Following up from my last post, I went ahead and moved all my personal email domains over to Fastmail. I also pre-paid for a pretty lengthy subscription, since it was so cheap for a long term, even cheaper than Zoho was if I paid for three years. That’s three less years to worry about emails.
I very much debated setting up a cloud based mail server, that I would be able to keep encrypted, and totally private, but, for now, I think I’m okay with Fastmail, they’re not mining my emails for ads, and that was my primary concern. Total privacy would be nice, but that does come at a cost. I wasn’t really looking forward to managing another mail server, since part of my job is watching over a few of them already, I know it can be a pain, especially managing spam policies, and keeping up with intrusion attempts, updates, etc.
The move was really simple. I have DNS all over the place, I use Godaddy, dns.he.net, and Amazon Route 53, which I really need to clean up and keep everything in one place. I like he.net for DNS, its easy, free, and simple, I should move everything to that. Outside of just moving MX records, adding aliases, and domains was all it took, and mail moved over without a hitch.
I’m contemplating migrating my 16,500 or so Gmail messages into the new service, since I have the space, I think it might be easier to clean up old mail while using the new interface. Google is getting more and more annoying with my email, and I feel like my privacy is violated more every year that goes by with them (I’ve had a gmail account since beta!). Only problem, a few hundred people and companies have my gmail address. I guess it’s time to start making a move towards privacy!