5 ms·

Love fastmail -- I have six domains. I can send/receive from whatever address I want.

StavrosK 10y ago
I should just bite the price bullet and move to them. I've moved everything else off Google (even search), it's about time I move my email too.
- braveo 10y ago
  I've been using FastMail for several years and have nothing but good things to say. You can configure gmail to forward everything to a different email account, that's what I did when I moved. I have filters in SmarterMail that filter the incoming mail from gmail accordingly.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    What stops me currently is that free is less than $50, but, then again, I've been having issues with Gmail being shitty when using alternate domains for emails. Everything shows up as "stavros@somedomain.com via someotherdomain.com", does FastMail do that too? I ended up using Mailgun to send email just to get rid of this stupidity.
    - stephenhuey 10y ago
      Is it stupidity or transparency since they don't know for sure it's legit? Just be a good netizen and use SPF and DKIM for that. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via-and-server-name-when-sending-mails-with-php http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via...
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        I did use both, they had a weird bug where if you used both, it would show you the "via", and only hide it if you didn't use both. I wrote this up when I discovered it, as it's very counter-intuitive: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-apps-email/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-a...
  - mxvzr 10y ago
    After using it for a few months I must say I am not very impressed with FastMail's antispam filter: I am receiving quite a bit of spam (tax/home alarm/life insurance/what-have-you spam) to an alias email. About a dozen a day (maybe it's not that much, but still a whole lot more than I am used to coming from Gmail). I always mark them as spam yet new ones, at a glance very similar to the marked ones, keep making it into the inbox. Admittedly this is partially my fault since the alias is very-common-firstname@one-of-the-many-domains-offered-by-fastmail.com. Since you've been with them for awhile now, what is your experience in regards to spam?
    - braveo 10y ago
      I've not really noticed a spam problem at all, but I do things like sign up using microsoft+trap@domain-name.com, but even then I haven't really noticed a lot of traffic through that account. OTOH, I'm pretty anal about protecting my personal email accounts.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        I use 33mail.com for that (with a custom domain), it's great.
      - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
        If you let Fastmail control your DNS, you can use neat aliases like website@me.my.domain instead of me+website@my.domain. That gets around websites with "validation" that rejects addresses with "+" in them, and I think it's a bit more secure since the tagging is less obvious to spammers.
        StavrosK 10y ago
        You don't need to let it control your DNS, you can just set wildcard MX.
        braveo 10y ago
        didn't know that, thanks for the tip.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I remembered why I couldn't move away: I have other family members on that Google Apps domain. However, I just moved my personal domain there, and holy shit is everything faster. Google would just keep Thunderbird spinning and spinning and not sync deletions to my phone and vice-versa (I use K9), but Fastmail is just lightning fast. The browser notification, their UI, their mobile app, Thunderbird and K9, everything is just super fast. Totally worth whatever price, I'm going to pre-sign-up for three years right now. Thank you!
  - goblin89 10y ago
    Couple of months ago I was asked to provide a non-Gmail-hosted email address for reliable confirmation (while booking a flight with China Airlines). After a bit of investigation I made the decision to jump onto FastMail’s cheapest personal plan. Guess what, had to give up after 10 minutes or so—their sign-up form kept reporting server error! Rationally I do realize that whatever it was it’s unlikely to affect their existing customers… Still, anyone can comment on FastMail’s actual uptime?
    - realusername 10y ago
      I personally never had any issue with Fastmail in about 2 years, it seems very reliable
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        Eh, I just signed up and am trying to add other domains and the DNS verification is failing, even though the fields have been there for days. Also, trying to verify DKIM unverifies the entire domain, so that seems pretty buggy. Everything else has been working great, though.
    - feld 10y ago
      zero downtime noticed in several years. They are public about their issues but I cannot remember ever being unable to access my mail https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ https://www.fastmailstatus.com/
    - MagerValp 10y ago
      They publish detailed data here: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ And anecdotally it's been rock solid for me and my family, never slow.
- kartickv 10y ago
  As someone who loves Inbox and Gmail, what does Fastmail do that Gmail doesn't? It needs to do a lot to make it worth the high price of $36 per year.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I just switched, and it's much, much faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729703
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    The biggest thing is customer support. You can have an issue or even just a question, file a ticket, and a FastMail employee will respond within a matter of hours.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    I've been a user for 3 years. The reason I use Fastmail is they sell you email instead of doing sketchy stuff with your data. As a side effect, this also means they have actual customer service! I've contacted them a handful of times and each time received a real response by a person who understood what they were talking about. Their web client is as good as it gets except for gmail, and under active development: stuff slowly but seemingly constantly improves. eg they recently added "add Rule from Message" functionality. It remains very responsive with 6G of email. They also apparently slightly increased prices (with larger data allocations) while I've been a customer and they silently grandfathered me into the old pricing. Also, one upside of running a domain for your email is you can use [sitename]@kartickv.com for every site. This not only makes routing email very easy, but allows you to both tell who sold your contact info and block that address.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    I have been a happy customer for some years, after using Google Apps for domains (paid) for more than half a decade. + You pay for the service, they are not mining your data. + When you have an issue, it is easy to talk to real humans. I had some feature requests, my case was transferred to one of their tech-people in no time. One of my feature requests was rolled out on their beta version in a couple of days. + They have a standards-conforming IMAP. So, it works much better with isync/mu4e/mutt/etc. + Fastmail is fast. + They are a big contributor to the open source Cyrus project. So a lot of their development ends up being available for everyone. + They support push notifications in Mail.app in iOS. (Not IMAP IDLE, real push notifications.) + subdomain addressing besides plus addresses. E.g. if my e-mail address is me@foobar.xyz I can give out me@quux.foobar.xyz without first creating a virtual host quux.foobar.xyz. It makes it easy to create custom addresses that are a bit less obvious than plus addressing. - The spam filter is not as good as Google's, even after training it for you personally. I regularly (usually once or twice a week) get spam or malware mails in my inbox. - The mobile app is acceptable, but not as the Google Mail app. It's basically their webmail in a web frame.
JohnTHaller 10y ago
How is their spam filtering? Rackspace's is pretty bad.
- jakebasile 10y ago
  I switched recently (kept my old address) and I've had only a few spam messages get through. It has a learning filter that kicks in once it knows enough about you, too. And finally, if you're getting some specific spam you might be able to create a filter for it.

I should just bite the price bullet and move to them. I've moved everything else off Google (even search), it's about time I move my email too.

braveo 10y ago
I've been using FastMail for several years and have nothing but good things to say. You can configure gmail to forward everything to a different email account, that's what I did when I moved. I have filters in SmarterMail that filter the incoming mail from gmail accordingly.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  What stops me currently is that free is less than $50, but, then again, I've been having issues with Gmail being shitty when using alternate domains for emails. Everything shows up as "stavros@somedomain.com via someotherdomain.com", does FastMail do that too? I ended up using Mailgun to send email just to get rid of this stupidity.
  - stephenhuey 10y ago
    Is it stupidity or transparency since they don't know for sure it's legit? Just be a good netizen and use SPF and DKIM for that. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via-and-server-name-when-sending-mails-with-php http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via...
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I did use both, they had a weird bug where if you used both, it would show you the "via", and only hide it if you didn't use both. I wrote this up when I discovered it, as it's very counter-intuitive: https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-apps-email/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-a...
- mxvzr 10y ago
  After using it for a few months I must say I am not very impressed with FastMail's antispam filter: I am receiving quite a bit of spam (tax/home alarm/life insurance/what-have-you spam) to an alias email. About a dozen a day (maybe it's not that much, but still a whole lot more than I am used to coming from Gmail). I always mark them as spam yet new ones, at a glance very similar to the marked ones, keep making it into the inbox. Admittedly this is partially my fault since the alias is very-common-firstname@one-of-the-many-domains-offered-by-fastmail.com. Since you've been with them for awhile now, what is your experience in regards to spam?
  - braveo 10y ago
    I've not really noticed a spam problem at all, but I do things like sign up using microsoft+trap@domain-name.com, but even then I haven't really noticed a lot of traffic through that account. OTOH, I'm pretty anal about protecting my personal email accounts.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I use 33mail.com for that (with a custom domain), it's great.
    - DashRattlesnake 10y ago
      If you let Fastmail control your DNS, you can use neat aliases like website@me.my.domain instead of me+website@my.domain. That gets around websites with "validation" that rejects addresses with "+" in them, and I think it's a bit more secure since the tagging is less obvious to spammers.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        You don't need to let it control your DNS, you can just set wildcard MX.
      - braveo 10y ago
        didn't know that, thanks for the tip.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I remembered why I couldn't move away: I have other family members on that Google Apps domain. However, I just moved my personal domain there, and holy shit is everything faster. Google would just keep Thunderbird spinning and spinning and not sync deletions to my phone and vice-versa (I use K9), but Fastmail is just lightning fast. The browser notification, their UI, their mobile app, Thunderbird and K9, everything is just super fast. Totally worth whatever price, I'm going to pre-sign-up for three years right now. Thank you!
- goblin89 10y ago
  Couple of months ago I was asked to provide a non-Gmail-hosted email address for reliable confirmation (while booking a flight with China Airlines). After a bit of investigation I made the decision to jump onto FastMail’s cheapest personal plan. Guess what, had to give up after 10 minutes or so—their sign-up form kept reporting server error! Rationally I do realize that whatever it was it’s unlikely to affect their existing customers… Still, anyone can comment on FastMail’s actual uptime?
  - realusername 10y ago
    I personally never had any issue with Fastmail in about 2 years, it seems very reliable
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Eh, I just signed up and am trying to add other domains and the DNS verification is failing, even though the fields have been there for days. Also, trying to verify DKIM unverifies the entire domain, so that seems pretty buggy. Everything else has been working great, though.
  - feld 10y ago
    zero downtime noticed in several years. They are public about their issues but I cannot remember ever being unable to access my mail https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ https://www.fastmailstatus.com/
  - MagerValp 10y ago
    They publish detailed data here: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ And anecdotally it's been rock solid for me and my family, never slow.
kartickv 10y ago
As someone who loves Inbox and Gmail, what does Fastmail do that Gmail doesn't? It needs to do a lot to make it worth the high price of $36 per year.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I just switched, and it's much, much faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729703
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  The biggest thing is customer support. You can have an issue or even just a question, file a ticket, and a FastMail employee will respond within a matter of hours.
- x0x0 10y ago
  I've been a user for 3 years. The reason I use Fastmail is they sell you email instead of doing sketchy stuff with your data. As a side effect, this also means they have actual customer service! I've contacted them a handful of times and each time received a real response by a person who understood what they were talking about. Their web client is as good as it gets except for gmail, and under active development: stuff slowly but seemingly constantly improves. eg they recently added "add Rule from Message" functionality. It remains very responsive with 6G of email. They also apparently slightly increased prices (with larger data allocations) while I've been a customer and they silently grandfathered me into the old pricing. Also, one upside of running a domain for your email is you can use [sitename]@kartickv.com for every site. This not only makes routing email very easy, but allows you to both tell who sold your contact info and block that address.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I have been a happy customer for some years, after using Google Apps for domains (paid) for more than half a decade. + You pay for the service, they are not mining your data. + When you have an issue, it is easy to talk to real humans. I had some feature requests, my case was transferred to one of their tech-people in no time. One of my feature requests was rolled out on their beta version in a couple of days. + They have a standards-conforming IMAP. So, it works much better with isync/mu4e/mutt/etc. + Fastmail is fast. + They are a big contributor to the open source Cyrus project. So a lot of their development ends up being available for everyone. + They support push notifications in Mail.app in iOS. (Not IMAP IDLE, real push notifications.) + subdomain addressing besides plus addresses. E.g. if my e-mail address is me@foobar.xyz I can give out me@quux.foobar.xyz without first creating a virtual host quux.foobar.xyz. It makes it easy to create custom addresses that are a bit less obvious than plus addressing. - The spam filter is not as good as Google's, even after training it for you personally. I regularly (usually once or twice a week) get spam or malware mails in my inbox. - The mobile app is acceptable, but not as the Google Mail app. It's basically their webmail in a web frame.

JohnTHaller 10y ago

How is their spam filtering? Rackspace's is pretty bad.

jakebasile 10y ago
I switched recently (kept my old address) and I've had only a few spam messages get through. It has a learning filter that kicks in once it knows enough about you, too. And finally, if you're getting some specific spam you might be able to create a filter for it.