[MlMt] good email providers that play well w/ MailMate [was: moving my mail from one server to another—will my IMAP mailboxes & their contents survive the move?]

[John Doherty]

On Thu 2023-04-13 02:05 PM MDT -0600, <ken at kenpope.com> wrote:

> What would you recommend as the *easiest* way for someone with little 
> computer competence to transfer my current MM store of emails & 
> folders into Fastmail so that they will be available should I use the 
> web to access my Fastmail account via the web from another computer 
> (i.e., not my computer that has MM)?

Looking back to the start of this thread, you said your mail currently 
resides on a server managed by company X. So you should be able to use 
fastmail's IMAP import feature:

<https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753594>

Basically, you tell it where your mail is now, provide the necessary 
username and password, and they'll import it all into your new fastmail 
account.

They say:

   Imports can take a long time, especially if you have a lot of email. 
It's not
   uncommon for imports to take up to 24 hours. You can check the status 
of your
   import at any time by going to the Settings → Migration → Import 
screen.

In my case, though, it was pretty fast, more like an hour or so. I don't 
have a ton of mail, maybe 2 GB or so.

I don't really remember: once I decided on fastmail, I got up on a 
Saturday morning, said to myself, OK today's the day, let's do this, and 
I was done a couple of hours later. The whole process was so easy and 
fast that none of the details left much impression, I guess.

In my case, my mail was on an IMAP server I operated myself. Pretty sure 
I proceeded like this:

(1) signed up for the fastmail account and started the import process
(2) when that was done, I configured MailMate to access the new account

MailMate will sync the new account and download all your mail at this 
point, which may take a while, depending on how much mail you have.

(3) convinced myself that the new account had all my mail, just by 
comparing message counts
(4) everything was fine, so then I deleted the old IMAP account from 
MailMate

At that point, all my mail was still on the old IMAP server, and I could 
always reconfigure that in MailMate if necessary. But everything was 
fine, so then I backed up my old server to a couple of places and shut 
it down one last time.

In your case, you might want to keep your old account active while you 
convince yourself that all your mail is in the new fastmail account. 
Once you've done that, you should be able to cancel the old account, 
which I'm sure will cause your old provider to delete your mail.

> Two or three of the online review services that review different email 
> providers had two general concerns about Fastmail (aside from privacy, 
> which I’m aware of): (a) service outages, & (b) occasional lag times 
> of 3,4, or even up to 7 hours before a response from their 
> customer/tech service.  Have any of you Fastmail users experienced 
> either of those?

Have not had any trouble so far with service outages. I've been using 
fastmail only for about two months or so now.

Have not had any reason to contact their support except for some 
pre-migration questions, and fwiw, I found them to be very responsive 
and helpful.