FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-encryption laws

Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by bravura on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:58AM (#19243609)

So I'm in the market for this, but what if you shut down while I'm on vacation and not checking my email?

I know that fastmail will be in business in two years, but I'm not so sure about you.

If you offered some sort of auto-backup option, so that even if you went down I could take my mail elsewhere, that would be more compelling.

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by Felz on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:30AM (#19243748)

I really can't imagine shutting down with anything less than 6 months notice. Do people really do that?

The infrastructure I'm running on really is pretty cheap. The biggest expense by far are the databases, which run about $250/month for two. If I had to pay out of pocket to support even just a few users for a year, I'd do it.

Anyway I think the best paranoid option (no matter what mailhost you're using) is to set up automatic forwarding to a backup address. Or you can use imapsync [0] from time to time, which is a bit finnicky but gets the job done pretty well. (I actually might try putting up a quick web interface for imapsync sooner or later to cover import/export use cases.)

[0] https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by mehrdadn on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:46AM (#19243823)

> automatic forwarding

Misses sent mail though...

> imapsync

If the emails are deleted on the server doesn't the client just delete them too?

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by cyphar on Monday February 25, 2019 @07:46AM (#19245199)

If you use mbsync, you can disable deletion synchronisation from the server (or disable it entirely).

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by gaadd33 on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:09AM (#19243646)

Does Fastmail offer an auto-backup option? Or any other email provider?

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by brongondwana on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:11AM (#19243655)

You can auto-download from just about anywhere that provides standard IMAP access!

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by ocdtrekkie on Monday February 25, 2019 @10:32AM (#19246301)

Bron, I do (kinda) take backups of my FastMail account via an Outlook sync occasionally, but I'd really much rather you also had a Takeout-esque "one and done" download that included calendar and contact data and all. For my major online accounts, I like keeping an archive of these, compressed and dated.

Is there any chance FastMail will implement this anytime soon?

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by ascar on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:27AM (#19243739)

Even POP3 should suffice for backups. It downloads the complete emails by default anyway :)

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by brongondwana on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:50AM (#19243841)

POP3 is tricky when you use server-side rules to file emails into multiple folders. You can use + login to fetch each folder individually, but IMAP is definitely nicer to work with. And of course JMAP is coming!

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Re:FastMail loses customers, faces calls to move over anti-e... by dannysu on Monday February 25, 2019 @06:15AM (#19244751)

I use offlineimap (https://www.offlineimap.org/) weekly to backup my email from FastMail.

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