masnick

I wasn't aware of that. I actually ran into federation issues a few months ago, but maybe it has been fixed since then.

My understanding is that upgrading to Hangouts still disables the old XMPP support.

There is no longer a free tier for FastMail.

As I mention in my post, Google Apps is a lot of overhead for just email. There are additional complexities with switching from gmail to google apps because of the integration with all other google services.

If someone was interested in switching from gmail to a paid service, I would argue that FastMail may be a better choice than Google Apps.

If you use a custom Sieve script, you can definitely whitelist certain addresses, domains, subjects, body text, etc. Google "fastmail sieve" for more info on this.

Also, if you haven't talked to support about this, I'd definitely recommend it. They've always been super helpful with me.

I've actually used Postbox and didn't realize it could do that. Thanks!

With what? I _do_ care about running random plugins in my browser that update in the background. There's nothing stopping a malicious plugin from scraping stuff out of your email, and I feel like _that_ is a legitimate security concern!

I agree that IMAP will probably stick around in some form. My big concern is if they start doing some kind of rate limiting, it could make it very difficult to get all your email out.

However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed federation support, then they killed it altogether). Limiting or removing IMAP is not outside the realm of possibilities.

All the UIs I've seen in the last several years present threads flat (without any hierarchy). If there are other modern mail clients that have this kind of UI, I'd love to see them.

My point is that if you don't like Gmail ads, you should investigate switching to something else. I feel like many people are uncomfortable with the ads but might feel locked in.

I actually don't care that Google is machine-reading email to serve ads (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do care about polluting the interface with ads that look like email for the same reason I don't like the new compose interface. Both make the interface worse, and email is bad enough as it is without bad UI.

Push email isn't something I really want, but that's a good point if that is important to you.

The other thing I forgot to mention in the post is contact syncing. I'm honestly not sure if I like the contact pollution gmail does more or less than not having sync between FastMail and my phone.

For one, it's much easier to maintain complicated rules in Sieve than with Gmail rules. This is just a function of having multiple lines and comments for rules.

I use Sieve to push a summary of certain messages to my phone (with https://pushover.net, another great service). This is not possible with Gmail rules (you can forward an entire message, but not selectively send just the subject and sender). See https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve-notify.html

Sieve also supports regular expressions: https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/draft-murchison-sieve-reg...

There are some example Sieve scripts that might give you a better idea of what Sieve can do:

http://ballz.ababa.net/jerry/sieve.txt

http://fastmail.wikia.com/wiki/MichaelKloseSieveScript

Note that you don't have to do all that crazy spam stuff -- the build in spam filtering seems to work fine for me. The only manual rule I added was to spam anything with common Russian characters because Russian spam was somehow slipping through the filter.

Yeah, it looks like this doesn't appear by default. To make it show up, select a message in your inbox and go to Message > Archive.

That should make this folder appear: http://tmp.m-n.us/m/20130718_k83emkvnc4.png. I believe it is automatically associated with INBOX.Archive on FastMail.

If you're tired of the gmail interface (like I was), I'd highly recommend http://fastmail.fm.

I made the switch (moved 55k+ messages with http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...) and haven't looked back.

FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.

FastMail's highlights for me are:

- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)

- Sieve support -- SO much more powerful than rules in Gmail, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)

- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience

- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.

- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)

- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).

- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.

The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.

This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.

I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.

I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.

The bios for their "characters" are super, super weird: http://www.nsa.gov/kids/bios/bios00001.shtml

The sad reality is that as a contractor, you have to operate under the assumption that you will sometimes have trouble getting paid.

If I was starting contract work for a new client, I would ask them to pay up front by the day. It is trivially easy to set up a one-click "pay for 1 day of work" button with Stripe (saving credit card info after the first payment) so it should not be a huge burden for the client.* I would eat Stripe's fee in exchange for peace of mind.

Note that this is good for the client too: hypothetically, if they don't like my work, they can pull the plug without being on the hook for future work (if I do my job right, this will never happen).

* Some corporate client's can't do this because of rules about what can go on a credit card. That's fine because those bigger businesses are generally used to paying invoices on time in my experience.

I used gitolite on a VPS previously and it worked well, but when Bitbucket introduced free unlimited private repositories I switched.

IMO there is no reason to use gitolite now for unless you have (a) sensitive repos (with your own server, not a VPS of course), or (b) lots of private repos with lots of collaborators and you have no money for a Github or Bitbucket monthly fee and you aren't a non-profit (I think non-profits can get a free Bitbucket account).

That said, I'm interested to hear about other gitolite use cases I haven't thought of.

No worries, we're all that guy sometimes.

+1 for emoji support in HN comments. (Also ironic...mostly.)

That was tongue-in-cheek (mostly...you never know with WWDC).

This video reminds me a bit of A New Kind of Science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science): some of the phenomena Wolfram discusses gave me the same "holy! how does this happen in nature" kind of reaction.

Bold title for WWDC day.

One of their replacement service suggestions is https://fiesta.cc. It looks nice but it's totally free -- I get nervous when there is not a clear business model. (It was almost shut down a year ago according to their blog: http://blog.fiesta.cc.)

Another suggestion is http://www.mail-list.com. They charge around $1/user/year, which seems pretty reasonable to me (one reason I didn't sign up for Breeze is that $25 seemed like a lot for a lot of use cases, like a list for a season-long sports team). But in the fine print, it says the minimum is a $99 purchase per organization per year.

Their final suggestion is http://www.emaildodo.com. Call me a snob, but the late 90s design scared me off.

So none of these seem like great options -- I'd rather use http://librelist.com, which is run as a free for-the-good-of-the-internet service from what I can tell.

Assuming Google and Yahoo Groups are too heavy-handed for a simple mailing list, what do you use? Any experience with these?

I think some people actually do think like this, but I'm with you: I can't imagine how this is more helpful than a linear list.

> I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail.

This only makes sense if you ignore switching cost. For example, what if it becomes difficult to get your email out of Gmail (e.g. they drop IMAP support or throttle it).

If there is a switching cost, then you do have a vested interest in choosing companies with (a) sustainable business models and (b) business models that align their incentives with users' interests.

Advertising may satisfy (a) but IMO it does not satisfy (b). My reasoning is that if users pay directly for a service, the company is more likely to listen to their comments/needs/suggestions than if advertisers are paying the bills and the users are only there to look at ads (cynically).

I'm sure this doesn't play out this way all the time, but I do think it is generally true. There also may be some selection bias: people running companies who have user-supported services may have different values than people running ad-supported services. Again, definitely not true 100% of the time.

I think the best example of this is Twitter. Because they need ad revenue, they had to change the API and developer rules. Theoretically, this will not happen with App.net because users pay for the service so they don't have to worry about ads.

I think worrying about ad revenue introduces a set of priorities that may be at odds with what's best for users. There are certainly cases where ads work fine (e.g. Google search), but for something like email I prefer to not have to worry about this.

You shouldn't, assuming you're happy with the service Google provides. If you're on Google Apps and like it, then you're set!

YES! And Mail.app on OS X actually works better with FastMail's Archive than it ever did with Gmail's (in my experience).

Here's a screenshot from Mail.app: https://files.app.net/1/79773/aTOWGMJ-rQ2Js_Edg-CWLi5FsLEVYq...

I either never knew that existed when I tried Mail.app with Gmail or it didn't work. In any case, it works perfectly with FastMail's "Archive" folder.

It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model.

I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.

The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc...

In terms of additional features:

- Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)

- Way faster loading time, snapper interface

- Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4...)

- Some different interface features that I really like (your mileage may vary), like always showing starred messages on top for specific folders

There's lots more in terms of customizability and different weird configurations they allow you to do. They've done a pretty good job of hiding the complexity for non-power users, but it's still really accessible if you're willing to read through lots of preference screens.

There are some features FastMail does not have that Gmail does. The two big ones for me are undo send and composing in a new window (although you can just open the whole FastMail interface in a new tab and it only takes a second to load; opening Gmail in a new tab could take 10+ seconds in my experience). I use the FastMail web interface full time and am just as efficient, if not more, than I am with Gmail. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same, so there wasn't even a learning curve.

For those interested in replacing the Gmail's built-in voice calling feature, I wrote up instructions for setting up a SIP endpoint: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/

It's by no means a complete Google Voice replacement (though one could presumably build one with some work using Plivo, the SIP provider I used).

I also recently did the Gmail -> Fastmail switch. I had some trouble with the automated import, but I found a Perl script that did the trick: https://gist.github.com/masnick/5239278#file-gmail_to_fastma...

So far I've loved Fastmail. It's great having a real human respond to a support ticket, usually within a few hours!

The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.

Thank you. I've been putting off upgrading for fear that it is a huge rabbit hole. It sounds like this is not the case, so I'm planning on giving it a shot this weekend.

Looks like you're right. I found this by searching Google+ (of all places):

> in case you're wondering how to enable Hangouts for your Google Apps account, found this: "Admins can enable the new Hangouts experience in the Talk settings of the Admin console. We are still rolling this out so look for it soon."