undefined | Better HN

0 pointssevensor6y ago0 comments

Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can't trust Google with crucial email. You get what you pay for.

0 comments

chrisfinazzo6y ago

I had similar thoughts, but it took a while until I found something like Netlify to handle the domain end of things. My personal site was on DreamHost, who threw in Google Apps for free (this was before the bottom tier went paid).

At the very least, I knew that if mail ended up in that inbox, it was usually important.

More to the point, Fastmail allowed me to use Mail.app on macOS and get away from Google's web UI which, despite best efforts on their part - read: none at all - never worked correctly on the desktop with regard to message deletion in IMAP clients.

sevensorOP6y ago

Fastmail's web client is absurdly excellent compared to Gmail. It's as if, instead of copying all of the bogus stuff Google piled into Gmail, they just made a really good version of webmail the way it was in 2003. Instead of scrapping webmail and starting over, they evolved it into something better. The result is fast, clear, easy to use, and no-nonsense. It's as if all the features that bloat Gmail at this point are just there to solve problems caused by Gmail's bloated feature set. You really don't appreciate how bad it's gotten until you switch.

jocoda6y ago

Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to.

There's a high 9's probability that it will arrive safely, but there's several ways that things can go wrong, simplest of which is that you are deleted by a misconfigured filter.

There are US ISPs (cough sbcglobal) that routinely throw away mail from some arbitrary IPs despite there being absolutely no SPAM blacklist entries for the IP, even if you are replying to a mail sent from one of their clients.

outlook.com once, (and maybe still does) blocked email from an entire C-block for some reason.

(edit - grammar)

Chlorus6y ago

> Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to.

And there's the core of all of this. SMTP is a best-effort protocol that does not guarantee delivery. Until someone comes up with something better, we're condemned to seeing "Help! My very important email disappeared in transit" threads on HN every several months for the rest of eternity.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse