tech stuff.

After trying ProtonMail for a year, I decided to migrate my email domain back to Google Workspace from ProtonMail. I like Proton, but in the end my users weren’t happy with the available features, and I was more interested in keeping my users happy.

Anyway, I needed to migrate a corpus of email from ProtonMail to GMail, and all the Internet had to offer was that I should use the Import-Export app to export my mail to mbox, use an extension to load the mbox into Thunderbird, and copy the mail using GMail IMAP.

GMail is great at handling millions of users simultaneously accessing their email, but high throughput from a single user isn’t its strong suit. When I attempted to copy more than 10 messages at a time via IMAP the operation would usually time out.

Here’s a solution for copying email from ProtonMail to GMail that worked better than IMAP for me (for Workspace users this requires imports from webmail hosts to be on):

1. Export ProtonMail to a local mbox file using Proton’s Import-Export app.
2. Copy the mbox file to a short-lived Cloud VM running a POP3 server.
3. Use GMail’s import mail feature to have GMail fetch the messages from your server.

This worked really well. GMail connected every few minutes and pulled 200 messages at a time until all messages were transferred.

Creating a temporary mail server was easier than it sounds. The rough steps I took were:

1. Create a GCE Instance running Debian 10. (I used a C3 instance because it was in free public preview, but GMail is conservative in its fetching so I would use an e2-micro next time.)
2. Add GCE firewall rules to allow traffic to ports 80 (for Lets Encrypt) and 995 (for POP3 with SSL).
3. Assign a DNS record for the host and follow the certbot instructions to obtain a Lets Encrypt certificate.
4. Install dovecot-pop3d, updating the config for the path to the Lets Encrypt SSL certificate and setting the mail_location to ~/mbox.
5. Add a mail user.

Almost surprisingly, that’s all I had to do. The whole process, including setting up the mail import, took around an hour.

I had such high hopes for Rackspace.  I’ve been hearing so many great things, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up.  My experience with Rackspace was anything but good, however.

It’s not like my request was complicated.  I wanted about 10 servers in managed colocation on a private switch behind a pfsense firewall.  Managed colocation means that I’ll do all the work of configuring them.  All Rackspace has to do is stick some servers in a rack and connect them with cables.  This is part of their advertised service offering.

Talking to the Rackspace sales team was an ordeal.  The problem wasn’t that I had to go through four tiers of sales people — though I did — or that they didn’t get back to me when they said they would — though they didn’t.  The biggest problem I had is that every time I’d advance through another tier of sales people, they would contradict the previous tier.  Every time I talked to someone new they would take something off the table until, in the end, we arrived at a solution that didn’t resemble what I wanted in the first place.

The last straw was when the latest salesperson told me that he just found out about a new rule that all managed colocation customers are required to rent a Cisco ASA firewall.  My BSD firewalls aren’t good enough.  This seems especially confusing since (presumably) I wouldn’t have to administer a Cisco firewall if I were to just rent 10 dedicated servers from them.

Regardless, for $600 per month per server I should be able to configure them in whatever way I want.  That’s way too steep a price to put up with all this run around.

I shall make a point of never doing business with a company who doesn’t list their prices on their website.