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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

I've been on Fastmail for many years. I didn't manage to _quite_ get rid of my gmail address, but it's close. I don't have to open gmail at all - and any mail that still makes it that way is forwarded to Fastmail.

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.

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For many of us, we aren't trying to get rid of the gmail account (as you would still need it for the play store on android devices and so on), it is to break the dependency on google in the event that they nuke the account and being unable to recover from it. Example: I use my gmail account for my bank, municipality and even our tax authority. If am not able to access my email address (and mobile number for that matter), it could potentially have harmful consequences when interacting with those entities. The idea is to be able to put the gmail on the back-burner and only use it when needed, basically to become immune to the whims of google and their ban hammers.

You can sign up for a Google account without signing up for a Gmail account.

... filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a major hassle.

I filed a bug report over just that, using their web form, a few months ago. No news since.

You can apply the new-style filters against existing emails in the "preview" window. That won't help if you're heavily using custom Sieve scripts, but it does handle a lot of common scenarios for me.

thats my only gripe too, however setting one up in the search ui appears to let you run it on existing mail as a workaround

$9/mo for 100GB doesn't really compete with the $10/mo 2TB Google plan or the one I have now for $12 and get unlimited storat

Except hopefully they won't deplatform and take your emails unlike Google, if their AI doesn't like your email content

Go on give us just one example of Google killing someone's account due to email content.

You got 'em. Google rarely reveals why they killed someone's account.

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.

It doesn't have to be limited to email. They will kill your whole account for a perceived violation on any service. There was a story recently where a father had his account terminated because he took a photo of his son to send to the doctor which auto uploaded to google photos and was flagged by the AI and reported to the police. The police check it and confirm its a false alarm but Google refuses to unban the account meaning the guy lost access to his email and phone number.

Same exact thing happened to me but thankfully it was a throwaway account (on my domain in fact) since I knew there was risk - thankfully they didn't cancel the whole domain for it...

I've been using gmail for my domain (free gsuite legacy) for 10+ years though I'm careful to not do anything that could be misinterpreted on the service particularly through google photos or youtube

I actually used fastmail for 10 years prior to gmail but abandoned it in 2010 or so because imap/calendaring/etc. wouldn't meaningfully sync with my iphone but gmail had full free activesync (which I still miss a bit...)

I still keep a basic inexpensive legacy fastmail account just for some sieve scripts and cleaner smtp than gmail offers...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

RSD Academy has been all sorts of messed up after Google flagged the guy's photos. He had the rsdacademy.net domain hosted with Google and lost access to that. He lost access to the YouTube account that handled all of the academy videos. He lost docs for his draft textbook. Granted, he probably should have not tied everything to a personal account. On the other hand, Google shouldn't be able to lock everything.

This comment has to be missing a "/s".

100GB is… a lot of email.

Yep, at some point it doesn't matter how much storage Google give you or at least that's the case for the majority.

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.

>2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk for us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled data.

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.

No, I'm not suggesting that 2TB is harder to manage than 200GB (even though it clearly is because there's more in it to keep tabs on).

What I'm saying is that we have a policy to not use email as long term storage because it's considered bad practice. As such we don't gain much from Google offering more storage space because we wouldn't use it anyway.

We're a only a small business and I know that's different once you grow beyond a team you can fit in one room.

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