Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail

Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by josephg on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:14AM (#12247901)

I have about 20gb of messages in gmail that I'm considering moving too. But really, I can't think of a single time I've needed to look at a message that was more than a couple of years old. Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.

My plan is to move to fastmail but and only migrate across the last year or so of messages. Google's data liberation front[1] lets you download the complete data set as an archive. Then I'll just import the most recent year into fastmail (or one of the competitors) and ask google to delete its copy of my mail archive.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

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Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by CaptSpify on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:36AM (#12248084)

> Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.

It does look intimidating, but it's not. I've been doing it for years with little effort. Once you get dns set up, and set up spam-assassin (which is super easy), It's been pretty much just sit and watch it work, IME

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Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by _RPM on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:23AM (#12248471)

I did that for a year on a 10 dollar box with Digital Ocean. In the end, the cost wasn't justified, as I can pay FastMail 120 a year for a lot more than what I was getting with Digital Ocean, and I don't have to worry about maintenance (updates, ssh configuration, etc)

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Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by CaptSpify on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:26AM (#12248500)

I'm not saying that running your own server is for everyone. If you think FM is worth it for you, then by all means, have at it. I'm just saying that running your own server is pretty easy, and all the supposed spam-maintenance work is overblown

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Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by _RPM on Monday August 08, 2016 @11:30AM (#12248528)

Yeah I agree. If running it yourself works for you, then by all means, you should do it. For me, I'd rather spend the 4 hours it takes to configure on something else.

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Re:Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail by robotresearcher on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:47PM (#12251828)

Why delete from Google? They already crawled the hell out of it. You don't have much privacy to lose from them, even if they actually do delete the messages.

There is some risk that your gmail gets compromised in the future I suppose, but the chances of your backup being borked might compete with that.

I plan to move away from gmail but I'll probably keep the old stuff there. Convince me otherwise!

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