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.

trying a vertical mouse

I’ve been using a trackball, left-handed, at work for the last few weeks. I’ve found that it helped with my shoulder problems a bit, and it wasn’t that hard to use. But I never got really good at precise positioning with it. So now I’m trying a vertical mouse (right-handed). I’m using this cheap one from Anker. A friend recommended an Evoluent VerticalMouse, but that’s $90, compared to less than $20 for the Anker, so I decided to give the cheap one a try first. It’s working OK so far, though I’ve noticed that double-clicking is more trouble than with a regular mouse, since clicking the button tends to move the mouse a little, and if it moves between clicks, it doesn’t register as a double-click. So I’m getting used to that.

I may try to switch back and forth between the trackball and the mouse occasionally, just to keep myself from relying on one hand or the other for too long. And I think I might try a trackpad at some point too.

sick days and comic books

I came down with a cold on Easter Sunday, and took a sick day on Monday. I felt good enough to go back into work on Tuesday, and made it through Wednesday and Thursday too. But things started going downhill on Thursday and I called in sick again today (Friday). I went to a doctor, and there’s nothing horribly wrong with me as far as he can tell, so I’m just resting and taking a (hopefully) stronger decongestant.

So this week has been good for comic book reading. On Sunday, I read B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered. On Monday, I got through B.P.R.D: King of Fear, and some other miscellaneous comics. Today, I read Baltimore: The Plague Ships and a bunch of DC Rebirth issues. Somewhere in there, I also managed to finish the Star Wars Omnibus that reprinted the first couple of dozen issues of Marvel’s Star Wars comic from the 70s, and start into the hardback collecting Paul Pope’s One Trick Rip-Off and some of his other stuff.

So, yeah, I read a lot of comics. I’m enjoying getting back into Mignola’s universe, but I’m not sure how far I’m going to go with that. On the B.P.R.D. side, I’m done with the “War on Frogs” story now, and “Hell on Earth” would be next, if I decide to go on with it. Hell on Earth runs through 15 trades, so it would be a pretty big commitment. (I think I have the equivalent of the first volume in individual issues, but that still leaves 14 more.) Baltimore runs through seven trades and a prose novel, so that’s a little less daunting, but still a pretty big story (and I’m not sure it’s done yet). And I’ve got a handful of random Hellboy comics to read too, plus the full Hellboy in Hell series.

On the DC front, I’m still enjoying Rebirth, but I also still have some mixed feelings about it. I have the first issue of The Button crossover, but I haven’t read it yet. I was at one point thinking that it might actually be a good point for jumping ship on the whole rebirth thing, but I’ll at least give this particular story a chance. If it looks like it’s leading into something horrible, I’m more than ready to drop it all. I’ve found the current DC books to be nice escapism, but I probably wouldn’t miss them if I stopped reading them.

I was kind of planning on going into New York tomorrow for the NYC version of the March For Science, but I’m clearly in no shape for that. So I guess my support for the march will have to come from my living room couch, in the form of supportive retweets and good thoughts.

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.

no SDCC again

Much like last year, I gave the SDCC open registration system a shot, but failed again to get tickets.

I could have gone to WonderCon last weekend, if I’d really wanted to. I’d done some research on it a few months back, but didn’t really like the airfare and hotel costs, so I decided to punt on it.

It’s not a bad day out today, so maybe I should stop sitting in front of the computer now, and go out for a walk.

The Laundry Files, the Library, and Modesty Blaise

After taking a fairly long break from reading Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, I picked up The Apocalypse Codex a few weeks ago. I just finished reading it this week. It’s not quite as funny as I remember the earlier books being, but it’s still very good. It includes two characters who are based on Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. Modesty Blaise was a British comic strip that ran for many years, starting in the sixties. I became familiar with it through reprints published in a magazine called Comics Revue, which I used to read regularly.

Here’s an article about the strip’s creator, Peter O’Donnell, from The Comics Journal, published just after he died. And here’s a more recent article, also from TCJ. Both are written by R. C. Harvey, who knows a lot about comics and who I should really read more often. (In fact, I haven’t actually read these articles yet, just bookmarked them to read later. I’ve been doing that a lot lately…) I stopped buying Comics Revue back in 2008 or so, when I stopped buying comics altogether. (Or at least mostly stopped buying them.) Now that I’ve started up again, I’ve been thinking about picking up on Comics Revue again too. But I still have a couple of unread Modesty Blaise books from the Titan Books reprint series, so I should probably read those before I start buying more issues of Comics Revue.

On a somewhat related subject, I did some spring cleaning last weekend, throwing out some old computer books and getting together some old novels to donate to an upcoming library book sale. I dropped the novels off today, and decided to have a look around the library while I was there. This book sale is not for my local library, rather for the neighboring town of Bridgewater. I’ve always known that Bridgewater’s library was bigger than ours, but I’d never really had any reason to go over there and visit it. Well, I was pretty impressed. It’s much larger than Somerville’s library, and they have quite a lot of books. I browsed through the comics section and the SF section, and found a few things there that I’d like to read. Bringing this back around to the original subject, they have most of the Laundry Files books, in hardcover. So I checked out the next one in the series, The Rhesus Chart. Now I have three weeks to read it. (I’ll have to check and see if I can renew it online, if I don’t get it finished on time. I don’t really know how all this modern library stuff works…)

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.

more JavaScript and TypeScript shenanigans

I’m still working on my fairly ridiculous JavaScript/TypeScript/SharePoint project, which I’ve mentioned previously. I’ve got the Q (promises) stuff all worked out now, I think.

I wanted to be able to read in a standard Microsoft Excel file as part of this project. To handle that, I looked at SheetJS. This looked like it would be pretty straightforward. But I hit a few issues in trying to integrate it into my project. There was a TypeScript definition file for it available via NuGet in Visual Studio. But the way the file was written led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out JavaScript modularization standards. This probably isn’t that tough a subject to figure out. I got as far as figuring that I should be using AMD and RequireJS. But, after about 20 minutes of reading RequireJS documentation and some related articles about how to use it in TypeScript, I decided that maybe I was better off skipping the whole thing and sticking with a CSV input instead of Excel.

I assumed I’d be able to read and parse a CSV file pretty easily, with the native JavaScript FileReader and some simple string operations to break up the lines into fields. But figuring out how to parse a CSV file sent me down a rabbit hole too. But it wasn’t a terribly deep rabbit hole. The end result is that I’m using a little library called Papa Parse to deal with the CSV parsing. (It turns out that the kind of CSV files I have will be a little too complex for “string.split(‘,’)”.)

Despite all the little issues, I’m learning a lot on this project. Maybe, most importantly, I’m learning about how far JavaScript development has come since the last time I did any major JS work. I need to do some catch-up work. Time for some more PluralSight videos.