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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about email privacy lately. It seems the free accounts are now mining your email for ways to show you advertisements. This is not something I want, it raises all sorts of privacy concerns. Last week, I had a friend say in an email he was thinking of going to Ireland. A few hours later, I checked my gmail, only to see an email with the subject: “flash deals on trips to Ireland!”. This is not okay. If Google is reading all my email (with a machine), then it has everything about me, where I eat, where I shop, what my hobbies are, my doctors appointments, what my friends are doing, where I’m going on my calendar, this is not good.