Removing Google as a Single Point of Failure Part 2: Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Removing Google as a Single Point of Failure Part 2: Gmail

jakewharton.com

53 pointscuu50810 comments

Since the author is willing to still use Google services, an alternative time saving technique is to use Fastmail for custom domain and forward email to gMail. Configure GMail to send-as your custom domain. Once every few months do a Google Takeout. Leave forwarded custom domain email on Fastmail as another backup.

You could lose your GMail account, and not Lise much data if you try to get people to not use your GMail address.

You don't even have to forward, gmail can use POP to fetch messages from your email provider and it will also send mail via your providers smtp gateway.

If gmail goes down the mail will just remain on fastmail.

I do this for my own domain and it works fine, the only caveat is emails can be delayed by 30 minutes or so as gmail uses some heuristic method to time its POP fetches.

Its a good solution as you get gmail features like classification and auto reply hints, but you can ditch gmail at any time if google become too obnoxious.

One day one of my friend's kids asked the other one, "Is this a good use of my time?". Even though I know that my time is valuable, I wonder if we shouldn't question our actions a bit more as we wander through this minefield of software we've created over the last 10 years.

The last TWO times I had Docker on my Desktop, some update caused it to fry itself and bring my computer to its knees trying to restart something that it had "uninstalled". I said to it the last time that if it wanted so badly to be uninstalled, that it could just stay that way.

I've started to use VMs for a lot of tools that I want to just work. I snapshot them so I can roll them back if an update breaks them.

Quite a few are still on Windows 7 - but who cares, they still work and security vulnerabilities don't matter as they are for one purpose and have limited access only to their own sandbox shared folder.

Does Fastmail have good deliverability between it and Gmail/Outlook or other popular email providers? I always think about switching but I always worry I will run into a situation where my emails are just getting dropped.

I've been using fastmail for a few years and have had no deliverability issues. Previously I was hosting my own mail and decided to switch because of deliverability. And before that, I was using gmail.

I really like fastmail and recommend it.

I recently moved to fastmail and it was a great experience.

I like how they have wizard type things to help you setup your DNS records for SPF and DKIM - I know how to figure it out, but its nice to just cut and paste.

They also support 2FA for the admin account, and you can make a bunch of dedicated logins for each app which you can disable easily if a device is lost or compromised.

Not to add the amazing iOS setup experience. It was surprising to say the least.

Edit: been using it for 5-6 years now. Got three 3yr plan. It has been awesome and I can configure my own deliverability settings or leave it up to fastmail. I have it so that other services will send me failure reports but I haven't had issues at all.

I don’t understand what’s wrong with gsuite and using its data export features?

Reminds me of this incredible talk by Tom Scott: https://youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q

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