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by dwc 5185 days ago
No, your email is that important to you, but you're trusting it to a company that may lock you out with no recourse or apparent reason. You can do your best to play nice and hope it doesn't happen, but that's just hope.

The good news is that the odds are on your side. Most people do not, of course, get their account shut down willy-nilly. But if it happens you're pretty much out of luck.
1 comments
Auguste 5185 days ago
This. If you're really worried about the safety of your Gmail account, maybe it's time to consider moving your email somewhere else. Sure, you can back your email up, but if your account is suspended you'll still lose access to your address.

I moved my email over to Fastmail.fm, a subscription email service, around 8 months ago. They've been in the business since 1999 and seem to be pretty reliable. The web interface and price obviously doesn't compare to Gmail, but all the other features are there.

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microtonal 5185 days ago
If you're really worried about the safety of your Gmail account, maybe it's time to consider moving your email somewhere else. Sure, you can back your email up, but if your account is suspended you'll still lose access to your address.

Or: use Google Apps for Domains, so that you can easily switch to another mail service when necessary, and have one machine make a backup with offlineimap.

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codeka 5185 days ago
This. Also, if you use Google Apps for Business then it's only $50 per year and you get a dedicated, 24/7 support phone number you can call.

Seriously, Gmail is free, you really can't complain about something that's free (yes, I know you "pay" by looking at ads, but when you can upgrade to the "premium" service for $50, never have to look at another ad again and get 24/7 phone support, why wouldn't you?)

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sirn 5185 days ago
>The web interface and price obviously doesn't compare to Gmail

Their new web interface currently in beta at https://beta.fastmail.fm/ is very nice. I've been using it (the new interface) for few months and don't feel like I want to go back to Gmail at all. (Then again I don't use labels in Gmail, so your mileage may vary.)

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dmd 5185 days ago
I'd love to use fastmail, but at least when I last tried it (two years ago) at least 1/10 messages I sent just vanished. Never went to my sent folder, never got delivered.

And today, you tell me to go to beta.fastmail.fm ... a site that looks like this: http://o7.no/IPvfHo

Note broken images, missing Latest News, and they can't even spell Fastmail correctly (see below "Login to your account"). This does not inspire confidence.

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sirn 5185 days ago
Their beta front page has been like that since forever and I'm not sure why it hasn't been fixed. Regardless of such blunder, I've been using FastMail reliably for almost two years and the only problem I've ever had was when DynDNS decided to no longer response to +recurse query (which they fixed it pretty quickly, within 12 hours, faster than it takes DynDNS Support to even response).

[Off topic: I think FastMail support system is pretty lame; despite being an email service, the only way to contact their support is via... web interface. They have few weird quirk like this but it's not something I couldn't live with.]

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pyre 5185 days ago
Looks like those image urls resolve on the fastmail.fm domain, but not the beta.fastmail.fm domain:

https://beta.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/images/fmlogo_horiz_...

vs.

https://fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/images/fmlogo_horiz_320.p...

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