masnick

Yep! FastMail is great. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

Yes, FastMail. I wrote a blog post a while ago about switching from Gmail: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

> It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

I think GitHub is moving in that direction. We're not talking about the general public here -- we're talking about people who can write HTML. There's not a big stretch from that to working on a static site via the GitHub website (you can create/edit/delete files online now).

For a single-person project, the GitHub for Mac app is probably easy enough for at least some non-devs to figure out. I've got some of my non-dev friends to use it for sharing statistical analysis code. It's not perfect but it's doable.

With that said, I definitely see where you're coming from now.

Thanks for your reply!

I definitely agree that all things AWS are terrible in terms of learning curve and usability. It's easy to forget how unintuitive setting up static hosting on S3 is (bucket policies, ugh).

So I guess your real competition is either (a) GitHub as that becomes more accessible to non-developers or (b) traditional FTP-accessible web servers. There's definitely room for improvement in both.

Best of luck to you with your launch.

(One of your competitors has a really neat feature that magically makes static web forms work -- https://www.bitballoon.com/. This seems like a great feature that really sets a hosting service apart from a FTP-accessible web server. Making a contact form is non-trivial, much more so than using FTP IMO.)

Thanks!

It's probably also worth noting specifically that CloudFlare offers some JS optimization/preloading features: https://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer

One is in beta and one is for Pro accounts only.

It seems to me like the set of people who (a) can make a static HTML site and (b) can't figure out to use Amazon S3 or GitHub Pages or a traditional host like http://nearlyfreespeech.net is quite small. But it seems like this is the set of people static hosting services are targeting, or am I missing something?

It's worth noting that you can get more or less the same functionality hosting a static site on Amazon S3 with a free CloudFlare account for CDN + JavaScript/CSS minification. Unless your site has tens of thousands of visitors a month, S3 will be essentially free -- it would take a LOT of traffic to cost more than $10/month.

Uploading the site to S3 is marginally more difficult than uploading to Forge, but if you can write HTML you can probably use one of the many GUI S3 upload tools.

I'm not trying to be a jerk about this -- I'm genuinely curious who the target customer is and how Forge (and similar sites) differentiate themselves from existing services. What problem is Forge solving?

(One way Forge is definitely different is great UI design. Props to whoever did their design work!)

I would recommend FastMail over other mail services to founders. Its features are fairly comparable to gmail (and presumably windows live mail, though I haven't used it). Additionally, there are some advanced features that seem particularly useful to small companies: the capacity for setting up lots of aliases pointing to multiple destinations, the ability to add super cheap small-storage accounts (good for interns), the ability to share folders, and Sieve filter scripting support all come to mind.

They also have a pretty transparent, non-evil privacy policy. http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/02/updated-privacy-policy/

Plus, you're now supporting a small independent company! http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-st...

I wrote a blog post about switching from gmail to FastMail that will give you an idea of the service if you haven't seen it before. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

I'm surprised they still apparently have the big banner ad on the right-hand side. I know they have to make money somehow, but it really detracts from an otherwise pretty good-looking design.

Yesterday I saw someone using the previous version of Yahoo mail, and that banner ad had a strobe effect on the border that was constantly flashing. I'm amazed people put up with this -- I guess people have probably developed pretty strong ad blindness (hence the strobe ads).

If I ran a web mail company, I would not want to be part of the arms race of user ad blindness vs. more aggressive ads. As a user I'd take google's textual, potentially relevant ads over this any day. (No, I do not care if google "reads" my email. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/)

I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.

A lot. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944

I have Arq (http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/) set to back up my ~/git folder every hour. At most I can lose an hour of work.

This came in handy once when I accidentally did the equivalent of rm -rf ~/git. Lost 54 minutes of work.

Arq is Mac-only, but you could accomplish the same thing with https://www.tarsnap.com/ and a cron job. Both are changes-only backups so there shouldn't be a huge performance hit.

I also use Time Machine when I'm at home but only sort of trust it.

Why is this on the front page? It sounds like a bug with a web form and a problem with non-responsive customer service, neither of which are uncommon.

I just use http://forecast.io saved to my home screen.

Yep. I was able to read it by manually adding the post's URL to http://instapaper.com and then looking at the text version.

+1 for z. It's the primary way I navigate between folders at the command line.

I think government surveillance is an issue because people can be arrested or harassed for things. I still don't see what harm can come from a private company having my data as long as they don't share it or use it for something nefarious. I don't see the threat of that happening with google.

To be clear these are two very separate issues: government surveillance and privacy policies of corporations.

We agree on the first point and disagree on the second.

If I'm wrong on the second, please give me a plausible example of something google would do with user data that would be actually harmful besides sharing with the government.

> Wow, that's a rant you wrote!

Thanks :) I'm tired of seeing this kind of post over and over again. At best it's misguided in that it's only telling half the story, at worst it's linkbait.

> We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it.

Well said. If you care about security, this is the answer. We really, really need good, ubiquitous email encryption software. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely to be widely adopted anytime soon.

> If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.

The holy grail of online advertising is ads that provide value to the user. This is the model behind sponsors of nerdy podcasts (http://5by5.tv). The ads reads can actually be helpful. It's not easy to do with a user base as diverse as Gmail's, but I'm sure Google is trying.

If you're talking about government snooping, they most likely can aggregate information from different sources.

If you're talking about the nebulous "one company has all my information and may do something evil" argument, I still say that it doesn't matter. Email is by far the most sensitive thing most people do online, so if there was a real threat from a company having all that information, also having searches is not substantially worse.

Regardless, I still don't see a credible threat of harm from Google having this information that outweighs the actual threat of hacking.

In my opinion, this kind of argument is demagoguery and ignores practical security concerns.

For the average person, which is more likely?

(1) A hacker taking over their email account to get bank info, etc.

(2) Some nebulous threat from Google having too much information about you.

Google and Gmail offer some of the best security controls and threat detection of any webmail provider that I've seen (pioneered two-factor authentication for email, warn you about strange sign-in activity on your account, allow you to kill other sessions, etc.).

If the outcome of this kind of article is people move to less secure email because of some intangible threat, I think it's a net harm. Gmail is still the best choice for my mom.

I wrote about this more than a year ago at greater length on my blog: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ and there's more discussion on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582609

My point is that any post criticizing Gmail for it's business model should also consider what is realistically a problem in the actual world (hacking) and hopefully offer some advice on what to do about it. I'm not sure this kind of "Google reads all your email and it's terrible. Full stop." post is very helpful.

Ok, a couple more things to preempt the inevitable trolling:

(1) Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable. We sorely need easy-to-use, widely used email encryption. Google isn't likely to do this because it would be counter to their business model, and this _is_ a problem.

(2) I don't use Gmail myself, but not because they are algorithmically reading my email. I switched (to FastMail) because I don't like the design direction of the Gmail UX, the FastMail UX is substantially faster, and the support is better (i.e. it exists). However, given that the average webmail user (a) doesn't want to pay for email and (b) is going to use one of the most popular services by default, I still think Gmail is a good choice.

I recommend listening to http://5by5.tv/b2w. Merlin Mann has really good advice about being productive and about life in general. My description isn't doing it justice, but I promise it's worthwhile.

(Start with with the first few episodes to get a sense of what the show is about -- don't start with the current episodes because there's a lot of inside baseball that won't make sense or be interesting.)

OP here.

As a newcomer to VoIP, a lot of it is confusing. I don't consider myself dumb or technically naive, and I've found it pretty difficult to get my head around how all this stuff works.

The Obi is so close to being an awesome consumer device and it was no problem for me to set up, but it's not at the "I can buy this for my parents" level of easy yet.

(FWIW, people like windexh8er totally don't help this situation. Well-reasoned suggestions and links to good documentation would serve the community better than trollery.)

OP here. That looks awesome -- exactly the kind of thing I want to set up one way or another.

I also want to have a Google Voice-style online interface for voicemail, starting conference calls, etc. I think there's a lot of potential in an open-source web app that has these features and makes the SIP setup stuff a little bit easier than having to go through the general Plivo dashboard.

> I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors

I wrote this a few days ago...it spent some time on the front page here at HN: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

FastMail isn't free, which is a plus in my book (clear business model not involving ads). It is comparable or better than Gmail in all the other ways that matter to me. See my post for more details.

Poor hand hygiene is a huge cause of preventable, hospital-acquired infection. See http://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/tools/who_guidelines-handhygien... (pdf).

I'd rather have my doctor wear a tshirt than wear a tie: ties are known to spread infection. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99526&page=1

I suspect the same could be true with long sleeves.

So I've been told :)

I've been using email since like 1996 but had never seen that kind of thread hierarchy display until I used MailMate. I can't believe all these email clients have been holding out on me!

Thanks!

That's a lot of email...how much does it cost to store on gmail?

I've heard the same thing, but it hasn't really been a problem for me.

If it was, I'd try http://mailroute.net. Apparently it's supposed to be pretty good at handling spam.

I actually use iCloud because the Google Calendar -> Calendar.app syncing was pretty flakey. Obviously that's a bad choice if you're not all on Apple devices, but if you are I think it works pretty well.

Based on this excellent post (https://kkinder.com/2013/05/21/leaving-googles-silo-alternat...) it seems like there isn't a great drop-in replacement for Google Calendar (except for iCloud).

Yes, you can use as far as I can tell an unlimited number of domains and aliases in a single account. Another plus over Google Apps is that the aliases are domain-specific (as far as I could tell, aliases for Google Apps applied to all domains).