Integrating with Fastmail
fastmail.com
fastmail.com
They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-data-i...
Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service. There is no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do with nearly every other email service.
The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
An attacker having shell access or a government getting plaintext dumps of whatever email conversations they want (when users don't expect it) are perfect examples of backdoors. AT&T giving the NSA a secret room for them to suck up all comms, encrypted are not, is also a classic example.
Every time the Coalition say the magic words "national security" Labor jump without even stopping to ask "how high".
The bridge on Desktop is OK, and their mobile app is better than every mobile open source android client I have seen.
No, they need a warrant
Separately "just use <public key encription>" implies it's easy to do. Even if we ignore the fact that software support is generally terrible, there's the much bigger problem of convincing the people you email with to use it too. If you're not doing super secret or illegal stuff that's generally not a thing that's going to happen.
However, if you don't like fastmail, who would you recommend instead?
Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another protonmail account, but I doubt it).
The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash. Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen. That's the society we've built and live in.
Can you elaborate what happened in the Opera era or are you under an NDA?
Fastmail is bootstrapped and profitable. They aren't beholden to outside investors trying to 10x their money. Fastmail also just doesn't have that sort of culture. (Source: I have friends there). They aren't looking to be a unicorn. They seem very happy to have a profitable business that they can nurture for decades.
Culturally, they're growing a garden, not launching a rocket ship.
Eventually the company will change hands. Knowing some of the people involved, I trust that when that happens, they'll find good stewards.
They pick up the phone and answer your questions.
They don't have you wait in a queue for 45min and affirm that your call is important to them.
They don't give new customers better prices than loyal ones.
If they update local bandwidth, you get that for the same price you paid before, without asking.
That's it.
I gladly pay less than $20 a month extra for all this peace of mind.
- must work well
- must be a paid service with proper support from a vendor focused on email (i.e. not consumer gmail)
- must allow custom domains (so I can regain control over my email if the provider goes under by updating MX records)
- must be the cheapest in the absence of compelling benefits (ruled out GSuite or protonmail)
Fastmail fitted the bill and seems to be working as I would expect.
Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.
But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.
For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
PM cut off access to my account for 4 days as the issue was being resolved with them. Like, yeah I get it shitty situation and they probably have to deal with a bunch of scammers but I think it was way too extreme of a response given I explained what happened and have been a long term customer.
I'm thinking about going back to Gmail now.... any ideas how to defend against this? For example, have a tested procedure to change MX records of the custom domain to another provider or even self hosted in order to restore email access while an issue is being resolved?
Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal email, nothing beats Fastmail.
But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one inbox.
I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great experiences with the import tools and security features. The admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great, its built right into the normal settings interface, and they have good privacy features with the relationship between the reseller and the end user.
[1] with the domain managed by Cloudflare
If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions, I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
Practically for email there is no need or reason to back door anything to do this though.
If asked they’d just pull the content straight from the server, same as Google/MS assuredly do for the US government. So I don’t think the threat model or risk of back doors is increased.
I’d disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who has two or three or four people at home who need their own mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too. But there are services that are far cheaper that have been operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
disclaimer: FM customer.
Had some initial buyer's regret for no reason in particular (did the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices will go up over time), but already feeling really solid. The web client is very snappy, documentation is good, able to import my Gmail messages, contacts, calendars, and even filters in a snap (though imperfectly). Looking forward to seeing how the API compares with my Google API scripts. Definitely seems to be more knobs and buttons for power users (more powerful filters, regex, etc.).
While not relevant to FastMail per se, also really glad to finally start the painful process of migrating decades of accounts to my custom domain email, where I hope it will stay forever. Growing concern about the (admittedly slim) possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator, as was the recent move to force the Google Apps stuff to a paid plan.
So far so good.
Setting up a custom domain lets me act on my anger every time I hear a story about google being shit to their customers: I pop open bitwarden, find something still on gmail, and move it over. I'm about half way through the alphabet. Feels good.
desktop clients are still better than web UI's, but fastmails web UI is the absolute epitome of 'good enough'.
Both?
;-)
My only big complaint is their woeful spam filtering. I get 1-2 spam emails a day, and I mark each and every one as spam. They're all of the same format; The subject line is something like [Symantec Invoice #431343] with the body being empty and a single .jpg attachment of a fake invoice. The company name and design of the invoice changes but it's always the same pattern.
I've contacted support but they shrugged their shoulders and suggested I just keep marking them as spam.
It's annoying, but I pre-paid for 3 years so I don't quite feel like jumping back to Google.
*Oh I just thought of another gripe that I didn't consider before switching: their calendaring system isn't really that useful for shared calendars unless the other people you want to share with are also Fastmail customers. This seems obvious when you think about it but I take for granted that literally everyone in my life has a Gmail account that I can share calendars with.
Also, I don’t trust Australia on encryption.
Re: calendars, with Fastmail you can use any calendar you want. I use iCloud for my calendars and just connect it to my Fastmail account.
One caveat is that Google calendar can’t subscribe read+write to an iCalendar feed. That’s their problem though. All other clients are fine, including outlook IIRC.
Also regarding calendars, can you share that calendar with arbitrary people who don't have Fastmail accounts?
Also I do have to praise their web interface, it's startlingly fast.
As a current user of Gmail and HN reader (where users blocked for seemingly no apparent reason and no realistic path of recovery), this possibility bugs my mind too.
While they do go up, users on legacy plan still pay cheaper. I am still paying $45 for the basically same feature as the current $50 plan.
Many years ago I was broke and going through rough financial strains. My yearly contract with Fastmail was up and I asked for a grace period. They did it, no questions asked, for 2 months.
It wasn’t a thing. When I renewed my contract we settled up and it was all good. It’s been quite a while now and I’m still glad to support them.
Thanks for sharing!
(i.e. if I'm developing a JMAP server, let me use the Fastmail app to test. If Protonmail wants to focus on server & security, let them recommend 'a JMAP client such as Fastmail' to their customers.)
Unfortunately though I tweeted (something snappier to that effect towards) the CTO a while ago; it's 'not on the cards' was the phrasing as I recall.
(I'm a former happy customer - I was doing something a bit weird receiving via SES, but no reason to think it wouldn't work, and indeed it did work for years as a paying customer until it broke overnight. Response was no sorry deliberate configuration change. I raced (no access to email!) to get something workable without Fastmail before my renewal that weekend; suddenly it started working again, no further contact from support, but by then I'd got my own solution almost working which I'd always intended on anyway. The JMAP part's still early WIP though, so I really would like to be able to use their client app as a solid reference.)
Other JMAP clients: https://jmap.io/software.html
I’m not saying that paid apps always receive great support at all times, but it’s about incentives.
The questions about business model should be answered on your website in an FAQ page or on the homepage.
If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect, Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because it sends traffic your way.
As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for open source projects in its current form. I've done some work on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1]. Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the perspective of a DNS provider.
If you're into domain/service-specific email addresses, give it a go!
https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/releases/tag/browser-v2...
That said, I do agree that using a domain you own is better practice. However, I have been burned there before - I used a .eu domain for pretty much all of my email sign-ups for over a decade, then had the domain yanked away because of Brexit. Yes, my fault for not realising that this would happen (I lay some of the blame with my domain provider for not mentioning it to me at all).
Can you own a domain name? I was under the impression that it can still expire, which makes this solution about just as bad.
The same thing is true of phone numbers, but it's more obvious that there's a finite number of... numbers... So they need to be reused eventually.
I can use my own domain too. It's pretty great. The web interface is simple but it has improved immensely since I've started to use it.
I guess this is the missing piece. One thing I miss from gmail is its ability to automatically sort incoming email into categories, even if you don't have filters. Fastmail has all the classic filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a major hassle. I've been using Sanebox to keep it less insane, but I don't like giving access to third parties.
I guess I'll play with this thing and write something to organize my inbox.
I filed a bug report over just that, using their web form, a few months ago. No news since.
So we can't prove it was due to email content. For all we know it could just be a dude named Richard who throws darts at a board full of usernames all day.
If Google increased their limits to 100TB it wouldn't really make them more attractive to my small business because I can already live within 100Gb without with virtually no administrative burden.
2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk for us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled data.
It's much better to get that out of the email server and into something secure and time managed so that it can be deleted when not needed.
You're suggesting 2TB is harder to manage with real enterprise management features and MDM functionality vs a provider who allows users to download a full copy of business emails to their personal devices? I like FastMail features, but if un-controllable data was the real concern then Google Workspace would be my go-to not FastMail.
The most recent feature is Fastmail calendar allows user to change the color of events. You will love the web interface more.
I forget the exact action described but I believe it was renaming a folder requires downloading every email in the folder and then uploading them all in individual requests which takes minutes. Stuff like this plague the protocol and hold back email clients. Rather than spending dev time building the best client, they waste it wrestling a protocol that has long outlived its usefulness.
And if Gmail doesn't support JMAP, why would anyone else bother adding it to their app?
Monopolies remain the primary blocker on innovation and until we get aggressive about forcing them to use open standards and interoperability, we are going to stay stuck in situations like this one.
could work, I feel like the bigger question is 'will email still be the standard' in 5 years -- it has iffy security, it's complex, nobody can self host it, it doesn't integrate well with other applications (i.e. 'push messaging' features)
but I think your point about postal addresses is important
part of the reason we still require snail mail for legal process is dumb legacy stuff, but the other part is that email isn't a good replacement
I have to use gmail for work and it is not great. Confusing tabs, sidebar re-arranged, some kind of interest based twitter feed order for my email. And it's always bugging me to use Chrome, which I don't.
1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..
2) I have a ton of documents in Google docs. Will those continue to work, and if not, what's the alternative? Google is terrible for privacy, but at least my sensitive documents aren't going to get stolen. I'm not sure I'll trust a startup to my personal docs. Self-hosting is such a massive pain, so not something I want to do.
Would love advice on transitioning away from the big G.
(I recently renewed my Fastmail subscription for an additional two years)
For some people it’s not just $50. If their whole family is on GSuite Legacy, for example, migrating away will be 4-5 times that, or more.
I wish Fastmail offered storaged-based pricing without a hard limit on the number of accounts.
If you’re in a first-world country and knowledgeable enough to be reading HN: how can that be? It’s one coffee a month. If needed, think of it as charity to support an indie developer.
#2 is not an issue. Your Google account and associated files and services continue to work. Email moves, nothing else.
Is Fastmail considered a startup? They've been there for a while.
Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They removed the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google Workspaces.
At least for me, the switch was a forcing function to move off.
FWIW, I have a custom domain with GMail for free. All incoming email to *@thedomain land in my GMail inbox, though replying is more of a faff since I have to individually add each one with its own app password pointing to GMail's own SMTP server.
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6328630?hl=en (the "Email forwarding" option) + https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en . People like lordofgibbons might have such a setup.
1. I wanted to sync a folder from my Windows laptop to the storage through Webdav, using the Windows Explorer (which they list as a supported client). I would get speeds of maximum 5kb. Opened a ticket, went back and forth and the customer support person suggested that I try with another (paid) client to see if the speeds are better. I downloaded a trial, tried it out and it was indeed better. Reported back and the person says something summarized as: see? here you go, just use that client (that cost another 50 euros)
2. I find this one much worse: they disabled support for FTP access to the storage. I get an email 1 (ONE) day before saying something like: hey, there's no FTP starting tomorrow, we did send an e-mail but didn't include _you_, here's 15 dollars for your trouble. I was using FTP actively to back-up the website of my small business nightly. Of course I email support and tell them hey, c'mon, this is unnaceptable, you can't just tell me one day before, give me a solution, something. The reply came almost immediately and said: we sent an e-mail informing everybody 3 months ago, deal with it (???).
That’s just the impression I get. Happy to be corrected
Pretend it doesn’t exist. It’ll be difficult to move away from Fastmail if you have to. Because they don’t have any free tier for that which is fine.
I regret using it on mailbox.org and I have used it at so many places in last many years that moving away seems tedious and I give up on it even before I start.
When I moved many years ago, I migrated well over 50,000 emails with FastMail’s importer. Other than taking a few hours (all async), there’s nothing to it. Enjoy!
(I’m unaffiliated, just a paying customer. If you care about customer support, privacy, or entrepreneurship, then FastMail - or another paid service - is a better fit than a free service can ever be)
That's like my grandmother who used to save every letter she ever got. Never actually read them again, but god forbid you suggest throwing them out.
Also, I wrote a lot of those emails (over 25+ years…). Sometimes it’s handy to refer to things I’ve written.
When I’m ready, I’ll set a rule to move incoming gmail into a folder so I can easily see all the senders with my gmail address. That’s when I can work on changing those accounts to use the new address. However … procrastination.
1. Email forwarding. Set a filter to label anything incoming to the old address.
2. Using a password manager. This winds up bring a map to everything important.
"No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage
"Use your own domain (you@yourname)" - marked as missing on Gmail. On Fastmail you're paying $5/month to have your own account, while in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with GSuite Legacy.
"No ads" - ads are also missing in paid Gmails accounts
"Notification settings that respect your attention" - Google makes a big deal of detecting the importance of a particular email threads. I doubt Fastmail is better at this than Gmail.
Also Fastmail claims better privacy, but I'm not sure what it is based on.
> "No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage
To the privacy conscious, that’s a feature. I and other users pay them enough not to have to harvest, collect, train ml models on, or use our data or metadata in any way, for predications or other pseudo-features.
> Smart Compose personalized suggestions are tailored to the way you normally write, to maintain your writing style.
"We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." (https://policies.google.com/privacy)
I have no idea what Google is collecting or selling, beyond legalistically phrased ts and cs.
Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.
Why do you think so? Specifically what are the reasons that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?
> Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.
I mean, technically I probably shouldn't be writing anything about Google products. But my area of work is so far from Gmail, that I only interact with it as a customer.
I don't know whether it will convince you that I'm not very biased about Gmail, but I do want to point out that I find at least one argument in favor of Fastmail pretty convincing and it's human support. Google has a pretty abysmal track record of handling accounts that they think are suspicious and if ever I change company I don't want to be in a position where my account is blocked without any recourse.
You can also just forward another email address to your free @gmail.com address and, after a quick verification process, send emails as that alias. Google Domains lets you forward email for no extra cost outside of the domain registration fee.
It's not a big deal for many use cases, but it's not the same thing as having email on the domain.
The predictions aren’t creepy, but using my emails in “anonymized” training data is creepy.
Note: I am a (very happy) Fastmail user, and I do not use Google at all anymore
About this API in particular, who is it targeting or what type of apps are expected to come out of this? Email clients that leverage Fastmail-specific features?
I would also love to be able to use widgets on iOS for the calendar.
So many things could be improved with the mobile app.
1. The "report spam" button doesn't also delete the message on the web version. You have to select "report phishing" instead to do both at once.
2. The UI for updating mail filter rules was buried under several layers of options last time I tried using it, and I don't think there was an easy way to update a filter and re-apply it to existing messages without going through several menus.
3. The UI on Android is sluggish when opening messages at times.
I still prefer Fastmail over Gmail, however. A minimal version of the UI like old Gmail's HTML-only view would be nice.
I know being locked down is part of Proton’s schtick, and I could kind of put up with only using their app for email. However, being unable to use any app for my calendar and contacts was annoying. It would have made the switch to iOS much easier. Further, the proton mail app on android developed a bug related to alternative routing that I was unable to figure out that led to the app not working for me for over a month.
I began realizing that I value being able to freely use my email, contacts, and calendars with whatever app I choose. The fact that I can also sync notes and reminders to my custom domain on fastmail from my iPhone is just a plus.
For operating a custom domain and being able to freely move between front ends for those services, I’m really satisfied with fastmail so far, and I’m actually using their web UI for email and calendar because it works well enough for me.
My only small gripe is the fastmail app on iOS doesn’t support offline emails. The native Mail app does, but the reason I prefer the fastmail app is native integration with calendar invites. Perhaps if Mail ever supported the JMAP protocol being explained in the post, I could happily use the app, which has become much better with iOS 16.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200#18997054 (2019)
https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty
> We are quite aware that users can set arbitrary From addresses on emails, that our SPF records allow arbitrary hosts to send email as our domains, and that our DMARC policy is not enforcing passes. These policy decisions are by design, and we track the actual sender in a separate header.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280461 (not as clear here)
> Fastmail domains have a DMARC policy of none
I currently have a gmail inbox and hey inbox with partial duplicates in each. I'd like to merge and de-dup my history as a one-time event and migrate to fastmail.
The gmail inbox has longer history. The gmail forwards to hey so hey has responses that don't exist in gmail.
I've already started with mbox exports and SQLite import, but I'd rather use something pre-existing. Any pointers?
For gmail you can use lieer to pull everything https://github.com/gauteh/lieer (tho it can take hours to pull everything). Fastmail has a similar tool https://github.com/elizagamedev/mujmap
If you unpack tour mbox into maildir then you can import that too into notmuch
After everything is in notmuch you can easily push your mail to fastmail with isync/mbsync https://isync.sourceforge.io/
As a bonus point you now also have a easily updatable local backup of your e-mails.
1. How to effectively migrate. Run dual email for a while?
2. How to effectively back up email all of my content so it is searchable. I've kind of used Google/GMAIL as a dumb filestore in that, I know random messages are there from 15 years ago that I can just use the google search for to bring up.
These are things I need to spend time on in order to take it seriously. I'd like to take it seriously.
1. To migrate I'd use their email import utility. I've never used it but I've heard good things. On the Fastmail side set up sender identities so you can compose (and reply) to emails using your @gmail.com address [if you're using gmail addresses]. On gmail side you can continue having a dual email setup by having gmail setup forwarding such that it forwards the email and keeps a copy in gmail. I have 4 gmail accounts setup this way, so I know that I can always fallback to gmail if there's an issue on Fastmail (haven't had one for over a decade with this setup though).
2. Fastmail indexes emails so they're searchable via their web UI. It's pretty good, I've not really had any issues.
In my opinion, the best way to use Fastmail is to bring your own domain. One really cool thing about Fastmail Web UI is that it integrates well with catch-all email addresses, so you can have <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com and when you get emails to that address, when you click Reply it automatically sets your sending identity to <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com. This ensures your correspondence is consistent with the email aliases you use.
For each new service, I'd sign up with my new custom domain email instead of my Gmail. I'd continually check the Gmail for emails that I cared about and would update my email for those services/mailing lists as they came in. Over the period of a couple years.
I maybe move one email over a month these days, so we're just about done. With a custom domain, I'll never have to do this again.
The best time to start is a few years ago. The second best time is now.
1.i switched emails over as i logged in so it wasnt as daunting. i did move over biggies like banking and daily stuff immediately 2. later i setup gmail to forward all mail to <gmail at my domain> so i dont miss the stray actual email to old address
thats it. 12 domains and zero problems later! i should mention, fastmails spam filter on the default settings is doing drastically better than gmail did for a publicly posted email
For what it’s worth, I signed up to fast mail yesterday, onboarding vs my cloudflare managed domain was a breeze and so far no issues (it’s email hosting (and their iOS app isn’t great), so there’s not much to get excited about on a day to day basis - apart from a long term appreciation of privacy first email).
I have just started using the Spark Mail App - now that I am excited about…if it lives up to its hype, it will be a great addition to my workflow.
I recently found a calendar UI bug and it took about 6 back and fourths with the customer support first line over a week before they (said they) passed it to the devs.
Not the best bug reporting experience. But then again I can't even fathom how I would have reported it to the Google or Microsoft/o365 equivalent.
Initially I thought this was due to a feature in IMAP that Fastmail didn't support (well they use Cyrus IMAP so the problem would stem from there). A back and forth with their customer service and they immediately piped it to one of their developers because it was technical and was discussing low level IMAP commands with debug transcripts from Mutt.
Turns out Mutt was using an outdated/legacy IMAP command that had been superseded by a new command with its own RFC.
Was able to patch Mutt and everything started to work correctly and look consistent.
It's not everyday you have a email provider service help you debug/troubleshoot your mail user agent which leads to actual improvements.
Thx.
I've been using Mailgun for that as a separate thing; Mailgun is great but the weird lack of API key management freaks me out. Exposing one key exposes EVERYTHING and you have to cycle through all the projects that use your account. So annoying.
I wonder if this is going to cause spam headaches for Fastmail and lower their sendability though
I just use SMTP for this (with FastMail). FastMail is not really intended for this as the limits and the like don't really scale to large services, but overall it works well enough (you can create an "app password" which can only access SMTP).
Work uses Gmail, though hopefully we can convince them to drop that in the future. May be a time to try fastmail then. It's a hard sell though; businesses get a lot out of the box with GSuite.
When Russia was sanctioned for all the atrocities and Visa/MC became unavailable for them, Fastmail decided to keep providing them services for free.
So now if you out of Russia you must pay, but it’s free if if you in a country where 80% of population cheer war crimes.
My only issue is the spam filtering isn't nearly as good. I need to regularly check spam.
If there's one thing that will finally push me to jump to something different it would be if spam filtering becomes ineffective.
So I ended up build an email forwarding service, it runs on my own domain, forward email[1] back to my personal gmail. So I still have full control at my own domain level, have the flexibility that gmail give me, and have a REST api to access email.
Having this access REST API[2] in hand, I have been thinking I maybe able to scrape bank alert email to build out a a read-only API for my own banking transaction.
---
[1]: https://mailwip.com
Now I have my personal and side business on fastmail.
UX is simple, service is reliable. Keep up the good work.
I don't need storage space to store attachments files.
The only thing that matters to me in email is spam detection and the ability to sort and delete as much mail as possible.
And who's your patron?
this is 2022
gmail is free for 15GB, 500MB is not a lot to ask
I'm happy to pay my ESP so you don't have to and so they don't collect your email data (as sender or recipient). You're welcome.
Fastmail is mail, calendar, contacts, some file storage and fantastic support.
- the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs
- the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to power their profiles of users for ads
- the fact it records nearly every transaction and vendor I've used, is scary
- I recently sent a friend a one word subject with a link to a tweet and it was red flagged as dangerous sender and content in my friends Gmail, he sent me screenshot
- the fact Google is so deeply integrated to state now, in other verticals like YouTube and this disinformation hunt against free speech against anyone who doesn't agree with what you should see or read
Time to switch folks, $50 a year to me is worth it.
I was lucky in that the first time I encountered one-click sign-on was in the early days when Facebook was aggressively pushing it. There was no way in hell I would give Facebook the discretion to allow me access to integrated services, so I created a login for the service. That lesson has stuck with me ever since and I'll never use these integrated logins. If you lose access to your Google account (which more and more people are experiencing for any and no reason at all), you also lose access to any integrated services. That's crazy. I wish more people would take that consideration seriously.
They have made very explicit statements about not using email content to target ads. So it's neither "known" nor "blatant".
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows_...
-
There's just no ambiguity in Google's statements about email contents not being used for any kind of advertising purposes.
Why pay $5 to fastmail when Microsoft offers heaps more.
Email is so foundational to online identity, that I would rather pay for the services of a smaller company that sees it as their main business, rather than an also ran arm of a massive big tech company who sees customer support as an outsourceable cost center to be cut to the bone.
I believe the API is more for the management of a FastMail mailbox. For example, this might allow IFTTT to monitor for emails and take an action.