Comment by cadamsdotcom
3 months ago
Looking for your alternative?
Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.
It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant. They live up to the name!
Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked - Gmail makes you stare at its logo for multiple seconds while it shrugs and eventually loads.. then takes over the top of your inbox with “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row. Everything in gmail is SO slow, while Fastmail doesn’t even bother with animations. No animations will confuse you until you settle in and realise that yes, things can be nice.
Fastmail data migration brought across my 22 years of emails over the course of about 30 hours with zero help from me. Search on Fastmail finds everything - even back to when you could only get Gmail with a friend code. There’s nothing left on the other side, it’s all here with me.
Going back to my brand new startup inbox (G Suite) gives me the same feelings I get wandering a castle ruin.
+1
When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful.
When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness.
Lean software stands the test of time.
Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever.
Minor annoyances:
It saves my drafts, it's not annoying, it has a mobile app.
I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.
Fastmail had a UI change a year ago, where they went all "rounded corner" and created unique rows for every message that weren't so easily sorted with Stylus CSS. I emailed them about the changes, and a few weeks later the messages were listed in a way that I could easily apply my own stylesheet again. They also acknowledged on their subreddit the UI change was not incredibly popular (even the CEO was "not enjoying" it) and they took some feedback and provided a few better UX customizations in the options.
At one point, Fastmail had an error parsing Unicode in misconfigured iCal files (Google Calendar showed events correctly) but after a short back-and-forth, they fixed it within a week.
Now, Google Calendar has had a problem with my organization's iCal files for the past four weeks. Submitting a bug report via the help community is very opaque and unhelpful (a la "Have you tried turning if off and on again?"). Fastmail loads the iCal correctly. I have no clue if Google is aware or when they'll ever fix it.
One huge productivity advantage to FM over Gmail? Sort by sender name. (This makes it so easy to bulk apply changes)
Setting up own domain has been straightforward. (It's a bit of work ensuring DNS records have DMARC/DKIM/SPF, but it's all in the FM checklist/documentation.) Setting up Python scripts to auto email me using app passwords has been straightforward. Creating aliases and throwaways is straightforward.
I have not regretted paying for email; specifically, Fastmail.
It's great when the source of revenue for a company is the user, rather than other companies that the user is being sold to. Too bad this is so rare these days.
Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.
>use any number of clients to access your email.
Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.
All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.
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Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?
I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.
Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.
Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.
Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.
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> Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.
Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.
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The amount of configuration required to rival what's available out of the box in Web clients (especially indexing, searching, filtering, blocking, etc.) is a bit too much for someone who isn't already interested in it. I tried GNUS in Emacs and a few TUI apps; I do like having all my emails accessible locally, but for day-to-day use, web clients are more convenient. I haven't tried Thunderbird or Outlook (if it still has a local version), though, so maybe I'd have all the conveniences I want there - but since I already have them in Fastmail, I just don't have an incentive to switch.
I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.
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I like using the webui because my mailbox is too large to pull down locally and it’s easier to handle through the web.
I also have it pulling to local clients that just keep a few messages. Maybe 30% of the time is webui.
Has worked well for me for 30+ years (substituting telneting in and using pine until webuis existed).
“Email in the cloud mainly” is a useful pattern.
Every desktop mail client is bad in its own way. And then I have to set it up on all computers I use. Web UI just works.
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Because Fastmail has a fantastic Web UI, have been using it for years.
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Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.
A lot of providers don't give you imap anymore or it's an extra cost option. SMTP also comes with a ton of traps because of spam fighting measures.
Also monopolies and mobile devices and skill issues.
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I migrated from gmail to Migadu. They have a webmail client, but they make a point that they Do Standards.
They also let you host as many domains as you like and the servers are all EU based.
Because it is really nice. I prefer it to thunderbird/(apple) Mail.
I get the same interface on my own computer as when I go on some other machine.
I never understood why anyone would want to download an application to do something as simple as checking email.
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This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.
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I use it with Spark on macOS and iOS (Spark Classic) and it just works. Archiving works fine, marking as spam actually moves and 'activates' Fastmail's training. There's email masks, aliases, the UI is always fast and responsive in the web view when I go there.
Have you had any issues with Spark or are there any downsides using it? I haven’t used Spark since I started using Fastmail and have been thinking about it
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> - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email
I've been using fastmail on iOS for years and have never experienced this issue. Clicking from a notification opens up the email. Maybe there's a setting you can adjust?
The only thing I miss from Gmail is a "send and archive" button to save me a click when replying to emails.
I just have to add on about how great Fastmail is. They are completely focused on having a stable product, that is relatively simple and cheap. They are not ambitious as a company at all, in the best possible way. They haven't tried to build an office suite. They don't upsell me on any new features. They just deliver a solid, basic product that has been consistently good for more than a decade now. I wish more software and services were like this, I'm tired of everyone hiring an MBA and following the exact same "maximization" business model.
Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.
Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.
I had the same issue, but after contacting support, I was able to re-claim the email address from my trial account and use it as an email alias of my main Fastmail account.
Ditto: I've also lost my Proton username because my trial account has expired.
As a Fastmail user, every time I have to use Gmail for work I'm aggravated by the absolute stupid UX of it which seems to have been thoroughly ruined around the Material Design era; it also seems to be unable to handle basic operations such as mass mark read or delete, or search.
Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.
The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.
I went with Fastmail just because it's not hosted in the US (they're in Australia)
All the comfort of the hemisphere least likely to suffer nuclear fallout coupled with the familiar warm embracing hug of the five eyes security panopticon.
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Fastmail is an Australian company, but their servers are located in the US [0]
[0] https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280221-Ho...
They are hosted in the US, legal entity is in Australia, so nothing was gained.
Unfortunately, I remember reading that Australia now has weak privacy laws:
> The Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill (TAAB or AssAccess) require technology companies like FastMail, Google, Apple, Cisco to provide Australian law enforcement and security agencies with access to all communications without any judicial oversight, transparency, or reason. The only restrictions offered to protect people’s privacy is the vague terms “reasonable and proportionate.”
Source: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/goodbye-fastmail.html
What issues do you see? I've never had issue with any mass operation there.
I was quite surprised how much better search and spam filters are on fastmail. Both things I did not believe a small company could do better than Google, but I think they did.
I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.
Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.
I personally find Fastmail's spam handling a lot worse than GMail's: and I get a lot more spam in my GMail address, due to it being a 22 year old address, which I still use for initial sign-ups, before then changing account emails to my fastmail one after a few months.
Very likely a lot of the difference is the types of email each address is getting.
First time I hear about signing up then change email trick. Does it help reducing spam?
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I am not a Fastmail user but I completely doubt this. I have been using Gmail for 20 years and I have never seen a spam mail land in my inbox which has always impressed me. Everything else I have used from time to time does miss a few, which I guess it might be acceptable if you want to move to another host.
There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.
(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)
Are you kidding me about the spam? I have 3-4 spam emails land in my inbox every day on Fastmail. It's horrendous.
I have more than that on gmail and none in Fastmail. My gmail account is way more over the place than my FMs though.
Doesn't Fastmail provide aliases?
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Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.
I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.
In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.
One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".
Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.
I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.
The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.
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I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.
> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?
This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.
All while being mail service agnostic.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird
2 - https://apps.kde.org/kmail2/
3 - https://support.apple.com/mail
4 - https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/
It’s not that making rules isn’t possible, it’s that it’s done automatically, out of the box, correctly by Gmail.
I've tried Thunderbird, Kmail, and Apple's client, and maybe I just have too many emails, but these apps completely crumble under my inbox. I don't see any "shine" with these third-party clients. Mimestream, my favorite email client on macOS, "just works" because it uses the Gmail API. It seems like Fastmail made JMAP, but this doesn't seem widely supported.
Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?
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Ahem, https://neomutt.org/
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Thunderbird does not seem to have auto-categorization from what I see, just filtering. Neither does KMail. Unless you’re referring to some addons? For apple mail you have to add it on each client. And a lot of comments are about how to disable it because it categorizes wrong.
Frankly I've tried quite a few clients and haven't found one I can settle for. I used Mailspring for a while because it was close to being a gmail experience, but that went some kind of bad way I don't remember and I don't think is developed anymore.
I want a client that is simple but flexible by default, extensible, themeable would be nice, and for the love of god has key shortcuts for everything THAT CAN BE CHANGED. LOOKING AT YOU, THUNDERBIRD.
Thunderbird is almost usable for me, but the UI is just absolutely abysmal. The kicker is not being able to change key shortcuts, making Thunderbird unusable for me.
Interesting to see people have such strong faith in Google's ability to filter. My experience is email from addresses marked safe ends up in the spam category. Wish you luck.
Ironically my experience with Fastmail was that every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first. It was literally sending 100% of emails to spam. The spam filter setting was set to the most basic level, nothing aggressive, so I was forced to disable spam filtering completely. Luckily it was a new email so spam hasn't been an issue but that has slowly been changing.
I still love fastmail though. Top choice. But they do have quirks to work out even this many years in.
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> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.
Surprising. I turned that off cause I found that to be yet another google nonsense. It did not filtered well and I simply hit unsubsribe for stuff I dont want.
What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.
This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.
But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.
I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.
No it doesn’t.
But luckily you’re about 5 email filter rules away from your ideal setup.
I guess everyone is different? That's one thing I hate about Gmail. I use Fastmail and funnel emails to different folders. I treat spam as a fact of life.
Mash that unsubscribe button my dude.
I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.
My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.
Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".
If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.
This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.
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This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.
I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.
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it doesn't. I've been using fastmail for years and miss this, a lot.
Setting up your own filtering rules seems like a relatively tiny time investment compared to the productivity gains if you have a busy mail account. Other features that Gmail lack are IMO more important than magic filtering, like a proper threaded view, or not being pestered by their AI bullshit.
yes. Fastmail can "automatically" do that, if you configure it to have those rules.
If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.
I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.
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Whatever provider you switch to, do use the opportunity to get your own domain so that you won't be locked in in the future.
If only it was based in europe. Every few weeks i look into detaching from gmail and wonder if proton is the way to go
Proton's being a bit slow and weird is totally worth it just for the privacy features. And it's slowly improving with time.
Agreed, I left Fastmail for Proton and am very happy with it. It improves/changes in fits and starts sometimes, but support is always great and overall I am happy with the usability, direction, pricing, etc.
I do wish ProtonMail handled labels/folders as one unified model like GMail does, it's so much simpler and more ergonomic. But I imagine hoping for a data model change like that is probably a pipe dream.
I can suggest having a look at Infomaniak: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/service-mail
And with the kSuite, you have everything: file storage, chat, emails...
I have no involvement with the company, except as a happy customer for many years
Well you can try Proton for free and see for yourself.
I've noticed that people either care about email being efficient and private, or they care about the comfortable bells and whistles of their existing inbox (and Gmail has many), but you can't really tell which one you are until you test something new for yourself.
I did comparison of Fastmail, Protonmail and Mailfence. Finally, I decided to go ahead with Mailfence due to their end-to-end encryption and stronger privacy focus. I am very happy with Mailfence so far.
I'm happy with tutanota.
It's extremely minimal though. I think it's just mail, contacts and calendar.
+1 for Fastmail.
I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.
I have no idea why people don't just use a standard imap mail client, Thunderbird being the most obvious choice here.
Breaks my heart to see you stuck in your unenlightenment.
If only there was some way to learn the answer to questions.
I would really like to learn the secret secrets to be able to stomach that enlightenment and I am enthused to learn about non-shitty cloud webmail integrations that don't make you want to shoot yourself within minutes.
I've been very happy with Protonmail, you can even use your old Gmail address from within Protonmail [0]. Although arguable doing that is counter productive, you want receive gmails but reply with you new address -> Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life, so you can move again with little pain in the future ;)
[0] https://proton.me/blog/proton-mail-connect-gmail
My problem with protonmail (and telegram) is that in my country, only scammers use those two services. So when I encounter these, I immediately distrust the person I'm interacting with and assume the worst. Even my one neighbor uses it and I distrust him immensely as he is not tech savvy yet he uses proton... its strange. How does he even know about it? He and his wife are not forth coming about what they do for a living, they seem to be nice people, but they both use proton. In our country its a huge red flag.
When people are suspicious of anyone not wanting to be surveiled and spied upon, it says more about the state of the social group that it says about the privacy-minded individual.
And it means it's even more important to move away from that surveilance because it shapes opinions to sustain itself.
Proton isn't used only by scammers.
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>How does he even know about it?
Maybe google locked their account.
I do get that, but that is what you get when you offer strong privacy, it's probably similar with GrapheneOS, and Signal (though there it's much less visible). When I see someone using Proton it's a signal they align with my values regarding privacy. To me it's a good sign, actually, one of the (friend) relations I have, started with "Hey you are also on Proton." Turns out she's a frequenter of hacker festivals etc.
I use Telegram for bots btw, nothing beats the ease of the Botfather.
I temporarily moved from Fastmail to Proton Mail, but found several downsides:
* Loading mails (especially when going quickly through them) has quite some latency. Possibly due to decrypting.
* Search is pretty bad compared to Fastmail.
* The keyboard shortcuts seem to never work correctly.
So I went back to Fastmail for mail (we still use Proton Drive, which has its own set of warts).
I changed from Gmail to proton many years ago.
The only pain point I have is the search. Understandable, the emails are encrypted and search has to be done on the client. That works when using the web hi as you have the option to index all emails.
I do not find this option in the iOS app :(
Agreed, there are quirks, and there is also an AI writer, though it never disturbed me and hope it never will.
But generally the UI is clean and they align with my values.
There is a bridge software that bridges Proton and imap so you can use any client. Never used it though, I find the apps pretty good. The latest generation is focussing on off-line use which will hopefully drive down down some of the latency, especially that of the calendar app is pretty bad atm.
My father somehow loves the search, but I myself am also unimpressed tbh. I do like the tagging system.
+ I'll add the obligatory complaint about the lack of Linux Protondrive client.
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My notes say: No IMAP or other way to export emails, they're trapped in the service. CEO is a Trump supporter.
You can export mails, but only if you're on a paid plan.
Then you can install Proton Mail Bridge (which exposes a fake IMAP server to your machine) and a mail client (e.g. Thunderbird). Then you move all your mail from Proton to your new service by drag-n-dropping inside of your mail client.
I did it in order to move to Mailbox.org (great service), exactly because I don't want to give money to a company run by a Trump supporter.
Also, get ready to receive replies in which they tell you "Ackchyually he's not a trump supporter!!!1"
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I'll be the "Ackchyually" person for those who don't know. Proton tweeted support for a _single_ thing the Trump administration did, on a subject that mattered to Proton. Otherwise, they have a strict neutrality position, and their CEO responded to the accusations on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...
Do you have any proof or are you still referring to that one tweet from very long ago, where he did not praise Trump but some action Trump took that was actually good (I know, when you're polarized enough it's hard to think in such terms).
As someone who does use their own domain to receive mail, I am acutely aware of how diligent I must be to never lose that domain. The chances of someone acquiring access to my Gmail account are far lower than me losing the dotancohen.com domain, especially with the cyber attacks against Israeli assets that have been ongoing incessantly since 2023. One's email is often the gateway to every other online service, via reset password features - losing access is problematic and an attacker getting access is nigh unrecoverable.
Anything can be taken from you at any time. Google can also just delete your account for no obvious reason. I guess that a domain can also be taken away but maybe not that easy. At least you can switch mail providers easily without having to change all your accounts that are based on your mail address.
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Change your password from 123456 to correct horse battery staple and you will be safe from cyberattacks. And use noscript.
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I use a .nl domain for my country, luckily it is governed by a trustworthy party and there are strict rules and convenient systems to move domainnames between providers. Agreed that some tlds may indeed be less ideal in that respect.
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One additional benefit of Fastmail is fast, helpful tech support. The few times i’ve needed them, they’ve answered quickly and given me what i needed in the first response.
Fastmail is great. I also use (and really like) Fairemail https://email.faircode.eu/
> Small (<30 MB)
The joy of modern apps...
I been using proton but the UI is just a little bit of a let down. missing things that just were natural on gmail and i never had to think about
dunno ok maybe I'll try fastmail
Agreed. Proton is not up to my personal standard.
That’s ok - they have a wonderful VPN service that I use every day.
Moved to Fastmail from Gmail like 15 years ago and I couldn't be happier.
I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a long time Gmail offered a lightweight, simple HTML version of their site. Essentially the original UI for it.
It was astounding just how quick it was, which really shows you how little of a damn they seem to give about their users. That's especially weird, given that they dogfood their own products.
Another happy Fastmail user here. They have great IMAP support (with app password) so I have a full local copy on my laptop that I can search instantly with notmuch or read/write from Emacs, but lately I've also started using their web UI a lot because it's just so fast and simple and well-thought-out. When they ship new features, it's stuff that makes you think "oh, that's actually a good idea – and they even made a very logical keyboard shortcut for it". And they've been very responsive to the few support requests I've made.
In TFA the author specifically mentions triaging Fastmail. He is happy with it.
The author literally mentioned they are in the process of migrating to Fastmail, but it sounds like you’re bringing it up as a new recommendation? Then you restated the reason they are moving away (overbearing AI features in your face) as if it wasn’t the crux of their argument? Then you touted how good Fastmail migration features are after the author stated they actually like the fact they are starting with a clean slate, and are undecided if they even want to migrate? Something smells fishy here my friend
Didn't you consider that the comment you're replying to was for the benefit of other readers not necessarily the OP? I found it useful and yes I did read both.
Plus one for Fastmail I’ve been using with a custom domain for years now and it’s great. I don’t use Google for anything at this point, though I’m sure they’re still tracking me somehow.
my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often
Yes literally it threw an invoice from AWS into spam recently. Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like you, i have a problem with false positives not false negatives.
I brought it up with support once and the domain was failing DMARC. Headers from the AWS email that has a spam score of 9.1! I don’t know much about email but something must be wrong there on Fastmails side.
x-sieve: CMU Sieve 3.0
X-Spam-known-sender: no
X-Spam-sender-reputation: 500 (none)
X-Spam-score: 9.1
X-Spam-hits: DCC_CHECK 1.1, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS 0.249, HTML_MESSAGE 0.001, ME_SENDERREP_NEUTRAL 0.001, MIME_HTML_ONLY 0.1, MPART_ALT_DIFF 0.724, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE -0.0001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H4 0.001, RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL 0.001, SPF_HELO_NONE 0.001, SPF_PASS -0.001, T_REMOTE_IMAGE 0.01, URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7, LANGUAGES en, BAYES_USED none, SA_VERSION 4.0.1
X-Spam-source: IP='54.240.9.110', Host='a9-110.smtp-out.amazonses.com', Country='US', FromHeader='com', MailFrom='com'
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> URIBL_DBL_ABUSE_PHISH 7
Hm...
Are you sure it was a legit invoice?
;-)
I disagree. Their spam filtering has been top notch for me. Sometimes spam does get through, but marking that as spam has made sure the next ones of the same are flagged correctly.
Lately LLM generated spam has fooled it more often, though. Let's see if that becomes a problem.
my problem is more like legit emails are marked as spam. which make me nervous if i miss anything in the Spam folder.
It's not. I wrote about this a couple times. Here's how it works: the personal spam filter kicks in after having trained on ~100-200 spam emails. You need to mark them as spam (you might want to use a filter initially if they all have a common pattern) and delete them regularly from the spam folder. Spam training kicks in only when you a spam message is deleted (to avoid training on false positives)
I went through the same phase when I first moved to Fastmail, and this is what customer support explained after some back-and-forth. I don't have spam in my Inbox any more (despite receiving ~20 spam emails per day)
Are you talking about false negatives? The problem I have is with false positives. It regularly throws important legit email into spam.
Just the other day it threw an invoice from AWS into spam! Regularly throws financial docs into spam. Like it’s hard for me to imagine how that happens.
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That's not exactly a reason to stick with gmail. Gmail will mark anything as spam.
I agree. Their spam filtering is absolute trash. I get 3-4 spam messages a day in my inbox. I file support tickets for it and they always tell me there is nothing they can do.
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380983
A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.
Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.
Their ios app works ok for me. But I really wish it was fully native, and not just a webview wrapper of their webmail client. They have truly excellent IMAP support though (and JMAP too). So yeah, mail.app works great.
They also support apple's custom XAPPLEPUSH IMAP extension, which means fastmail supports mobile push over IMAP. I think they're the only ones who support it other than apple.
I use infomaniak. Works great, no complaints. The support is based on human beings as well. I like that, and they are polite and helpful too!
I was curious about whether one could layer email-ids as an interface on top of ATProto, and get all the decentralization benefits of the latter while being easy to move on from the former. A bit of searching threw up Comail [1]. Curious to hear perspectives on Comail / the general idea.
[1] https://comail.at
Fastmail is great, their android app is also great except one single thing. They for some obsure reason insist on opening attachments like pdfs inside the app instead of in the default app. But the problem is that they don't support opening password protected pdfs. And they shows an error that they dont support password protected files without providing an option to open in default app. I have to manually click on the file, read the stupid error, click the download button(this is available only in the error page), then use the notification bar to open the damn file on my phone. Everything else is fine. This one sketchy insistance to open every file themselves within the app even if they dont know how to do that is something that annoys me.
Fastmail is fast enough and has rich enough keyboard shortcuts that I stopped using mutt for it. It's very good.
Speaking about Gmail->FastMail migration, you might be interested in this ten-years old thread: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12247401)
Fastmail is indeed great. It’s been a pleasure to use.
You can add multiple domains to your account without making it a feel like an enterprise.
All the features relating to the aliases is available on the ios app. One doesn’t need to jump between the web and the app to do basic things.
Fastmail seems good but there’s some comfort from tutanota/protonmail promising to store my emails e2e encrypted (though they obviously can read them on send/receive). Have you tried them? What was your opinion?
Serious question (for me): How would you rate fastmail strictly in terms of perseverence over time, ie will it still be here a decade from now? Confidence in that alone would move me there.
Fastmail’s been around since 1999. (That’s 5 years older than Gmail…). It’s profitable and employee owned, not VC funded.
The senior staff have all been working on it for over 15 years. Anything can happen of course, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a tech company with more apparent longevity.
(Source: I am one of those senior staff)
I started migrating to FastMail years ago, but never got to switch in full yet, because in my case with a public email address, the level of unhandled spam is too high.
Did you meet that issue?
Nope. The spam filtering works fantastically for me. They might’ve improved it - I migrated only a few months ago. So it could be worth another try.
Thanks!
I agree, it's one of my best value subscriptions. It's especially good if you host a lot of domains, you can link 100 custom domains to a single Fastmail account.
How is offline support in their mobile app? I am looking for a protonmail alternative, because it didn't open emails when I really needed while being offline.
It’s good! Works for me when I need it, but you should still save crucial stuff somewhere locally.
Also, I recommend to disable ios Files’ setting to auto-delete at will “because it’s in the cloud!”
+1 to Fastmail. Been their happy customer for 5+ years.
How good are their spam filters? That's what keeps me coming back to Gmail every time I try something different.
You’re in for a treat. They’re good!
Its eating AI pilled companies lunch o clock
Just another +1 for fastmail, long time user, really pleased with the service. They do one thing and they do it well, and they charge a fair price for the value delivered.
Google doesn't have app passwords anymore so plus one for fastmail.
It still does, but the page is hidden and nothing in the UI links to it.
If you still need it, you can find the url by looking at blog guides to setting up calendar integrations.
Fastmail is the best and you cannot change my mind ever. I love it.
> “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row.
Ah, the standard Silicon Valley permission request format:
"Would you like us to invade your privacy: 'Yes' Or 'Ask me again later'".
It's like being propositioned by a nutcase who won't take no for an answer.... the ethics and legality of which are obvious for all to see.
thanks for the suggestion.. gmail has really been a dog lately so this sounds worth looking at
Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up.
I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.
Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.
I would rather invest 10 x 60 Eur = 600 Eur every 10 years into new laptop or bigger RAM rather then trying to switch to non-free email and lose whole Google ecosystem.
Not having much spam is number one priority for me. 50ms delay in refresh rate is OK. In fact I have never noticed and it have never came to my mind that Gmail is slow. Yes, it needs RAM but I was never annoyed by any "slowness".
Losing google ecosystem is a bonus for me and is the main reason I want to leave.
Google has been slowly sucking more and more each year and I have to spend mental energy figuring out how they are trying to screw me over or bill me for something.
It’s worth $50/year to not have that mental stress.
Actually occasionally fastmail initially loading seems to hold up for a while for me for some reason
Don’t try Fastmail’s family plan. It’s undercooked. Rest is all greatz
While GMail is horrible, FastMail is not great either. Their spam filtering is a joke - it was quite a decent on until they ruined it few years ago with some changes.
I have no alternatives to suggest besides doing your own email. It's way better than anything commercial, works the way you want it, and most importantly nowadays, it's not used to train a commercial AI.