I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
- There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
- There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop.
- Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it.
- Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy.
Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization.
Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.
(except for the aggressive spam filter)
Is this what you are asking about for mailto links? https://www.fastmail.com/help/send/openemaillinks.html
The spam filter can be customized, but I agree that it isn’t nearly as good as gmail’s. I have it configured to move messages with a score higher than 3.5 to spam which prevents all false positives for me, but 1 or 2 spam emails a week still get to my inbox. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html#cust...
I agree that the comment manager is barebones. Fastmail does support CardDAV so you could use a different contact manager but I haven’t had the need.
Edit: I swear I am not a Fastmail shill. Just a happy customer!
FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level.
They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02
Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
Never using Fastmail after that. :)
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect.
If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me.
As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
No major complaints so far.
Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.
That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.
> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.
Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)