Category: internet

moving over to FastMail

I’ve been gradually working on moving all of my active online accounts over from Gmail to FastMail this week. I’d say that I’m maybe 60% done. (I have a lot of online accounts.) I’m liking FastMail and will likely pay for an account within the next week or two, before my 30-day trial ends.

FastMail has, so far, been entirely reliable, which is probably the most important thing with email. It’s easy to take reliability for granted if you’ve been using Gmail for years, but not all email providers are as reliable as Google can afford to be. FastMail has occasional problems, but they have a status page that they use to log any issues, and they seem to have been doing well recently.

As I’ve moved stuff over, I’ve been setting up rules in FastMail to file stuff into folders and keep my inbox clean. I should be able to use FastMail rules in place of OtherInbox Organizer. (Of course, I could also have used Gmail rules for that purpose, if I’d stuck with Gmail.) FastMail’s rule system is reasonably powerful, and compares well with Gmail’s system. If you really want to get fancy, you can actually write scripts in FastMail, though I don’t think I’ll need to do that. I do miss the flexibility of Gmail’s labels (vs. FastMail’s folders), but I think I can make a folder system work.

On iOS, I’ve been using FastMail’s iOS app. It’s good enough that I haven’t bothered setting up my FastMail account in the regular iOS mail app. I had always intended to do that at some point, but now I think I might just skip it.

I do want to add the account to Outlook on my desktop PC at some point, and I haven’t done that yet. I may do it at some point this weekend. FastMail uses app passwords for third-party mail clients, similar to Gmail’s system.

I’ve been reading through some old posts at MacDrifter to get some pointers on FastMail. Gabe has been a FastMail user for a while, and has blogged about it a few times, and also linked to other useful blog posts on FastMail.

When I’m done with all this, I should have a pretty clean system, and a pretty clean mailbox. I’m also using this as an opportunity to clean up my plethora of old online accounts. In cases where an account seems to be dead, I’m making a note of that in 1Password and moving the account to an archive folder. And in cases where I hadn’t updated my password in a long time, I’m trying to do that in addition to updating my email address. So that’s all a bit of a process. But it’s probably worth doing.

I’ve been thinking about the possibility that my new email address, since I’m using my own domain now, may be my last email address. Over time, I’ve gone through email addresses at CompuServe, GEnie, an old dial-up ISP, my current broadband ISP, Yahoo, and Gmail. The last three of those are all technically still active, though I only really use the Gmail account. But all of those have been my “primary” account at one point or another. I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with FastMail, but I think I’m likely to stick with my personal domain email for as long as I can, even if I switch it over to a different provider. This makes me think a little more about safeguarding it more than I ever did my Yahoo Mail account, for instance. There’s always a brief period, with a new mail account, where it really doesn’t attract any spam. We’ll see how long that lasts with my new account, and how good FastMail’s spam filters are, once the spam does start coming in. And we’ll see how long the account stays off Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned. I’m not too optimistic about that, but here’s hoping.

messing around with email services

As I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at alternatives to Gmail. I’m not really in any hurry to switch, and I like messing around with this kind of stuff, so I’ve been doing just that: messing around. My two main reasons to switch would be (1) privacy and (2) using my own domain.

I’ve continued to experiment with ProtonMail. Their webmail interface does (almost) everything I need it to do, and their iOS app is reasonably good. The main issue I have with ProtonMail is their current lack of IMAP support. I’ve also discovered that there’s no way to do a full-text search on your email, which is a problem for me. The (obvious) reason for lack of full-text search is that they store all of your email in an encrypted form, so there’s just no way to search through it. (You can search based on sender and/or subject line, so that’s helpful, but not quite useful enough for me.) So ProtonMail is out of the running for me, for now. If they ever get their IMAP bridge out of beta, I might try them again. (IMAP would, among other things, eliminate the search issue, since I could search in Outlook on my desktop.)

I also spent a little time messing with my 1&1 email. Since I’m already paying for it, I figured I might as well mess around with it a bit more. Their webmail interface is actually pretty good, but it’s got a few quirks that I’m not sure I like. So I set that aside and moved on.

I currently have an Office 365 Home subscription, and an Outlook.com account, so I thought maybe Outlook Premium would be an interesting choice, since it would allow me to use my own domain. (Whether or not Microsoft’s privacy policy is better than Google’s is arguable, but I think it is, at least a bit.) I actually went as far as signing up for it this morning, and adding one of my domains to the account. I like a lot of things about outlook.com, but there are a number of problems and feature gaps that make it difficult to use, and finding help for it isn’t easy either. First, it really wasn’t clear as to whether or not they were going to charge me for Premium. The sign-up screen was a bit confusing: it said the subscription would be free, and had a $50/year rate crossed out, but then it had a $20/year rate shown below that, and not crossed out. In the end, it was free, apparently, since they never asked for a credit card and it doesn’t show on my Microsoft services screen.

Setting up the custom domain wasn’t too hard. They step you through adding some DNS records. I had some trouble figuring out how to deal with some of these in the 1&1 interface, but that’s more 1&1’s problem than Microsoft’s. Once you’re set up, it works fine, though you’re pretty limited with what you can do. You can set up a few aliases on the domain, for instance, but you can’t set up a catch-all.

The big problem I had, though, was when I decided that I didn’t want to stick with Outlook.com Premium. It turns out that there’s no way to cancel the account or tell it to stop handling the domain. For paid Premium accounts, you can apparently cancel them from your MS subscription page. But free accounts don’t show there, and there’s no other way to cancel. It might be possible to cancel via MS support, but I found a forum thread that indicated that contacting MS support isn’t really helpful either. So, for now, my Outlook.com account still thinks it’s handling my domain, but I’ve removed the DNS entries so it isn’t. I don’t know if that’s going to cause any problems down the road. For now, I’m just going to hope it doesn’t.

I’ve been trying to avoid signing up for a FastMail trial, but I finally gave in and did that today. Signing up was quick and easy. I also went ahead and added my own domain to FastMail. They make it a lot easier than Microsoft by giving you the option to let them host the DNS for the domain. So I just had to set the DNS servers at 1&1 to point to FastMail’s servers. Then, FastMail just adds all the necessary DNS entries on its own. (The downside of this is that you can’t really use that domain for anything other than email once you’ve done that. But that’s fine. I’m not using the same domain for email as I am for my blog. And if you want to have more flexibility, they do allow you to keep hosting your own DNS and just add the records yourself.)

My main issue with FastMail’s web interface is that it only supports regular folders, and not tags/labels like Gmail and some other providers. I have a certain workflow in Gmail that relies, to some extent, on using labels in a way that’s not going to be possible in FastMail, but I think I can work something out so I won’t be too inconvenienced. I’m just going to have to change my workflow a bit.

Right now, I’m stuck in a bit of a limbo, where the nameserver change hasn’t quite propagated out everywhere, so some email to my domain is still going to Outlook instead of FastMail. So I guess I should lay off this stuff for a while and come back to it tomorrow, after work, and see if everything’s settled down.

At this point, I think there’s a fair chance that I’m going to stick with FastMail and gradually move stuff over from Gmail. I’ll start by moving some newsletter subscriptions and stuff like that, then eventually start changing all my various online accounts to use the new address. Thinking about how many accounts I have using my Gmail address, that’s going to be a long process. (The nice thing, though, is that once this is all under a domain I own, I can change email providers without having to change my email address again.)

unroll.me and email privacy

The recent mess with unroll.me selling user data to Uber has got me thinking about email privacy again. I’m still using OtherInbox Organizer with my Gmail account, and I still think their privacy policy isn’t unreasonable, but I am also thinking about the fact that it would probably let them do the same thing thing unroll.me did. Mind you, I also don’t think that selling anonymized data to a third-party is a big deal, assuming the data is truly anonymized. And I’m quite surprised about the level of vitriol about the unroll.me thing; I didn’t realize how many people were clueless about how services like that make their money.

I’ve also continued to experiment with ProtonMail. I haven’t had any real problems with either the web interface or the mobile app, so that’s good. I looked into their IMAP plans a bit more too. It looks like their plan for that is to have a “bridge” program that can run on your PC, which will encrypt/decrypt emails on the fly and interface with your desktop email program (Outlook or whatever). That’s good, I guess, but it would mean that you still wouldn’t be able to use IMAP on iOS, if I understand it correctly. I guess there’s no easy solution to that, given the way that their service is set up.

FastMail still seems like the most reasonable alternative to Gmail, and should be relatively secure. I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail yet though.

1&1 hosting plans

I’ve been using 1&1 for web hosting for a very long time. Their reputation is mixed, but I’ve never had any huge problem with them. An occasional hiccup, but not that often really. I’m currently paying about $6.25 per month for my hosting plan. But I just got an email saying that they’re changing me over to their “1&1 Unlimited Plus” plan, which will cost me $11 per month. This supposedly includes an 8% discount off their normal rate, which I guess would make the normal rate $12.

Looking at their web site, it looks like new customers can get Unlimited Plus for $5/month for the first year, and $10/month after that. So I’m a little confused about how $11/month is a discounted rate. Maybe I’ll e-mail them about that. At any rate, it looks like the new plan might include a free SSL certificate, which I’m currently paying $50/year for, so that would offset the price increase. (Of course, there are other ways of getting free SSL certificates these days, so I shouldn’t have to pay for SSL regardless.)

I don’t really have any intention to move off 1&1, but a price increase is always a motive to look around at alternatives.

Organizer and email follow-up

This is a follow-up to my post about OtherInbox Organizer from a few weeks back. They finally acknowledged that they’d made changes, via an email they sent about a week ago. Their main point was that the service is now much faster. I can’t dispute that; under the old version, emails would generally sit in my inbox for a few minutes before being filed. They were, I assume, running some kind of batch process that could only check once every few minutes. Now, it seems like emails are instantly filed. I’m not familiar with Google’s APIs for accessing Gmail, but I’d guess that they’ve switched to an API that’s more event-driven, where maybe they have a callback that gets called every time a new email comes in. Either that, or they just tossed more computing power at their old process, so it runs more often.

The one big annoyance from the recent change is that they stopped applying the general “OIB” tag to every organized email. (I mentioned this in the previous post.) Well, they fixed that as of last night, so I’m happy about that.

They don’t seem to have made any effort to restore some of the other related functionality, like applying a “receipt” tag to emails that look like receipts, or “shipping notice” to emails that look like shipping notices. But those functions weren’t working real well anyway, and I never really relied on them at all, so that’s fine.

In a nutshell, now that they’ve restored applying the general “OIB” tag, I’m pretty happy with them overall and will likely stick with them for now.

On a related subject, ProtonMail just announced some new features. They still don’t have IMAP/SMTP support, but they’re testing it and will probably roll it out before the end of the year. I’ve been messing around with ProtonMail a bit over the last couple of weeks, including installing their iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. It’s a pretty good app. Sometimes, apps for services like this are an afterthought, farmed out to a third-party developer, and the end result isn’t very good. But ProtonMail’s app is quite nice. Visually, it’s well-designed and looks good on both iPhone and iPad. It works well, and includes support for Touch ID. I haven’t quite talked myself into switching over to ProtonMail, but I like what they’re doing and they’ve made a ton of progress since they launched a few years ago.

Repealing Broadband Privacy Rules

As expected, the House voted to roll back the online privacy rules created by the FCC under the previous administration. The Senate passed the bill last week, so now it just needs to be signed.

There’s an opinion piece by former FCC chair Tom Wheeler in the Times, and a regular news article about the vote. And here’s the EFF’s blog post about it.

This happened on the same day that Trump rolled back Obama’s climate change policies, which is undoubtedly a bigger problem, but I’d like to think I can be indignant and upset about both.

You need a VPN

Most of the media attention to congress right now is focused on health care, and rightly so. But the current congress is pushing through a lot of other stuff too, and one particular item recently caught my interest.

There is a bill going through the House and Senate to roll back broadband internet privacy rules enacted under Obama’s administration. It just passed the Senate, along party lines. There wasn’t much coverage of it in the mainstream media, as far as I can tell, but I did find one good NY Times article.

The House bill has not gone up for a vote yet. I was disappointed to see that my local rep, Leonard Lance, is one of the co-sponsors.

I first learned of this bill through a blog run by Private Internet Access, the company I use for my VPN. Here’s their article on the House bill, and another one on the Senate bill. Of course, it’s in their best interest to call attention to this kind of thing, and maybe exaggerate it a bit, but I don’t think they did that here.

And here’s an article from Consumerist that goes into some depth.

There is, of course, coverage of this at the EFF blog too. The EFF post includes the typical exhortation to “call your lawmakers today” to stop this from passing the House. In my case, I don’t think calling Lance would do me much good, since he’s never going to vote against legislation he co-sponsored. Oh well.

I haven’t really been using my VPN service when I’m at home, but maybe I should start doing that more often. There’s no need for my cable company to know how much time I’m spending looking at photos of corgis.

Thinking about email services

Seeing the changes to OtherInbox Organizer this past weekend got me thinking about email in general. I’ve been using Gmail for more than ten years, and I’ve been using Organizer since 2011.

Every once in a while, I consider switching from Gmail to a non-free alternative. I last looked into paid email services in 2014. Not much has changed since then, but a few things have. Generally, the trend seems to be towards offering more space and charging a little more.

FastMail is probably the best example, and the likeliest candidate, if I were to switch. Their basic account is $30/year, for a 2 GB mailbox. That’s probably not enough for me, since I currently have about 2.3 GB in my Gmail account. (Of course, if I switch, I don’t need to bring all of my old mail over, but I’d like to, if I can.) Their standard account is $50/year for a 25 GB mailbox, which would be more than enough. That also includes the ability to use your own domain. (When I last looked at FastMail, a few years ago, the standard account was $40 and included 15 GB of storage.) They’ve got pretty much all the features you’d want in an email service: a nice web interface, IMAP support, an iOS app, two-factor authentication, calendar/contact management, and support for importing old mail from Gmail (or wherever).

I signed up for a free ProtonMail account back in 2014, when the service was still in beta. At the time, I found it to be too limited to be really useful. Looking at it again now, I see that it’s improved quite a bit, and it’s seriously worth considering for use as my main email account. The main selling points for ProtonMail are security and privacy. So if those are your main concerns, definitely take a look at their service. They have a pretty good web-based interface (much better than it was during the beta), and an iOS app (that I haven’t tried yet). They don’t support IMAP, though, since that just wouldn’t work with their secure architecture, so you’re stuck with either their web interface or app. You can’t hook your account up to Apple’s mail app, or Outlook, or anything like that. Free accounts have a 500 MB limit. Paid accounts are $5/month for 5 GB. One other downside with this: they don’t support any easy way to import mail from another account. (And since they don’t have IMAP, you can’t use an IMAP-based migration approach either.)

I host this blog at 1&1, and I have access to 1&1’s mail services as part of my hosting account. Occasionally, I think about switching from Gmail and just using my 1&1 account for mail. There would be a couple of advantages there. First, I’m already paying for it, and second, I can easily use one of my own domains, which are all hosted with 1&1. The included mail service gives me an IMAP account with 2 GB of storage. They have a web interface, which is OK but nowhere near as good as Gmail’s (or ProtonMail’s or FastMail’s, from what I’ve seen of them). And they have an iOS app, though I don’t think I would ever use it. The 2 GB limit is a little low; you can up that to 50 GB by signing up for a “business” account at $7/month. They also have Exchange 2013 hosting for $10/month, including a 25 GB mailbox, which is kind of interesting.

Of those three options, FastMail is the only really good one for me, I think. The 1&1 basic mail account has that 2 GB limit, and bumping it up costs a bit too much. And their web interface isn’t great. The ProtonMail service is pretty cool, but without IMAP support, there are too many things I just wouldn’t be able to do.

Well, I guess I still haven’t talked myself into switching away from Gmail. At this point, the one thing that might push me into doing it would be if OtherInbox Organizer becomes a problem. Then, I might be able to talk myself into switching providers, as part of an effort to switch to SaneBox or some other system for organizing my mail.

 

Organizing Email (and related privacy issues)

I’ve been using OtherInbox Organizer to keep my Gmail inbox clean since 2011. it’s a service that scans your Gmail inbox and moves commercial email into various folders under a main “OIB” folder, for example “OIB/Shopping” or “OIB/Finance”. It’s a good service and it’s free. I’ve had some concerns with it over the years, partly because of it being free. Obviously, they’re doing something with the data from their users to make money. I don’t necessarily mind that, if they’re just using aggregate data and not telling people which brand of underwear I’m buying or which books I’m reading or anything like that.

I hadn’t given them much thought recently, but, yesterday, some stuff changed, so I did some digging. Part of their service is a daily review email that summarizes all the emails they’ve organized in the past 24 hours. That email has looked the same since I first signed up for an account, but the design on it changed yesterday, along with a couple of other minor things. And, previously, they’ve always applied two labels to each email: the main “OIB” label and the more specific folder label, like “OIB/Shopping”. Now, they’re only applying the specific label and not the general “OIB” one. (Gmail, of course, doesn’t really have folders, just labels, which can be nested to look like folders.) So I was wondering if they’d been acquired recently or if the service had been sold from one company to another.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find much information via Google. I did discover that they’d been acquired by Return Path, but that happened back in 2012. I might have read about that previously, but I don’t remember it. Up until yesterday, Return Path wasn’t mentioned in the summary email, but that changed with the redesign; the copyright notice at the bottom of the email now says Return Path instead of OtherInbox. Nothing about the changes has shown up on either the OtherInbox or Return Path Twitter feeds. And I couldn’t find any recent reviews or news about the service, other than seeing it included in some typical clickbait “top five ways to organize your email” articles, but none of those were that recent either.

Reviewing Return Path’s privacy policy, it sounds like they’re only sharing aggregate and/or anonymized data with their (business) customers, not personally identifiable data, so that’s good. If I was worried about that, I’d probably switch to SaneBox. Their service costs money, so their users are actually their customers; they’re not selling the data at all. But they charge $7 per month for their service, for their low-end accounts. (It goes up to $36 per month for their high-end accounts.)

Or, I could just use Gmail tabs. They were introduced in 2013, after I started using OtherInbox, so I’ve never really tried them. I think I did notice at one point that they only work with the regular Gmail client and don’t affect the view of the inbox through a third-party client like the mail client on iOS. (And I really want to have a clean inbox on iOS, so that could be an issue for me.)

Of course, if I’m worried about privacy, and being the product rather than the customer, I could probably switch from Gmail to a paid email provider also. I’ve considered switching to FastMail in the past. Their standard account is $5 per month, which is pretty reasonable. Combining FastMail and SaneBox would give me an email account with great organizing tools and no obvious privacy issues. (I’m pretty sure SaneBox would work with FastMail.)

For now, though, I’m going to stick with Gmail and OtherInbox Organizer, and just keep an eye on the Organizer product and see if anything weird is going on with it. The recent changes may just be the result of some long overdue maintenance work. Or they could be related to some further changes that could compromise privacy and/or make the service less useful.

Pocket acquired by Mozilla

Well, this is interesting. Mozilla has acquired Pocket. I blogged recently about Instapaper, and their acquisition by Pinterest. Now, their one big competitor has been acquired too. That’s a little disappointing, but maybe not unexpected. Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Mozilla would be the one to buy them out.

I’m still using Instapaper. They’ve restored all the data that was lost in their big crash a few weeks ago, and their site has been working fine for me ever since. So I’m hoping that they’re doing OK.