Comment by educating | Hacker News Reader

Comment by educating | Hacker News Reader

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I'm glad you said this, because it was the reason I stopped also. I'll give it another try at home.

However there are a lot of times at work where having search results relevant to me is essential. Since DDG is all about not being the search bubble, to use them all of the time, I'd have to change the way I worked to bookmark my projects and search for my blog entries in the blog's search bar instead of just using the omnibox in Chrome (that is using Google) for everything.

Reason #2 is that search advertising helps pay for the GMail service that I rely on. I don't want to go back to my cable company's email accounts. Yuck. Terrible spam filtering and much worse webmail UI.

But, I'd like to stop using Google as much as the next guy. I'm waaaay too reliant, and I'd be surprised if the U.S. hasn't infiltrated their employee ranks, along with other countries, for greater influence and access to data than is even currently known by congress. Using Google is like living in a whorehouse.

With regards to your email: I recently switched from Google Apps (free tier) to Fastmail.fm and the transition has been pretty seamless. The interface is snappy and decent looking, and importing all of my gmail over IMAP worked well. On the other hand, I now pay a yearly fee for my email. The fee is fairly nominal (~$40/year for a mid-range account), and my money ensures that Fastmail doesn't need to harvest my content to keep the lights on.

Thanks for the advice, but I don't know that I'd place all my eggs in a basket affected by the politics and distance of the Federated States of Micronesia.

That's the problem with domains these days. Yay we're using a Libyan domain and whoops (remember- they took it offline http://readwrite.com/2011/02/20/what_happens_to_ly_domains_w...). io - British Indian Ocean Territory: same deal. People aren't thinking.

Yeah I think that's a very valid point. Thanks for the link -- was an interesting read :)

EDIT: Just as an aside, Fastmail is operated by Opera and runs on many domains that they control. For example, their IMAP and SMTP servers are messagingengine.com.

So, a US Govt owned domain. Remember Lavabit? Your email host is not good enough, unless it's, at least, your own. Then you have a whole host of new problems.

If you're not aware of it already, you might want to keep an eye out for Mailpile, which should have a bunch of the features of GMail (web-based, labelling, spam filtering) while being open source and allowing you to run it yourself (I'm sure hosted versions will pop up as well).

You can make the Omnibox use DDG.

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