at least as secure as iMessage (before Apple backdoored it by adding automatic key and plaintext escrow).

Most emails use TLS, so they’re encrypted on the wire between servers.

ProtonMail then encrypts the plaintext as soon as they receive it, for storage. It stays encrypted from that point until it reaches the client.

For most mail it’s not e2e, but it does cut down on the opportunities for the mail to get seized by anyone who can compel the provider to turn over their records.

I recommend to use your own email domain with it. If you're ever locked out or want to switch, you can easily switch while keeping the same address.

What if I forget to renew the domain?

Someone else buys the domain after me? And steals all my online accounts? (Pwd reset emails)

That's honestly nobody's problem but your own. Set it to autorenew or buy it for a longer period of time. I bought 10 years up-front for my own domain.

This. One tip I might have learnt from here is to renew a domain for the maximum allowed period (usually 10 years), and then make it a habit to renew it once a year, back to the full ~10 years.

Hmm, let's look at how feasible this is.

Namecheap is quite a popular place to buy domains, isn't it?

(myname).xyz - 10 years - £85.29 / $110.15

(myname).com - 10 years - £69.87 / $90.24

(myname).net - 10 years - £98.40 / $127.08

In a world where many people are not able to afford food for themselves[0][1], this is hardly an alternative. At minimum wage ($7.25[2]), a single domain name would take about half a month to earn, assuming you have no other outgoings, which is very likely not the case.

What coherent person would do that?

[0]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/10/01/how-confron...

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/02/magazine/food...

[2]: https://www.epi.org/blog/millions-of-workers-are-paid-less-t...

> $110.15

> At minimum wage ($7.25[2]), a single domain name would take about half a month to earn

I don't understand.

110/7 is 15 hours, not 15 days.

The question wasn't, "how can I afford this?" though, it was "but what if I forget to renew?"

If you're already buying your own domain then this is a valid solution, particularly if you can't or won't set up autorenewal.

The affordability of paying for your own domain and also your email provider is a separate conversation entirely.

Then that's on you, because you would be the responsible party.

You could buy an 'ugly' domain. When it expires, no one would like to take it.

That’s what I do, along with running my own services. But either you run your own mail server, and the cost and complexity is prohibitive to most users. Either you outsource, and then all your data is still held hostage by a third party provider (though granted, any of the smaller players is likely to have some form of customer service).

If you use Thunderbird as your email client, you have all your data in an sqlite database on your computer, conveniently updated regularly throughout the day.

I'm like you - it's been on my todo list for about 8 years... the thing that keeps my exit velocity insanely high is:

1. Entire family on @gmail 2. All Android phones setup to send photos to a shared family@google account so no one needs to 'send me those pictures from Anon's birthday' - it's all getting sent into the same account.

I'm not sure how to seamlessly pull off #2 without trying to lift and move the entire family over to iPhone's or something like that.

Yeah, I agree, that's way too inconvenient... I shall wait to get banned first.

That's a recipe for disaster when a compromising photo gets spammed to the whole family.

Also, if it's the wrong kind of compromising photo, the whole family can lose the photos.

> I'm not sure how to seamlessly pull off #2 without trying to lift and move the entire family over to iPhone's or something like that.

Get an owncloud/nextcloud account somewhere (or host your own) and use that instead. Works pretty much the same.

I switched from Dropbox to that about 2 years ago, not problems at all. Email, I'm still hesitation though I probably shouldn't.

But even then you have to trust FastMail not to lock you out. Sure it's a paid service so less likely and I'm sure their customer service is better. But it doesn't fix the root issue of being dependent on one party.

If you combine it with a paid domain, then you can transfer your email provider even when locked out. Of course you risk loosing your emails, but you can setup a desktop client to always download all your emails or do periodic backups.

I've had trouble with e-mails from my own domain frequently landing in spam folders. I do agree on the control though.

I don't have these issues with Fastmail + custom domain, but you need to make sure that DKIM and SPF is set up correctly. Fastmail helps you to check and fix this.

My issues were with Zoho, with DKIM and SPF set up correctly. Would be interesting to see if the domain (or top-level-domain) or the e-mail provider is at fault. It's difficult to test given the number of signals that are involved in flagging a message.

That seems very odd. There's no reason why mail from any domain with good mail servers should just land in spam folders. You should investigate. Perhaps someone is sending spam using your domain?

Google is pretty unique here. You can have a dedicated support team at Google with a multimillion dollar account, and still be wack-a-moled by Google's automated systems.

The root issue is Google. This doesn't happen with most companies. This is specific to Google's culture, which treats customers as statistics. That comes out of how Google thought about search and ads, and doesn't work for anything else.

The secondary issue is being dependent on one party.

To be fair, I don't think other providers like Microsoft are much better, but also note that the service is equally bad if you pay for ads or cloud.

I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.

Every time I needed support for my office365 account I got it and it was resolved quickly and professionally. The account size is very small. Microsoft is in another universe compared to google.

Fair point, I was referring to the unpaid version.

With the office 365 support I did have a minor accounting issue that they didn’t intend to fix and support tried some standard responses (I needed the billing company name to be different from the Domain/account name, which isn’t possible and the support didn’t know and asked me to do a bunch of things before I figured out through a post that it’s not possible - an edge case that isn’t too much of an issue unlike being locked out)

Yeah that's just not correct. If you're paying Microsoft for an Office subscription, they will offer you support because that's your gateway into becoming a lucrative business whale of a customer. It's been that way for decades.

I don't have this fear with Microsoft and I've fully locked out a tenant admin before. They have support I can call and get help from.

Last time this happened with google I got lucky and found the password after trying for 3 weeks with support.

The bigger problem here even if you want to maintain your anti regulation stance is that a Google lockout prevents the user from acquiring the data that is rightfully theirs. If a lockout included something like a 90 or 120 day sunset period where you had read only export, even a harsh termination could at least be defensible.

That you should be able to obtain through GDPR in Europe at least, though it might be an issue to prove ownership if you didn’t provide your real name.

What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)

I would say that this applies to most of the companies with hundreds of millions of users. The account flagging needs to be automated and there is still some fraction of false positives. The appeal process is not easy because the false positive users are intermixed with bad actors. The human time dealing with the appeals is limited due to the sheer numbers of users.

For me the solution is to use a paid service or a free service at smaller business where employee/user ratio is better.

You can integrate with Thunderbird for local backup, and anyway Fastmail customer service is capable and responsive.

The critique on the earlier post is a little like saying it's still a problem that you need to trust your local supermarket for food. Which is true, but still much better than relying to avoid starvation exclusively on just-in-time shipments from an automated unstaffed ACME Growers Warehouse in Nowhere, USA.

The solution is to control your domain's DNS and to keep your own backups.

Disclaimer: happy customer of FM for 8 years.

The single time I needed support from them, I was replied by a person that understood my problem and while they didn't fix it (it was a feature request) it was added to their backlog.

The suggestion appeared live like a year after and was contacted saying it was available in case I still wanted to use it.

From Google, on the other hand, I never got a human reply to any issue. The one that pissed me off the most was that my location history pre-2015 disappeared for some reason and I was using it to geotag old photos. No response, no acknowledging of the issue, nothing.

Happy fastmail customer of 5 years here.

I found a UI regression a few months back with the way threaded messages were working. Notified FM, they replied within a few hours acknowledging it was a bug and they would fix it asap. Fix was out within a few days, and they followed back to with me to confirm it was fixed for me.

Yes, the import is actually extremely easy - basically one click where you authorize Fastmail to connect to your Gmail account.

"and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail"

I don't see this on their website, will this keep working if Google bans your account?

Why would you want to send mail from an address you can't receive replies at?

"Hi all, Please be aware that this account is closed and I may now be reached at foo@bar.baz."

Oh man I'd pay so much to be able to own bar.baz.

You'd likely regret it: https://www.bar.com

This has been on my to-do list for too long. I need to do it this week.

I also need to detach any accounts from using Google for signin.

The next priority will be having a replica of my photo collection somewhere.

This. It is very comfortable to use Google OAuth sign in, even if you have a custom domain, but I've run into a few services that will not let you log on with user/password if you created the account via Single Sign On with Google, regardless if you use the same email.

It made me do the same. It was discussed on HN earlier this week re: Google Cloud Print being sent to the Google graveyard.

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