8 ms·

I very recently switched to fastmail and couldn't be happier. For $90 a year, I don't have to deal with people snooping and tracking me around for ads. I know g

I very recently switched to fastmail and couldn't be happier. For $90 a year, I don't have to deal with people snooping and tracking me around for ads. I know google is trying to give me value with all their facial recognition and recommendations, but I don't think it is going to end well. When it does end badly, it will be too late for the user because we would've given up all the data. I don't want Google to build models to track my toddler's face when he isn't even capable of consenting to such tracking.

samblr 9y ago
how are you sure that fastmail is secure and they aren't using ur data to build models ? because there is an annual subscription or they advertise it so ?
- bthrn 9y ago
  They advertise it as such. From their privacy policy: "Incoming messages are scanned for the purpose of spam detection unless you disable spam protection for your account... To make message searching fast, we build an index of your messages (this is a table, just like you would find at the back of a reference book, in which you can look up a word to quickly find the emails in which it appears). No information from any of these activities is used for any other purpose, or to compile any kind of profile on our users." https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
  - samblr 9y ago
    Is it generally possible to reconstruct email(=text) with indicies if they are stolen/hacked ? Although Im not questioning fastmail ability to provide secured email service. Yet I cannot help think why I would rely on a small player for email. I would ask what is the probability of fastmail service getting hacked say compared to gmail. (Somebody has right pointed out that ) Ad relevance to your email is not same as reading - thinking in same vein should also lead us to believe even (spam) classification can be termed as reading.
    - vaishaksuresh 9y ago
      I can talk about myself and the reason I think Gmail is not working for me. I'm less worried about the security part of the email and more about the tracking aspect. I don't need encrypted emails, however I don't want someone gleaning information from my emails and using it for selling me stuff and generally profiling. All my Amazon order confirmation used to go to Gmail and they would most definitely read it. I know this because they use it to show me status of the deliveries. It is not unrealistic to think Google will also use this data to build patterns around my buying habits and things I use etc. That does not make me feel comfortable. Amazon already know that because I shop there, I don't want Google also knowing that. My opinion is tracking, ads are all fine on the primary website, but if you follow me around the web, tracking my every move, I'll stop using such services and try my best to prevent the tracking.
    - zargon 9y ago
      If I were to use Gmail I would consider myself already hacked.
    - albinowax_ 9y ago
      I'm a security person, and I've found vulnerabilities in both fastmail and various core google services (although not gmail). Fastmail and gmail both have mature bug bounty programs, which mean they will pay out cash to anyone who finds and reports a way to hack them: https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html This shows that they are willing to put money behind their claims to security and probably puts them in the top few % of difficult to hack websites above eg windows live mail. Also, it's a mistake to think a company will be more secure because it's larger. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite; large companies tend to have complex websites with vastly more attack surface. Of course, every email provider is vulnerable to certain governments.
    - tajen 9y ago
      > I cannot help think why would I rely on a small player for email. If Fastmail were, say, 1% of Google size, it would still be #2, which is a pretty good ranking on any market. And if you don't lose features by switching to the #2, please do it, for the sake of competition – Give freedom a chance. I'm using Fastmail for my 3-ppl business. We lack no feature, we get used to it, we pay them (cheap), we don't leak our source code to GitHub and other browsing habits or contacts to Google Analytics/G+, it's just good management of the company information. We are the annoying guys who can't click "Connect with Facebook" nor "Connect with G+" and that makes providers keep the login/pw auth. Plus it funds a company so you might still have a choice in 5 years. And we show VCs that writing "privacy" on commercial documents yields customers. Cost to us? Zero.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ionised 9y ago
  Reputations are important to build trust. Fatmail has a reptuation for not doing this, Google doesn't.
DerfNet 9y ago
Is there any reason not to go with ProtonMail? They seem to be the big recommendation lately for encrypted email service.
- vaishaksuresh 9y ago
  No particular reason, I just knew fastmail from many years ago and liked them.
  - joering2 9y ago
    I emailed them (Proton) on few occasions with important questions and never got a single response. That alone turned me off. Will go with Fastmail very soon moving my yahoo since Verizon bought them.
    - marcopol 9y ago
      Where did you email them? They're known to have one of the best support out there.
- Propen 9y ago
  I'd really love to support ProtonMail but one thing I can't swallow is that there's no server-side search of email bodies (only to/from & subject) because it's encrypted. This kills the possibility of searching through years of newsletters & stuff :/
  - bartbutler 9y ago
    You will be able to use the upcoming ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP bridge to do fulltext search locally.
  - jszymborski 9y ago
    [I'm stupid they have 2FA, ignore this comment.] Another huge problem is the lack of two-factor authentication. How can a security-oriented service not offer TOTP or even SMS 2FA.
rocqua 9y ago
I still like gmail for its spam filter and notably "important mail" function. Outside of those, I'd switch to something self-hosted.
komali2 9y ago
>facial recognition Is there some sort of Gmail camera thing I'm not aware of?
- vaishaksuresh 9y ago
  Google Photos. I'm talking about Google in general, not Gmail in particular.
weitzj 9y ago
We are using fastmail as well, and it is great. They have a solution for every weird mail-problem we tried to solve, i.e. shared inbox folders, shared calendars and integration with "dump" client applications. For example your username might differ in order to access a shared calendar. Also you can generate application passwords for an account. So you can create an SMTP-only application password for your fastmail account.
- weitzj 9y ago
  Oh. And personally I am using mailbox.org which is also nice but a little bit cheaper. And the feature-set is still great, but limited compared to FastMail. Also the webui in mailbox.org is slower than for fastmail.
  - jszymborski 9y ago
    one nice thing about mailbox.org is that you can have them encrypt incoming email with PGP. Allows you to use IMAP and get protonmail/tutanote-esque security... I really like it :)
  - newscracker 9y ago
    I'd recommend Posteo [1] and Mailbox [2] to people mainly for the costs. They're cheap and are a lot more flexible in pricing as your needs grow. Fastmail becomes terribly expensive once you realize you need multiple accounts (not just aliases) for different people in the family. At least for me, paying a few hundred dollars on Fastmail (or anywhere else) for email is really way too expensive. I've also written to Fastmail asking for flexible pricing options, but they responded that they're not even considering any changes on pricing/flexibility for the near future. Edit: If one doesn't need custom domains and office suites, I'd recommend only Posteo! That company is way ahead of others in being better for all humans (read on their website about all the things they do). [1]: https://www.posteo.de https://www.posteo.de [2]: https://www.mailbox.org https://www.mailbox.org
- frutiger 9y ago
  I used Fastmail until I found that they have a hardcoded limit of 128 IMAP flags per mailbox. I switched to G Suite - they have no such limitation.
majewsky 9y ago
> 90$ a year Sounds excessive. Does this include any special features beyond privacy? I pay 1€ per month for a privacy-respecting mailbox at posteo.de
- vaishaksuresh 9y ago
  $90 is the most expensive plan. Their basic plan start from $30 or $3 a month. I'll downgrade to a cheaper plan in the future, but $90 a year for something I use on a daily basis does not seem excessive to me. That is about ¢25 a day.
Veratyr 9y ago
I tried Fastmail for a while but I just couldn't deal with the spam. There was a lot of spam and Gmail's filters seem to be better at dealing with it.
- hyper_reality 9y ago
  This is also merely anecdotal, but I don't recall having ever received more than a few spam emails in either my Gmail or Fastmail inboxes.
- chrismorgan 9y ago
  Something to bear in mind: when you use one spam filter for a while, it learns the sort of spam you get and will do a better job. When you switch to a new provider with a new spam filter, you have to train the new spam filter before it can be as good as the provider you left. (FastMail enables personal spam filters for improved results when it gets to 200 spam and 200 non-spam messages.) Some find FastMail’s spam filtering better than Gmail’s, some worse.
- frabcus 9y ago
  I had that problem, and fixed it by doing these four things: * Train the built in Bayesian filter fully * Setup SPF * Setup DKIM * Point MX records at Fastmail directly (rather than forwarding via some other service) More of a pain than GMail which often "just works", but still relatively simple to setup. I suspect ultimately more robust than using mail forwarding on consumer GMail (the rules of which constantly change and it gets less powerful, if you don't buy GSuite and point your whole domain at it).
jszymborski 9y ago
Anyone know about a Canadian service (operated & hosted) like FastMail? OVH has a hosted exchange service, but no 2FA is a deal breaker for me.
tomaskafka 9y ago
I have a problem with price. $90 for about 20 personal emails per year and a bunch of useful newsletters? Is there a $10 hosted mail that sends and receives reliably and doesn't sell my personal data on top of subscription (like AV companies)?
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  The support is first rate. I've seen their developers on Github helping to track down a synchronisation problem that could have either been with the open source tool, or Fastmail. Turns out it was a Fastmail bug, and they promptly fixed it.
- newscracker 9y ago
  My recommendations for cheaper, more flexible and privacy respecting services are Posteo (no custom domains) and Mailbox (allows custom domains). See my comment above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624624
gub09 9y ago
$5/month and an afternoon to set up unlimited email accounts on unlimited domains on one server. There are a few scripts/services out there that limit the pain.
gub09 9y ago
Does fastmail let you use your own domain?
- reynoldsbd 9y ago
  Yes indeed
- vaishaksuresh 9y ago
  Yup they do. That is what I use it for.

samblr 9y ago

how are you sure that fastmail is secure and they aren't using ur data to build models ? because there is an annual subscription or they advertise it so ?

bthrn 9y ago
They advertise it as such. From their privacy policy: "Incoming messages are scanned for the purpose of spam detection unless you disable spam protection for your account... To make message searching fast, we build an index of your messages (this is a table, just like you would find at the back of a reference book, in which you can look up a word to quickly find the emails in which it appears). No information from any of these activities is used for any other purpose, or to compile any kind of profile on our users." https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
- samblr 9y ago
  Is it generally possible to reconstruct email(=text) with indicies if they are stolen/hacked ? Although Im not questioning fastmail ability to provide secured email service. Yet I cannot help think why I would rely on a small player for email. I would ask what is the probability of fastmail service getting hacked say compared to gmail. (Somebody has right pointed out that ) Ad relevance to your email is not same as reading - thinking in same vein should also lead us to believe even (spam) classification can be termed as reading.
  - vaishaksuresh 9y ago
    I can talk about myself and the reason I think Gmail is not working for me. I'm less worried about the security part of the email and more about the tracking aspect. I don't need encrypted emails, however I don't want someone gleaning information from my emails and using it for selling me stuff and generally profiling. All my Amazon order confirmation used to go to Gmail and they would most definitely read it. I know this because they use it to show me status of the deliveries. It is not unrealistic to think Google will also use this data to build patterns around my buying habits and things I use etc. That does not make me feel comfortable. Amazon already know that because I shop there, I don't want Google also knowing that. My opinion is tracking, ads are all fine on the primary website, but if you follow me around the web, tracking my every move, I'll stop using such services and try my best to prevent the tracking.
  - zargon 9y ago
    If I were to use Gmail I would consider myself already hacked.
  - albinowax_ 9y ago
    I'm a security person, and I've found vulnerabilities in both fastmail and various core google services (although not gmail). Fastmail and gmail both have mature bug bounty programs, which mean they will pay out cash to anyone who finds and reports a way to hack them: https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html This shows that they are willing to put money behind their claims to security and probably puts them in the top few % of difficult to hack websites above eg windows live mail. Also, it's a mistake to think a company will be more secure because it's larger. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite; large companies tend to have complex websites with vastly more attack surface. Of course, every email provider is vulnerable to certain governments.
  - tajen 9y ago
    > I cannot help think why would I rely on a small player for email. If Fastmail were, say, 1% of Google size, it would still be #2, which is a pretty good ranking on any market. And if you don't lose features by switching to the #2, please do it, for the sake of competition – Give freedom a chance. I'm using Fastmail for my 3-ppl business. We lack no feature, we get used to it, we pay them (cheap), we don't leak our source code to GitHub and other browsing habits or contacts to Google Analytics/G+, it's just good management of the company information. We are the annoying guys who can't click "Connect with Facebook" nor "Connect with G+" and that makes providers keep the login/pw auth. Plus it funds a company so you might still have a choice in 5 years. And we show VCs that writing "privacy" on commercial documents yields customers. Cost to us? Zero.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ionised 9y ago
Reputations are important to build trust. Fatmail has a reptuation for not doing this, Google doesn't.

DerfNet 9y ago

Is there any reason not to go with ProtonMail? They seem to be the big recommendation lately for encrypted email service.

vaishaksuresh 9y ago
No particular reason, I just knew fastmail from many years ago and liked them.
- joering2 9y ago
  I emailed them (Proton) on few occasions with important questions and never got a single response. That alone turned me off. Will go with Fastmail very soon moving my yahoo since Verizon bought them.
  - marcopol 9y ago
    Where did you email them? They're known to have one of the best support out there.
Propen 9y ago
I'd really love to support ProtonMail but one thing I can't swallow is that there's no server-side search of email bodies (only to/from & subject) because it's encrypted. This kills the possibility of searching through years of newsletters & stuff :/
- bartbutler 9y ago
  You will be able to use the upcoming ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP bridge to do fulltext search locally.
- jszymborski 9y ago
  [I'm stupid they have 2FA, ignore this comment.] Another huge problem is the lack of two-factor authentication. How can a security-oriented service not offer TOTP or even SMS 2FA.

rocqua 9y ago

I still like gmail for its spam filter and notably "important mail" function. Outside of those, I'd switch to something self-hosted.

komali2 9y ago

>facial recognition Is there some sort of Gmail camera thing I'm not aware of?

vaishaksuresh 9y ago
Google Photos. I'm talking about Google in general, not Gmail in particular.

weitzj 9y ago

We are using fastmail as well, and it is great. They have a solution for every weird mail-problem we tried to solve, i.e. shared inbox folders, shared calendars and integration with "dump" client applications. For example your username might differ in order to access a shared calendar. Also you can generate application passwords for an account. So you can create an SMTP-only application password for your fastmail account.

weitzj 9y ago
Oh. And personally I am using mailbox.org which is also nice but a little bit cheaper. And the feature-set is still great, but limited compared to FastMail. Also the webui in mailbox.org is slower than for fastmail.
- jszymborski 9y ago
  one nice thing about mailbox.org is that you can have them encrypt incoming email with PGP. Allows you to use IMAP and get protonmail/tutanote-esque security... I really like it :)
- newscracker 9y ago
  I'd recommend Posteo [1] and Mailbox [2] to people mainly for the costs. They're cheap and are a lot more flexible in pricing as your needs grow. Fastmail becomes terribly expensive once you realize you need multiple accounts (not just aliases) for different people in the family. At least for me, paying a few hundred dollars on Fastmail (or anywhere else) for email is really way too expensive. I've also written to Fastmail asking for flexible pricing options, but they responded that they're not even considering any changes on pricing/flexibility for the near future. Edit: If one doesn't need custom domains and office suites, I'd recommend only Posteo! That company is way ahead of others in being better for all humans (read on their website about all the things they do). [1]: https://www.posteo.de https://www.posteo.de [2]: https://www.mailbox.org https://www.mailbox.org
frutiger 9y ago
I used Fastmail until I found that they have a hardcoded limit of 128 IMAP flags per mailbox. I switched to G Suite - they have no such limitation.

majewsky 9y ago

> 90$ a year Sounds excessive. Does this include any special features beyond privacy? I pay 1€ per month for a privacy-respecting mailbox at posteo.de

vaishaksuresh 9y ago
$90 is the most expensive plan. Their basic plan start from $30 or $3 a month. I'll downgrade to a cheaper plan in the future, but $90 a year for something I use on a daily basis does not seem excessive to me. That is about ¢25 a day.

Veratyr 9y ago

I tried Fastmail for a while but I just couldn't deal with the spam. There was a lot of spam and Gmail's filters seem to be better at dealing with it.

hyper_reality 9y ago
This is also merely anecdotal, but I don't recall having ever received more than a few spam emails in either my Gmail or Fastmail inboxes.
chrismorgan 9y ago
Something to bear in mind: when you use one spam filter for a while, it learns the sort of spam you get and will do a better job. When you switch to a new provider with a new spam filter, you have to train the new spam filter before it can be as good as the provider you left. (FastMail enables personal spam filters for improved results when it gets to 200 spam and 200 non-spam messages.) Some find FastMail’s spam filtering better than Gmail’s, some worse.
frabcus 9y ago
I had that problem, and fixed it by doing these four things: * Train the built in Bayesian filter fully * Setup SPF * Setup DKIM * Point MX records at Fastmail directly (rather than forwarding via some other service) More of a pain than GMail which often "just works", but still relatively simple to setup. I suspect ultimately more robust than using mail forwarding on consumer GMail (the rules of which constantly change and it gets less powerful, if you don't buy GSuite and point your whole domain at it).

jszymborski 9y ago

Anyone know about a Canadian service (operated & hosted) like FastMail? OVH has a hosted exchange service, but no 2FA is a deal breaker for me.

tomaskafka 9y ago

I have a problem with price. $90 for about 20 personal emails per year and a bunch of useful newsletters? Is there a $10 hosted mail that sends and receives reliably and doesn't sell my personal data on top of subscription (like AV companies)?

duncan_bayne 9y ago
The support is first rate. I've seen their developers on Github helping to track down a synchronisation problem that could have either been with the open source tool, or Fastmail. Turns out it was a Fastmail bug, and they promptly fixed it.
newscracker 9y ago
My recommendations for cheaper, more flexible and privacy respecting services are Posteo (no custom domains) and Mailbox (allows custom domains). See my comment above at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624624

gub09 9y ago

$5/month and an afternoon to set up unlimited email accounts on unlimited domains on one server. There are a few scripts/services out there that limit the pain.

gub09 9y ago

Does fastmail let you use your own domain?

reynoldsbd 9y ago
Yes indeed
vaishaksuresh 9y ago
Yup they do. That is what I use it for.