4 ms·

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.
- ansgri 10y ago
  One BIG MINUS is internationalization (couldn't care less about localization though), they still haven't completely fixed full text search for Cyrillic mail. Some weird behavior like not matching partial words, or otherwise omitting some legit search results, makes things difficult to find sometimes. That said, even with that, it's much better than everything else on the overall UX.
ansgri 10y ago
Also the thing rarely mentioned: they have the best web calendar for the desktop. The UX matches that of Fastmail: fast and free from annoyances. Supports sync with thirdparty services, too.

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.

ansgri 10y ago
One BIG MINUS is internationalization (couldn't care less about localization though), they still haven't completely fixed full text search for Cyrillic mail. Some weird behavior like not matching partial words, or otherwise omitting some legit search results, makes things difficult to find sometimes. That said, even with that, it's much better than everything else on the overall UX.

ansgri 10y ago

Also the thing rarely mentioned: they have the best web calendar for the desktop. The UX matches that of Fastmail: fast and free from annoyances. Supports sync with thirdparty services, too.