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Comment by conradk | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see several posts about people leaving Gmail in the recent months pop up on HN.

What I don't get about this one is that the author, Christopher, put the email server on a Digital Ocean VPS. If I'm not mistaken, DO is a US company and the gov can probably get access to the server's contents as easily as to a Gmail account.

Of course, if Christopher uses PGP for everything, then the gov would still have to find a way to decrypt stuff. But PGP doesn't seem to be commonly used (yet).

I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.

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1 - Gmail is a much bigger and jucier target than any VPS provider. Though the bigger and more popular the VPS provider is, the jucier a target it becomes.

2 - Siphoning data from Gmail is much easier for three-letter-agencies than breaking in to coercing every VPS provider out there. Though the bigger and more popular the VPS provider is, the more likely it becomes that these agencies will go to the trouble of spying on them.

3 - Fastmail's servers are in the US.[1]

[1] - http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...

1- I'm not talking about anything being a target. I'm saying the US gov can get access if they want. And Gmail or DO won't be allowed to talk about it.

2- Not "every VPS provider", but the big ones, like AWS and DO. The NSA apparently had access to the fiber cable used by Google a few months back. They can probably easily get access to any other cable.

3- Yes, so? Did I say anything about me moving to Fastmail to get away from the US gov? The US gov will get to your data wherever you are if they actually need to. It's hopeless to try and hide your data. The only solution I see is encrypting it with something like PGP. They can easily find and save everything. But they can't decrypt everything. My move to Fastmail is about not having my email screened by robots to serve targeted ads. And making me less dependent on Google (which I think is the main topic of this thread).

I wish Fastmail would add servers in Iceland.

They already have a datacenter there, it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables), a sensible government and sensible, transparent judicial processes.

> it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables)

Not as well as you'd think. We see substantial packet loss to Iceland for long periods at least once a week, and very occasionally the entire country disappears from the internet (maybe every couple of months).

Also so far we haven't found a datacentre that we feel we can trust to care about reliability as much as we do. I've just spent the last four hours dealing with our entire Iceland presence being taken off the internet because someone at the datacentre misinterpreted our normal replication load as a denial of service and blocked the entire thing.

We're trying, but so far we do not have the confidence that we could reliably provide user-facing services from Iceland, or at least not to the standard that we do from New York.

I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.

Yep, me too. My primary reasons:

* I am moving back from Mail.app (+ Google Mail interface) to mutt. Google's non-standard IMAP drives my totally crazy. Now I use mutt-kz + isync + notmuch + msmtp. Thanks to mutt-kz/notmuch, I have full threads, even when they are cross folder and fast search.

* On the occasions I do need Webmail, Fastmail's web interface is indeed insanely fast.

* More control over filters, etc., down to writing Sieve scripts. (I don't use tagging in notmuch, since it is not portable to mobile, so I use virtual folders in mutt-kz with 'folder:' queries.)

* Google is becoming too large and intrusive, and I don't want all my data to live with them.

* I would rather support a smaller company that contributes back their improvements to an opensource IMAP server (here Cyrus).

At any rate, notmuch is absolutely brilliant!

I'm a notmuch user, too. It's really awesome, but there's a couple things I haven't figured out yet that would really improve my setup. The most important issue is being able to sync tags across many computers. I'll remove the inbox tag from mail on one computer, and then I'll have to do it again on each additional computer that I use notmuch on. Do you have this issue, too? Have you solved it?

I basically decided to give up on notmuch tags. I index using notmuch and create virtual mailboxes using folder: search queries. In that way I get the best of both worlds:

- notmuch + mutt-kz shows me complete threads (including mails that I sent or mails that are in other folders).

- I can use Maildir folders as normal, meaning that changes are synced back and I see them on my phone and other computers.

Of course, this has the downside that an e-mail cannot have multiple tags, but I don't run into that issue much. I primarily use search when I look for something that is older than a few days.

My messy (and outdated) muttrc, if you are interested:

https://github.com/danieldk/dotfiles/blob/master/.muttrc

The only thing I want to change soon is to switch from the OS X address book (using the 'contacts' command) to the new 'notmuch address' command for contact completion.

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