Ask HN: Gmail migration? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Gmail migration?

8 pointsedj12 comments

Hey All,

I'm planning to switch from an @gmail.com address to an @<myname>.com address.

The purpose of the switch is to use a better email address. Beyond that, I'm also concerned with organization/searchability, travel-friendly access, privacy, and reliability.

I have a couple of choices for email providers: self-hosted or Google Mail.

I like the idea of having the privacy and security self-hosting offers, but I've never set up a mail server before and I don't know what options are out there. Is any self-hosted solution anywhere near Google's UX and ease of use? Or is Google so far ahead of the competition with its labels and search that it's not worth self-hosting? What have you chosen in this situation?

In addition to choosing a mail server, I'll need to migrate several tens of thousands of emails accumulated over several years. I believe this is possible manually via IMAP, but it sounds slow and tedious. As in, more-than-a-day slow and tedious. There are services that can migrate emails. The best-seeming one I've heard of is YippieMove -- http://www.yippiemove.com/

Has anyone here used YippieMove to either migrate from Gmail to Gmail, or from Gmail to self-hosted email? Does it do what it says on the tin? What about security? It's bad enough that Google has access to all of my messages -- I'd prefer that random employees of another company not read them, too. What kind of security/privacy assurances can YippieMove or others provide? What kind of precautions can one take prior to using a service like this?

Any and all input is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

You said "privacy and security" but for a personal email, there's a much bigger problem... spam.

It's been a couple years since i tried it, but I used <name>.tld for email like you're considering. I never received more than a few emails a day, but it was greatly outnumbered by spam. probably 100:1. gmail and Google Apps mail is the tits with spam. false positives (or negatives) are very rare on the order of 1 every month or 2... probanly 1:1000 emails.

If you use Google Apps for email, it syncs right in with android devices and is subject to the same security (good or bad) of gmail. Even if you're an experienced sysadmin (irrelevant of os) it will take an order of magnitude more time to setup and maintain the infrastructure than if you just use google.

yeah yeah i know, i'm suckin their junk pretty hard... but the beauty of it is that their stuff 'just works'. It's hard to beat.

I've found Rackspace Mail's spam filter to be better then Google's. It's $2/month per mailbox, with a minimum of $10/month across the account (all domains/mailboxes).

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/

Good point. I've been on Gmail so long I forget that spam isn't a solved problem everywhere.

I've migrated to and from gmail for myself and multiple clients. I'd recommend staying with Gmail until there is a compelling need to change. If you're concerned about the googlebots selling your data then go with a more traditional email host like rackspace or fastmail.

IMHO you only need your own email server for extensive logging of email traffic for regulatory reasons. Or if you have a corporate environment with people who need shared mailboxes/centrally managed email.

edit: IMAP move works fine btw. It can get a little weird with the way it handles multiple labels though.

edit2: Gmail presents labels as folders in IMAP. So multiple labels = same email in multiple folders. There are also Gmail specific IMAP folders like All Mail that are under a Gmail folder. I encourage you to take a look at it using Tbird or another IMAP client. You will have some loss of structure when moving away from tags and into folders so just make sure you know what you're losing and where.

In what way do multiple labels make IMAP move weird?

Do labels get transformed into folders? And then you end with duplicate emails in multiple folders? Or something else?

Yeah, Labels come across as folders if you try and access them in anything that isn't made specifically to handle them. It makes it a huge pain when you have more than one label because things could wind up where you don't want them to be or maybe duplicated into both.

Some thoughts:

* privacy and security: you don't have any with email. It moves in plaintext across the Internet. It'd be silly to pretend that your own mail server doesn't help some, but you might be better off feeling insecure. You'll keep sensitive data out of your email, and if you have to move very sensitive data across email, encrypt it. If you move unencrypted data across the Internet, assume it's become public information. Personally, I feel that Google is good with privacy and security. I'm happy with it. http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... I use two-factor authentication on my google account, and it alerts me if it's been accessed from unusual IPs/locations. Frankly, Google does a better job of protecting my privacy and security than I would. I wouldn't audit my log files. I believe there's a fair chance my privacy and security would go down by switching off of gmail.

So, I went to namecheap, registered a domain, and it forwards email to my existing email address. If Google locks me out of my account permanently, there's a layer of indirection with my gmail account. I'll point namecheap's mail forwarder at my new email account.

I have also considered moving (for different reasons), and my current short list is fastmail[1] and rackspace-hosted-mail[2].

Been thinking about it for a while though, and haven't yet made any decisions yet. sigh

[1]: https://www.fastmail.fm/

[2]: http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/

FYI, I faced the same choice. Tried both and had a significantly better experience with Rackspace. Their push IMAP is fast. Good status page that's never missed an outage. Techs seem knowledgeable when opening a ticket.

I've been using FastMail for years, and I've looked into Rackspace Email recently, and back when it was Webmail.us. FastMail's interface is definitely superior, and their beta interface[1] is on par with Gmail.

If you're using a desktop client with IMAP, then the decision matters less, but definitely take the time to check out FastMail Beta.

[1] http://beta.fastmail.fm

I would primarily use imap, but good to know. thanks!

been using lavabit.com for a while. give it a try.

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