Ashburn/Loudoun resident here, lived right next to us-east-1 for 10+ years. No, the noise is not impactful. The data centers are very quiet on the outside. More noise comes from Dulles Airport nearby. Main problem is 1. visuals. They are horrendous blobs to look at. 2. land/electricity values. Gone up a lot in the past few years. Happy to answer any questions.
Well noise drops off following an inverse square law, so possibly everyone. Moving down just a couple houses can significantly cut down on noise pollution.
The direction of wind and shape of terrain has a huge effect on noise, too. If a noise source is down wind of you the gradient in wind speed wrt elevation effectively makes the noise curve upwards, and even very loud things can sometimes be inaudible at ground level.
Also live near the data centers. While I'm obviously not 100% sure, I think that blue one is on Glenn Dr - for a bit of context, that is less than 3 miles (drive) from the Dulles International Airport. I'll see if I can record a video of the sound later tonight.
I agree, my experience is anecdotal. Generally never heard much from Loudoun residents about noise (Loudoun is where most of the N. VA data centers are), it's more of a complaint you hear online from people in other parts of the country that are having data centers built near them. Again, anecdotal.
Marco seems really interesting! I'm curious as to how the UX is with solely IMAP. Whenever I use iCloud/Outlook/Gmail accounts on a different email client (e.g., using my Outlook email on Mail.app or my Gmail on the Outlook client), the IMAP experience just feels subpar compared to using the regular client (I have three email clients on my dock right now because of this...). Usually this shows in not great push notifications or actions I perform not getting synced properly. Has Marco been dealing with these issues, or have I just not been using the right email clients?
Yes, we've dealt with those issues, and that was actually one of the hardest problems to solve. Most email providers use mailboxes, while Gmail uses labels to "emulate" mailboxes (sort of).
We have spent quite a lot of time and thought creating a label abstraction that makes _all_ email accounts play together nicely. There is currently no other product like this on the market.
Google Workspace looks like the best option. Decent plus is that I'm already using a Google account for a lot of things except email. Main concern I had (forgot to include in original post) was calendar. I use iCloud+Calendar.app for calendar (and basically nothing else), and my existing Google account doesn't play too well with it. Figure I could mostly mitigate this by looking into other calendar clients (Notion Calendar works with Google which is a plus).
I've seen purelymail, but my biggest doubt about it is getting blocked by email servers. I don't send too many emails, and almost all are sent to Gmail/Outlook accounts. Love the pricing though; I don't use up a massive amount of storage with my emails (way way way under outlook's free storage with 10 years of use) and pay as you go seems really nice.
