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I've just started checking out Fastmail as a result of this thread. I hadn't heard of it before but I'm really into it. I've been trying out different email s

by herbig 11y ago

I've just started checking out Fastmail as a result of this thread. I hadn't heard of it before but I'm really into it. I've been trying out different email services lately in an effort to untether myself from Google, and this one seems like a really good choice. I'm not into the iOS themed non native Android app though, but being an Android developer I'm more averse to that nonsense. It seems to work great and is really fast though. Does anyone know if there is a native app planned? I'd be willing to pay a subscription for email if it's worth it. I'd love to hear others' experience with them.

Karunamon 11y ago
Another +1 for Fastmail. I've been putting off migration from Google for months, but finally got around to moving things over. The migration was easy, their UI is shockingly quick (about halfway through processing ~20k archived messages), and it's got most of the features you could possibly want.
gfosco 11y ago
I've been using it for my main domain for over a year... It's a great service and I'm happy with it. I wanted to move away from GMail, without losing a good spam filtering solution, and it works very well. I recommend Fastmail.
piker 11y ago
Great experience with our business account. We pay some trivial amount and our emails are out the door... fast. There's also the basic support that you would expect built in. Our experience is that they just "do one thing well". It's probably the second-to-last external dependency we'd [edit: internalize], with Stripe being the last and Analytics and Github being the first two, if that gives any perspective.
Raphael 11y ago
Couldn't you just use a generic email client?
- sbierwagen 11y ago
  Can't flag emails as spam in a generic client. Could probably make a workaround by creating a folder and setting a rule on it, or something.
  - brongondwana 11y ago
    Yes, we support setting a folder to auto-learn as spam, so you could create a folder and move messages into it from your IMAP client.
bratsche 11y ago
I have a lifetime email alias from my university, and when I used it with Gmail it would always appear to people as "From me@gmail.com on behalf of me@wherever.edu". I wanted my .edu to be my actual email address, but my gmail address is what was ending up in people's address books. So I tried out Fastmail with my alias and had no trouble getting it working the way I wanted it to work. So I've been with Fastmail ever since.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- superuser2 11y ago
  I have my GMail configured to send email from my .edu address through my school's SMTP server. Fastmail supports this too. Look at your IT department's website, they probably explain how to configure it.
- danieldk 11y ago
  when I used it with Gmail it would always appear to people as "From me@gmail.com on behalf of me@wherever.edu". This doesn't happen if you configure an external SMTP server in Google Mail for the alias. http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-... https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en Moreover, you don't want to use a different 'from' address without sending through the appropriate SMTP server. If the domain has SPF or DKIM set up, a receiving server might reject your mail if it wasn't sent from an expected SMTP server.
rz2k 11y ago
On iOS, the client seems like it is just a shortcut to a website. However, I use IMAP in other applications, whether Apple's Mail or Outlook, and I'm just as happy if they don't develop a complete client.
sbierwagen 11y ago
I pay yearly for them to host email for my personal domain. No problem with email delivery (so far) and now that they let you flag emails as spam from the notification in the android app, I'd say that they do everything I want. Ideally of course I'd be self-hosting, but that's a tarpit I'll leap into at some time in the future.
- user_0001 11y ago
  >Ideally of course I'd be self-hosting, but that's a tarpit I'll leap into at some time in the future Wish I never bothered, that is a hassle you just don't need. Getting it up and running so it just works is a hassle enough. Thinking of going on holiday and want auto responses? You better plan that about a month in advance to figure it out :-( As you may tell, I am thinking of moving to fastmail for domain email hosting
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I do devops/infrastructure and even I shudder at the pain of setting up, hosting, and maintains a mail server.
josteink 11y ago
> I'd be willing to pay a subscription for email if it's worth it. I'd love to hear others' experience with them. It's a very good no-nonsense service based on standard protocols, although a bit pricey (compared to a grandfathered, free Google Apps account). They've lately been expanding to offer a more complete offering (CalDAV, CardDAV, etc). This means it plays nicely with any platform where these standards can be applied (Googley or not) and it also means it's easy to take data ownership seriously, if that's your thing. I only have positive experiences with fastmail, and I like that they don't have messed up and bloated their WebUI like Google have. Currently I'm only using it for my personal email because of price. It's not that expensive, but because it's 100% free for me, I still have the rest of my family on the Google apps account. The reassuring thing about paying for a service like this is that you know who the customer is. Fastmail will not change their UI to sneak in a "social network" in your inbox just to mine more data and milk more ad-dollars out of you. Edit: Clarifications about "pricey"
- vvpan 11y ago
  I have not shopped around for mail, so I have nothing to compare it with. But their tiers are $10/$20/$40 for .25/1/15GB per year. To me that's a _tiny_ price. I don't know what you mean by "pricey" then.
  - hhandoko 11y ago
    It's pricey relative to the other options. As mentioned, OP had a grandfathered Google Apps for Business (so, free forever?). Another alternative is to sign up to a $5-$10/month web hosting package which normally comes with free email hosting. Disclaimer: I'm a FastMail customer, been really happy with their service :) I also have a grandfathered Google Apps for Business account.
    - AlisdairO 11y ago
      FWIW I'm just switching over from using a web hosting package for my email towards FastMail. I was generally happy enough with the web hosting package, but didn't actually need it for anything much other than the email in the end. The biggest benefits I've noticed are reduced spam and a web interface that works well - I can actually search all of my email from my phone now, which was previously a practical impossibility :-). I hadn't noticed any slowdown, so kudos to the Fastmail guys!
SixSigma 11y ago
I've been a member for 15 years or so. Great spam detection, no viruses. Never been out
hendry 11y ago
I recommend Fastmail. They are responsive which is great. http://greptweet.com/u/kaihendry/#fastmail http://greptweet.com/u/kaihendry/#fastmail
- brongondwana 11y ago
  hi from over in twitterland :)
kxyvr 11y ago
I've used them for six years on a paid (enhanced) account and they've been very reliable for me. I've never noticed any downtimes and I appreciate how fast their web portal is when I need to mess with my configuration. There's also been zero issues with CalDav. I'm sure other providers give similar access, but they also make it very easy to create alternative email addresses for the domain I own. Once I started using them, I started setting up a different email address for every company I did business with online and that's cut down the amount of spam I receive dramatically. Basically, when I see a compromised email address, I disable it and that seems to do the trick. In any case, they've provided me rock solid service and that's worth the $40/year that I pay.
alex_hitchins 11y ago
> I'd be willing to pay a subscription for email if it's worth it. I'd love to hear others' experience with them. My experience is their people are awesome and their product is awesome. You won't regret signing up.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
Overwhelmingly positive, with great support too. I've seen their devs commenting on GitHub issue threads tracking down sync issues - deeply clueful and prompt support. Plus all the things: family accounts, CalDAV, CardDAV, XMPP...
tajen 11y ago
+1 for Fastmail over my 6-months experience: Reliable service, fast UI, no G+/GNow/Promotions tab annoying push. However there are things I'm really used to in Gmail, for example the unread messages at the top, and seeing messages in several labels. So Fastmail feel a bit less advanced.
- brongondwana 11y ago
  Labels is something that's tricky to implement on top of our IMAP-standards-folders-based server, but we have some ideas on how to do it. Sort unread to the top is easy on desktop interface, though there's no UI to do it on mobile. search is:unseen works nicely to find them on mobile as well, and you can save it to your sidebar/folders list.
bachmeier 11y ago
I moved to Fastmail six months ago based on their reputation. I use it for several accounts, including that sent to my own domain name. No regrets at all.
pidg 11y ago
On my third year of membership and wouldn't hesitate to recommend Fastmail. Only ever had one issue (a small bug to do with some very specific domain config) - their support team emailed me back straight away, it was escalated to the devs, and fixed almost immediately. Now with CalDAV and CardDAV support it's a no-brainer.
merijnv 11y ago
I've been using Fastmail for 2 or 3 years, recently moved my XMPP and Caldav stuff over too. I would recommend them, no complaints, I've not noticed a single outage in that time. It was trivial to IMAP import mail from my old host. Good support for multiple authentication schemes, i.e. I have a 32 random char master password saved in my password manager, and they allow me to add any number of alternative authentications like shorter passwords that are only allowed in combination with Yubikey/Google Authenticator or one time passwords. As for "app" I just use a generic IMAP client.
Shugyousha 11y ago
As far as I can tell they offer the same services as https://kolabnow.com/ https://kolabnow.com/ at a comparable price. The difference I can see is that kolabnow uses Open Source software throughout and contributes back. That's why I chose to support them instead.
- feld 11y ago
  Yeah, it's a real shame that Fastmail isn't doing any open source or trying to improve email standards for the entire internet https://github.com/fastmail https://github.com/fastmail https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/ https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/ http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
Jgrubb 11y ago
Paying user for 2 years now. Never had a single complaint.
mreiland 11y ago
I moved from gmail to fastmail a year or so ago and I've been supremely happy with them.

by herbig 11y ago

Karunamon 11y ago

Another +1 for Fastmail. I've been putting off migration from Google for months, but finally got around to moving things over. The migration was easy, their UI is shockingly quick (about halfway through processing ~20k archived messages), and it's got most of the features you could possibly want.

gfosco 11y ago

I've been using it for my main domain for over a year... It's a great service and I'm happy with it. I wanted to move away from GMail, without losing a good spam filtering solution, and it works very well. I recommend Fastmail.

piker 11y ago

Great experience with our business account. We pay some trivial amount and our emails are out the door... fast. There's also the basic support that you would expect built in. Our experience is that they just "do one thing well". It's probably the second-to-last external dependency we'd [edit: internalize], with Stripe being the last and Analytics and Github being the first two, if that gives any perspective.

Raphael 11y ago

Couldn't you just use a generic email client?

sbierwagen 11y ago
Can't flag emails as spam in a generic client. Could probably make a workaround by creating a folder and setting a rule on it, or something.
- brongondwana 11y ago
  Yes, we support setting a folder to auto-learn as spam, so you could create a folder and move messages into it from your IMAP client.

bratsche 11y ago

I have a lifetime email alias from my university, and when I used it with Gmail it would always appear to people as "From me@gmail.com on behalf of me@wherever.edu". I wanted my .edu to be my actual email address, but my gmail address is what was ending up in people's address books. So I tried out Fastmail with my alias and had no trouble getting it working the way I wanted it to work. So I've been with Fastmail ever since.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 11y ago
I have my GMail configured to send email from my .edu address through my school's SMTP server. Fastmail supports this too. Look at your IT department's website, they probably explain how to configure it.
danieldk 11y ago
when I used it with Gmail it would always appear to people as "From me@gmail.com on behalf of me@wherever.edu". This doesn't happen if you configure an external SMTP server in Google Mail for the alias. http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-... https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en Moreover, you don't want to use a different 'from' address without sending through the appropriate SMTP server. If the domain has SPF or DKIM set up, a receiving server might reject your mail if it wasn't sent from an expected SMTP server.

rz2k 11y ago

On iOS, the client seems like it is just a shortcut to a website. However, I use IMAP in other applications, whether Apple's Mail or Outlook, and I'm just as happy if they don't develop a complete client.

sbierwagen 11y ago

I pay yearly for them to host email for my personal domain. No problem with email delivery (so far) and now that they let you flag emails as spam from the notification in the android app, I'd say that they do everything I want. Ideally of course I'd be self-hosting, but that's a tarpit I'll leap into at some time in the future.

user_0001 11y ago
>Ideally of course I'd be self-hosting, but that's a tarpit I'll leap into at some time in the future Wish I never bothered, that is a hassle you just don't need. Getting it up and running so it just works is a hassle enough. Thinking of going on holiday and want auto responses? You better plan that about a month in advance to figure it out :-( As you may tell, I am thinking of moving to fastmail for domain email hosting
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I do devops/infrastructure and even I shudder at the pain of setting up, hosting, and maintains a mail server.

josteink 11y ago

> I'd be willing to pay a subscription for email if it's worth it. I'd love to hear others' experience with them. It's a very good no-nonsense service based on standard protocols, although a bit pricey (compared to a grandfathered, free Google Apps account). They've lately been expanding to offer a more complete offering (CalDAV, CardDAV, etc). This means it plays nicely with any platform where these standards can be applied (Googley or not) and it also means it's easy to take data ownership seriously, if that's your thing. I only have positive experiences with fastmail, and I like that they don't have messed up and bloated their WebUI like Google have. Currently I'm only using it for my personal email because of price. It's not that expensive, but because it's 100% free for me, I still have the rest of my family on the Google apps account. The reassuring thing about paying for a service like this is that you know who the customer is. Fastmail will not change their UI to sneak in a "social network" in your inbox just to mine more data and milk more ad-dollars out of you. Edit: Clarifications about "pricey"

vvpan 11y ago
I have not shopped around for mail, so I have nothing to compare it with. But their tiers are $10/$20/$40 for .25/1/15GB per year. To me that's a _tiny_ price. I don't know what you mean by "pricey" then.
- hhandoko 11y ago
  It's pricey relative to the other options. As mentioned, OP had a grandfathered Google Apps for Business (so, free forever?). Another alternative is to sign up to a $5-$10/month web hosting package which normally comes with free email hosting. Disclaimer: I'm a FastMail customer, been really happy with their service :) I also have a grandfathered Google Apps for Business account.
  - AlisdairO 11y ago
    FWIW I'm just switching over from using a web hosting package for my email towards FastMail. I was generally happy enough with the web hosting package, but didn't actually need it for anything much other than the email in the end. The biggest benefits I've noticed are reduced spam and a web interface that works well - I can actually search all of my email from my phone now, which was previously a practical impossibility :-). I hadn't noticed any slowdown, so kudos to the Fastmail guys!

SixSigma 11y ago

I've been a member for 15 years or so. Great spam detection, no viruses. Never been out

hendry 11y ago

I recommend Fastmail. They are responsive which is great. http://greptweet.com/u/kaihendry/#fastmail http://greptweet.com/u/kaihendry/#fastmail

brongondwana 11y ago
hi from over in twitterland :)

kxyvr 11y ago

I've used them for six years on a paid (enhanced) account and they've been very reliable for me. I've never noticed any downtimes and I appreciate how fast their web portal is when I need to mess with my configuration. There's also been zero issues with CalDav. I'm sure other providers give similar access, but they also make it very easy to create alternative email addresses for the domain I own. Once I started using them, I started setting up a different email address for every company I did business with online and that's cut down the amount of spam I receive dramatically. Basically, when I see a compromised email address, I disable it and that seems to do the trick. In any case, they've provided me rock solid service and that's worth the $40/year that I pay.

alex_hitchins 11y ago

> I'd be willing to pay a subscription for email if it's worth it. I'd love to hear others' experience with them. My experience is their people are awesome and their product is awesome. You won't regret signing up.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

Overwhelmingly positive, with great support too. I've seen their devs commenting on GitHub issue threads tracking down sync issues - deeply clueful and prompt support. Plus all the things: family accounts, CalDAV, CardDAV, XMPP...

tajen 11y ago

+1 for Fastmail over my 6-months experience: Reliable service, fast UI, no G+/GNow/Promotions tab annoying push. However there are things I'm really used to in Gmail, for example the unread messages at the top, and seeing messages in several labels. So Fastmail feel a bit less advanced.

brongondwana 11y ago
Labels is something that's tricky to implement on top of our IMAP-standards-folders-based server, but we have some ideas on how to do it. Sort unread to the top is easy on desktop interface, though there's no UI to do it on mobile. search is:unseen works nicely to find them on mobile as well, and you can save it to your sidebar/folders list.

bachmeier 11y ago

I moved to Fastmail six months ago based on their reputation. I use it for several accounts, including that sent to my own domain name. No regrets at all.

pidg 11y ago

On my third year of membership and wouldn't hesitate to recommend Fastmail. Only ever had one issue (a small bug to do with some very specific domain config) - their support team emailed me back straight away, it was escalated to the devs, and fixed almost immediately. Now with CalDAV and CardDAV support it's a no-brainer.

merijnv 11y ago

I've been using Fastmail for 2 or 3 years, recently moved my XMPP and Caldav stuff over too. I would recommend them, no complaints, I've not noticed a single outage in that time. It was trivial to IMAP import mail from my old host. Good support for multiple authentication schemes, i.e. I have a 32 random char master password saved in my password manager, and they allow me to add any number of alternative authentications like shorter passwords that are only allowed in combination with Yubikey/Google Authenticator or one time passwords. As for "app" I just use a generic IMAP client.

Shugyousha 11y ago

As far as I can tell they offer the same services as https://kolabnow.com/ https://kolabnow.com/ at a comparable price. The difference I can see is that kolabnow uses Open Source software throughout and contributes back. That's why I chose to support them instead.

feld 11y ago
Yeah, it's a real shame that Fastmail isn't doing any open source or trying to improve email standards for the entire internet https://github.com/fastmail https://github.com/fastmail https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/ https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/ http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/

Jgrubb 11y ago

Paying user for 2 years now. Never had a single complaint.

mreiland 11y ago

I moved from gmail to fastmail a year or so ago and I've been supremely happy with them.