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Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

> Would you recommend against using GAE?

I've been burned so hard by them, I'd recommend against using anything Google.

It's getting to that point for me too now. I'm really really close to removing them from every aspect of my life. Professional and private.

Gmail still rocks

I switched to fastmail a year ago and have never been happier. Their support also responds!

FastMail is so much better than GMail. I don't know why I didn't change earlier.

Yeah, I thought I'd miss GMail, but I really didn't. I used Google Inbox for a while too and thought I'd miss that, but now I use Spark as my mail client so I don't even miss that either.

It was more of a mental "but but my decade-long history of gmail" thing, but it turned out that really was less of a big deal than I thought. I now have a nice custom domain and I forward my gmail to my fastmail, updating subscriptions every so often. Eventually gmail will receive no more mail I care about and I will remove the forwarding altogether. Its getting there!

This. I too dreaded the switch because of all the history, but the migration to fastmail was quick and painless, and I lost nothing. (Arguably, losing everything would've been better, so much useless noise in my history.)

Looking back on it now, about a year after migrating, my only regret is I didn't do it sooner.

Exactly the same experience for me. It's so much faster, more convenient and useful, and the migration tool was a breeze to use, I should have done it years ago.

I just stopped by to join the little FastMail fan crowd over here.

If you aren't a FastMail customer yet, you're gonna assume we're shills. We're not, it's just the sort of quality product that makes you want to tell others. It's like having found Gmail in 2005.

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?p=599512

No angels anywhere.

That seems like a minor issue in comparison to the issues with google discussed here. I mean, sure, they should honour the lifetime membership, but is it really worth losing sleep over something you paid $15 for 15 years ago (at the time of that message)?

Well, to be perfectly honest, you are paying for Fastmail, while Gmail is free.

Oh, you're paying for Gmail. Just not in upfront dollars like with Fastmail.

Sure, but the sentiment in this entire discussion is how unreliable googles paid for service is (never mind their free stuff - have you ever tried to get support from google for gmail or other feee service? From what I've heard it's like talking to a wall). I'd rather pay for good service than get unknown service for free.

I pay for G Suite and basically the only thing anyone uses is Gmail. I don't have hard proof but I feel that all of my emails from my domain never go to spam. I one time had to use Godaddy's email system and ALL emails went to people's spam folder. It is like Google makes you pay for email or your emails won't get delivered properly. Maybe it was Godaddy's mail system's IP that was blacklisted but I think you have to pay to play these days.

Is there some criterion by which GoDaddy is not the worst service provider? Given their popularity with domain parkers and other less savory parts of the IT world, I would assume that the blame was entirely on their shoulders. That said, configuring an email server correctly seems to be rather an involved process[0] so we should perhaps not rule out some measure of incompetence as well as shadiness.

[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/218615/mail-server-checkli...

The reason we're all here, support. One of the reasons GoDaddy is a company I still use and have used for years is that they have 24/7 telephone support that's reasonably decent. I have called and gotten domain issues sorted by GoDaddy at 2 AM on a Sunday by a dude who didn't have a foreign accent.

I'm not a big account with them, surely trivial compared to those mass domain parkers you mention, but they've never made me feel like I was less valued as a customer. I have received calls from humans just to ask me if I am currently satisfied with my service with them.

Especially if you have a business-critical service, this should simply be a baseline requirement for support, but it's becoming shockingly rare these days.

I've had the complete opposite experience with GoDaddy support. Many of them are not so knowledgable and can easily waste time, and billing matters in particular can be quite disorganized with them if something goes wrong. I moved all my domains way from GoDaddy.

Did the sender domains in question have SPF records at any point?

SPF is essentially a self-maintained whitelist.

Blacklists are public and searchable. Something to check after dealing with an infected machine, for example.

> SPF is essentially a self-maintained whitelist.

Ironically, commercial spammers have the best SPF records. And DKIM. And all the other goodies.

I did that. It took me two years to move everything over (email took the longest time), but it's been totally worth it. I still have my @gmail address, but it's only there to forward email to my real address, and I never log in or send email. Besides junk mail and spam, I am now at a point where I get maybe 1-2 real emails on my @gmail account, and then I tell the sender to use my new address.

My google usage is now

1. Occasionally watching Youtube videos in an incognito window

2. Very rarely using !g to search Google via DDG

3. Using Gmaps in an incognito window a couple times a month

and that's it. I don't find that I miss it at all. If I had to stop using Youtube and Gmaps, I won't miss 'em.

Uhhhh using Chrome?

No, Firefox.

Same here Marcus.

Now, if only good and valuable startups weren't getting bought by google by the dozens :( I guess it's your cue to start migrating to something in house when it happens.

I use GCP for "small stuff" and never have any issues at all: using GAE with the maximum number of instances set to 1 on a paid plan, using cloud storage to host static web sites, and occasionally spin up a really large VPS (their maximum memory and CPU core offering) for a short time periods to run machine learning and other large tasks.

So, for some applications, GCP works very well.

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