I have to say FastMail works really well on my Apple devices. iOS and macOS have worked perfectly so far for mail, calendar and contacts.
The only pain point was 'losing' my custom domain Google Account when I cancelled G Suite. Migrating mail, etc. wasn't an issue as FastMail has a pretty solid import tool. However one area that caught me out was export/import of my 800+ YouTube subscriptions (that number shocked me aswell).
Turns out YouTube has no such functionality so I ended up having to hack a semi-automated solution but even that wasn't straight forward as YouTube has limits on how many new subscriptions you can make in a ~6 hour window.
I wish Google had some kind of "convert my G Suite account into a consumer Google Account" function instead the moment you cancel the G Suite plan any accounts simply vanish and you then have to sign up again for a consumer Google Account. Quite the pain in the ass.
Anyway it is nice to be free from Google's core services and I am very impressed with how smooth migrating to FastMail has been. If anyone is thinking of doing the same and wants to know anything specific feel free to drop me an email, info in HN profile.
Do you have any other registrar suggestions?
¹: https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/common_operations/who...
The domain is "thelittleshits.net" (I'm absolutely serious, I needed a domain for testing a deployment and couldn't come up with anything)
I find it very satisfying that a good engineer went on to succeed and would definitely trust the engineering competence of Fastmail.
Is there any service that will host my email with as many users as I want for a flat (or bandwidth/storage-based) fee?
Or if you want to pay for one mailbox somewhere and then have customized forwarding, I found this thing called Forward Email in another thread that looks interesting and I want to try setting it up self-hosted: https://forwardemail.net/#/
Huge props to any service that has an honest list of reasons not to use them. I'm a little concerned that one of those things is "no SLA", though; yes, mail delivery is resilient, but if I can't access email all the time I'm gonna be grumpy.
They've come in handy for a couple of my colleagues.
Additionally, mxroute does not seem to provide any trials. Its policies say that payment issues from the customer have to be resolved within 24 hours, but that refunds to the customer may take 72 hours. That seems unfriendly to me.
(Assuming that you are not talking about spam but actual important messages).
EDIT: Oh and as an anecdote I also have a FastMail account and as far as I can tell all my emails "land" on gmail accounts.
These benefits are broadly true of most paid-for private email hosting providers.
I'm sure they could sell that data (maybe even to Google) even if they don't sell ads themselves.
(I'm not saying they do read emails, but "more money" is a big incentive)
If they ever do start privacy farming then I'll be incentivised to move my domain to a separate supplier.
If I didn't care about that I'd just be using Google's "free" service already. So FastMail are incentivised to protect their business and to not compete head on with Google.
Why would I pay for something that gives me an inferior experience?
You have to do that yourself but personally I prefer being in control of that anyway.
I trust gmail's security more than tripit, thanks. I think I'd be more worried about the world learning of my trip history if I used tripit than if I used gmail for that.
And also, the average user does not care. They don't want to think about it even to the point of researching a service, they get used to their phone telling them they have a flight the next day, and they want that to keep happening. They don't think about how it works and if they did, "oh no my privacy" is not something they'd think afterward.
It's not "stupid". Caring that your data is not being used to make opaque decisions in other products that you have no visibility or control over is something that people are allowed to care about.
When it's just an email can be deleted and when it is you don't have to wonder if it's purged from 10 other systems. That it's not showing you is what some people want, regardless of whether you do or not.
Whether a product shows that data or not, it can still make those decisions if it has that data. Both Fastmail and Google have that data. It is certainly naive (if not stupid) to conflate data use with privacy and get suckered into spending money on that confusion. Data collection is what matters for privacy.