[HN Gopher] CTemplar Is Shutting Down
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       CTemplar Is Shutting Down
        
       Author : foolishhunter
       Score  : 51 points
       Date   : 2022-05-18 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ctemplar.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ctemplar.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | Yet another reason why I use mainstream email providers. I cannot
       | mess with my emails and have only few days to migrate when
       | providers (developers) decide to ditch the project.
        
         | dilap wrote:
         | Mainstream provider: Eventually you'll get falsely flagged by
         | some automated abuse system and you'll lose your account.
         | 
         | Niche provider: Eventually they'll go out of business and
         | you'll lose your account.
         | 
         | Solution? Web3 somehow? Urbit maybe?? Something else?
         | 
         | (I discovered the other day I can't just login to Gmail
         | anymore; I have to have a device with me I've logged on with
         | before. E.g. right now I'm outside w/ my computer and phone --
         | if someone came by and stealthily stole both, I think I'd lose
         | my gmail account!)
        
           | pm3003 wrote:
           | Own the domain name if you need it. Save your data with the
           | Golden Rule.
        
             | hifikuno wrote:
             | Golden rule? I couldn't find anything relating to this with
             | a quick internet search.
        
         | wahnfrieden wrote:
         | you'll have even less notice when google decides to block you
         | without recourse or reason given
        
       | hugg wrote:
       | Any speculations as to why? Can't find anything
        
         | nazgulsenpai wrote:
         | `CTemplar said they were "actively refusing investments,
         | donations or grants from governments and corporations." This
         | clearly turned out not to be viable, at least in this case.`[0]
         | 
         | This sounds like as good an explanation as any.
         | 
         | [0]https://reclaimthenet.org/private-email-provider-ctemplar-
         | is...
        
         | jacooper wrote:
         | They lost all emails recently, and as per the other comments
         | they were limiting their funding options.
         | 
         | In addition to that, their pricing was very expensive with a
         | sub-par experience compared to Protonmail, which has improved
         | massively in the last year.
         | 
         | https://cyber-privacy.net/ctemplar-catastrophic-incident-wit...
        
           | dimgl wrote:
           | > cyber-privacy.net
           | 
           | Blasts the user with one of the sketchiest examples of ad
           | malware I've seen in years.
        
           | cornstalks wrote:
           | FYI that website is hijacked by a hostile ad (ironically for
           | an ad blocker) when accessing it from my iOS device, making
           | the page inaccessible due to HTTP redirects and whatnot.
        
         | bachmeier wrote:
         | To be honest, my question would be why this wouldn't have
         | happened. Their cheapest plan was more than Fastmail
         | Professional - while delivering less product than Fastmail
         | Basic and not having anything approaching the Fastmail brand. I
         | have a hard time understanding why anyone would have used their
         | service.
        
       | tasn wrote:
       | Running an email service is just damn hard and it's hard to get
       | people to pay for it. Even if you have the privacy angle.
       | 
       | There's just so much abuse going on, and when you are privacy
       | first you limit your ability to fight abuse which makes things
       | much worse. :(
        
         | ancientsofmumu wrote:
         | CTemplar as a service has no integration with standard
         | protocols (SMTP, IMAP, CardDav, CalDav, etc.) even if you paid.
         | It is/was a walled garden solution that can only be used with
         | it's web portal or mobile client; when I was evaluating non-
         | GMail solutions to de-Google it was an instant "nope" in my
         | evaluations. It does not fit in the same category as other
         | general purpose email solution providers.
        
           | tasn wrote:
           | Yeah, but it's the case with all of them. ProtonMail,
           | Tutanota, etc, all of them are walled gardens that try to
           | shove you into their proprietary lands.
           | 
           | I created EteSync[1] a contacts, calendars and tasks sync
           | solution that's e2ee and privacy respecting but people kept
           | on asking us to integrate with one of the above email
           | solutions. Though they are all closed and don't interoperate.
           | :(
           | 
           | [1] https://www.etesync.com
        
             | Klonoar wrote:
             | ProtonMail has plenty of escape hatches, I wouldn't call
             | them a walled garden.
        
       | anilakar wrote:
       | As to how to migrate old email messages between services, good
       | old drag and drop in Thunderbird is likely still the best way to
       | go.
        
         | pseudostem wrote:
         | I always thought we couldn't have our own mail clients with
         | services like ctemplar and protonmail. Will have to recheck.
        
         | jordemort wrote:
         | I moved a couple domains over to Zoho recently and they have a
         | really nice tool to import mail from other accounts - only
         | relevant if you're planning on going to Zoho though.
        
         | Nextgrid wrote:
         | I'd recommend imapsync: https://imapsync.lamiral.info
        
         | tut-urut-utut wrote:
         | Unfortunately not, it isn't. Tried to do it when migrating from
         | Google to Mailfence, but gave up since it missed some messages,
         | randomly timed out and couldn't continue.
         | 
         | In the end I had to remove all messages, and process them using
         | Claws client, which gives much better control and a feedback
         | which messages were transferred and which failed. The only
         | issue I had is that some messages were transferred multiple
         | times, but Claws even has a solution for that by using "delete
         | duplicate messages".
        
           | scintill76 wrote:
           | Seconded, though it may have been a decade since I tried. I
           | recall the GUI locking up and probably didn't complete the
           | operation. Even ~2 years ago, I had similar issues just
           | trying to move a few hundred messages between folders on the
           | same IMAP server. IIRC it worked, but takes a lot of
           | patience. That time, I also didn't really care if it ate
           | those messages instead of moving them.
           | 
           | I wouldn't trust Thunderbird for more than a few dozen
           | messages I could hand-verify. For anything more, use a
           | dedicated tool that provides logs and can gracefully restart.
        
           | ancientsofmumu wrote:
           | I'm a (paying) Mailfence customer as well, and use it as a
           | destination sync backup of my primary domain using imapsync,
           | encountered a similar problem so opened a ticket to Support.
           | 
           | The general problem is that Mailfence has what I guess you
           | could call DDoS protections in place and opening too many
           | simultaneous IMAP threads trips their defenses. I have my
           | ~/.mbsyncrc set to only use one thread when writing to
           | Mailfence to avoid tripping the trigger and it runs like
           | clockwork now (cron timer doing IMAP sync writes from the
           | primary). $0.02, hope this helps.
        
             | tut-urut-utut wrote:
             | Thanks for the confirmation. I supposed it was some kind of
             | rate limiting. I guess Claws worked for me since its IMAP
             | operations are single threaded, and with Thunderbird, it
             | was easy to trigger multiple parallel connections, e.g., by
             | opening an IMAP folder while copying of messages is
             | running.
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | You transferred your email from Google to a different host
           | and you used Claws to do it? How did that work?
        
             | tut-urut-utut wrote:
             | Installed Claws and configured both old Gmail and new IMAP
             | account locally.
             | 
             | Basically, I did it semi-manual, since it was the only way
             | it worked.
             | 
             | Clicked to "get all messages" on the Gmail account. This is
             | important. Otherwise, it would need to first fetch messages
             | before doing the copy.
             | 
             | For smaller labels / folders, I was just right-clicking
             | label and choosing copy. It would then create a folder in
             | the new account and copy all messages. For labels with a
             | lot of messages, I would create a folder manually, open a
             | label by clicking on it, select manually let's say 500
             | messages, and calling copy. If copy is successful, I'll
             | mark copied messages in another colour, and proceed copying
             | the next bunch.
             | 
             | In case of any error, and there will be errors, I would
             | just retry copying. That way, I ended up with duplicated
             | messages in the target folder, but that was easy to clean
             | up using Claws option to remove duplicated messages in the
             | folder. The errors may be due to network timeouts, rate
             | limiting on both Gmail and new provider side.
             | 
             | It may be tedious if you have many folders with many
             | messages. I wanted to avoid using any external tools for
             | the purpose, and was too lazy to try to program something.
             | YMMV.
             | 
             | I also took the chance to actually clean and reorganize my
             | mail archive as a part of the process, and ended up not
             | transferring / deleting two thirds of my mail archive
             | during the process.
        
       | foolishhunter wrote:
       | I'm a paying customer and found out about this by chance! They
       | don't give any notice besides this blog post. There is only one
       | week left.
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-18 23:01 UTC)