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FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't
by lvillani 8y ago
FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1].
They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server.
[1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-push/#iosmail https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-...
[2]: https://jmap.io https://jmap.io
- FuckOffNeemo 8y agoFastMail IMO are one of the best email providers, by far. Their web GUI is fantastic and support teams are responsive and well versed.
- spondyl 8y agoIt's surprisingly responsive for large email accounts too. I had ~100K emails imported and marking all as read would take about 10 seconds. I can't complain with that all things considered.
- EdJiang 8y agoI’ve been using Fastmail for my personal email for the past four years, and love it. Really reliable, fast, and allows me to keep a personal email without all of the Google Apps stuff.
- nvmr 8y agoSwitched to Fastmail many years ago when self hosting became too time consuming for me. Never looked back. I had to use their support only very occasionally and even then their reaction time and competence were outstanding. They do just one thing - email - and do that very, very well.
- darekkay 8y agoThey do another thing: calendar. And I find it at least as good as Sunrise Calendar was before Microsoft shut it down.
- glogla 8y agoHow do you use their calendar? Do they have a special app or are you talking about the calendar integrated in mail app?
- darekkay 8y agoYes, I use their calendar web app on Desktop (the one next to Mail). For mobile, I sync individual calendars into my Android Calendar ("CalDAV-Sync"). My biggest issue with the Google Calendar was the syncing rate of 24 hours for iCal feeds. On Fastmail, new events appear quite fast (and I can force the update manually, if I need to).
- reacharavindh 8y agoI wanted to create a group calendar between myself and my wife. We both use FastMail. Gave up after fighting for a day with weird errors. FastMail sent me an email that said our calendars are not in sync anymore.. way too often.
- bklaasen 8y agoThis seems like a really common use case that ought to work well. I switched to Fastmail a few months ago (I still haven't fully committed to sticking with it.) Did you contact support? Did you solve the problem by switching to another calendar provider?
- thirdsun 8y agoI use their calendar with various apps like Fantastical or Timepage. It's standard CalDAV and should work with any decent calendar app, including defaults like Apple calendar.app.
- 8y ago
- contingencies 8y agoWe switched our company to fastmail recently, largely on the strength of recommendations here. No regrets.
- vbezhenar 8y agoFastmail is paid and very costly while Gmail is free, not very good alternative for me.
- TwelveNights 8y agoFor the privacy, quality, and features it offers at the reasonable price of $50/year, I would say that it's a fantastic alternative. It'd be hard-pressed to find anything free that is on par.
- babayega2 8y agoWell. Since all their servers are US based, talking about privacy like talking about Gmail : none knows what's going behind ...!
- mda 8y agoHow is it better for privacy and quality?
- Riverheart 8y agoPrivacy wise, you're paying for the service so there's a reasonable expectation that they're not mining your emails to build a profile of you. Unlike Google they have no ads to serve you.
- mda 8y agoHow are they mining your emails to build a profile of you? Besides when you use such a service all your personal emails are stored in servers. One rubber stamp away from total ownage.
- epicide 8y ago> all your personal emails are stored in [someone else's] servers. Well, yeah. That's true for everything except for hardware you actually own. They're saying it's better than storing it on Google's servers, not that it's bulletproof. There really isn't a way to have impenetrable email. It's all about what type and level of risks you're willing to take. E.g. are you concerned more about rubber stamps or software exploits? Are you more concerned about usage pattern profiles or someone actually reading the content of your messages? Different people have different priorities and there is no one single best option.
- simfoo 8y agoOne thing to keep in mind about Fastmail is that all their servers are hosted in the US and they have no plan about changing this (I asked). Post-Snowden this means you can be quite sure that all mails will end up being analysed by the US authorities
- SSLy 8y agoYeah, but on the other hand it's also a feature of Gmail. So it's not strictly worse.
- simfoo 8y agoCorrect, but since the reason this question popped up is due to privacy concerns regarding Chromium, I think it's even more important for people to know about these things to make an informed choice. By the way, I really like Fastmail - they are very competent. But mail/calender is such an important part of online identity and life, I think people should be careful about who to trust
- mda 8y agoExcept that gmail is hosted on a much better and secure infrastructure with very good SREs.
- brongondwana 8y agoOur SREs are pretty good too!
- jsmeaton 8y agoI dont think this is true. I don’t believe there is any evidence that the US government is analysing all emails hosted by all US companies. Rather, if the US government asks for a particular individuals emails the provider must grant the request provided there is a valid (possibly secret) warrant.
- doubt_me 8y ago
- nadont8 8y agoFastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.
- danpalmer 8y agoI don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.
- nadont8 8y agoIt's expensive if you think of what it costs to keep a mail server online. They have a price that clearly shows to me that they have no competition.
- glandium 8y agoWhat do you get for less than $35 per year? A cheap VPS? Are there plans for less than $3 per month these days?
- nadont8 8y agoThis 1-XS server costs 2€ every month and it could perfectly handle the email of hundreds of users. They are charging you more only for yourself, and that's not even factoring in the economies of scale. https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_starter https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_start...
- wtetzner 8y agoFastmail has employees that have to be paid. You're paying that money instead of the time required to maintain your own email server.
- mcjiggerlog 8y agoDoes Fastmail provide any kind of "bundling" or "priority inbox" features? Since using Inbox on Android, I can't imagine going back to being notified about every single email. Automatic bundling of messages and the custom rules that you can then set on those bundles is a killer feature. If nobody comes along with a decent alternative before Inbox is shutdown then I don't know what I'll do!
- nift 8y agoI don't know if fast mail provides it out of the box but I have started to test out spark: https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/ as a replacement for Inbox. While it is a bit from as good as Inbox it can get the job done, and has bundling. I simply set it up to archive when swiping (which is what Inbox seems to be doing). However, it's notifications are far from as good and you can't archive straight from the notification, which, to me, is a let down. Furthermore, on iPhone 8 there is an actual loading screen when opening the app. Like, why? Everything is already stored in the phone and it should just look for new mail in the background? So far from perfect, but what can one do when Google is killing stuff off. One issue though: you have to be in the apple ecosystem as they do not support, anything but iOS/Mac OS. Note: I'm not associated with spark in any way.
- mcjiggerlog 8y agoLooks pretty promising but it's not available on either Linux (I can't believe an email client has no web app!) or Android...
- alienreborn 8y agoFYI: They store your credentials on their servers. Its not like outlook/thunderbird where you credentials are stored locally.
- nift 8y agoThanks for letting me know! Did not know that. That is quite scary to be honest and do you know the reason as to why they do this?
- vivan 8y agoMy problem with FastMail is that if you stop paying for your email address, they recycle it. This means that someone else could potentially buy your old email address (if you migrate away) and use it for nefarious purposes.
- _jcwu 8y agoYou should be using your own domain anyways.
- dotancohen 8y agoYou've never lost a domain name I see.
- bad_user 8y agoAs long as you're paying for it, there's very little probability of that happening. I got my personal domain (alexn.org) in approximately 2008, so that's older than most people's Gmail accounts ;-)
- dotancohen 8y agoWell, my Gmail account dates to 2004 but my personal domain dates to December 2000! I've lost domains that I continued to pay for, in fact I'm pretty sure that Zoho was paying for their domains as well.
- swalladge 8y agoAgreed 100%. After losing multiple emails addresses in the past due to ISP changes, having an email on your own domain is nice. You can then even switch email providers as you wish and your address will follow.
- samlewis 8y agoLast time I tried this, I found a lot of corporate spam filters seemed to (silently) drop my emails, so I went back to using GMail out of frustration. Is there anything you do that helps with this? I was using GApps and I don't think my domain name was too spammy (samlewis.me).
- kaivi 8y agoI second this. Their service was exceptional for 3+ years I've been with FastMail. Got many small businesses I've worked with to migrate. Only thing which annoys me is that their push-enabled iOS app does not support multiple accounts. It has been like that for years, I've heard that a new app was in the making, but nothing came out yet.
- bad_user 8y ago+1 for FastMail — I've been using it for the last 2 years and I've got nothing but praise for them. ProtonMail seems to be another popular alternative, but their E2E encryption claims sound like snake oil to me, but snake oily as it is, it's still a better choice than Gmail.
- brantam 8y agoI'm a Protonmail user. E2E isn't snake oil but it does assume you have an alternative secure channel for password exchange. I like the fact that my mail archive is encrypted even though I don't send encrypted mail to others.
- bad_user 8y agoI think this post from FastMail says it better than I do: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ Here are some arguments: 1. if it's encryption in the browser via a web interface, then it's not secure; the moment a web form asks for a password that can be used to decrypt your data, that's the moment your alarms should go off, because in spite of the claimed E2E encryption, their security might actually be worse than Google's 2. with email you're communicating with the world and the email world is not encrypted; what this effectively means is that ProtonMail keeps your email encrypted only while it is at rest; maybe it's better than what Google does, but they can still see whatever comes in or goes out in plain text and you're still relying on their promise to do no harm 3. ProtonMail needs to use a "bridge" in order to be compatible with email clients; this means that access to ProtonMail is non-standard (e.g. SMTP, IMAP) and therefore you still have the lock-in of Gmail, only it's now worse 4. It creates a false sense of security. If you want real information security, better tools are needed; various chat apps are much better, plus actual GPG ... because the PGP model requires a "chain of trust" that you have to maintain yourself for actual security
- floatboth 8y ago> if it's encryption in the browser via a web interface, then it's not secure Ehh… The big difference from native apps is that native apps are often signed by the developer. While with web apps, there's normally only a more "temporary" form of signing, that is, the TLS session. Assuming the app developers are better at securing their offline signing keys than TLS server keys, native apps with signatures are indeed more trustworthy. (But are they actually better at this??) However, you can achieve the same kind of signing on the web with a browser extension: https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages https://github.com/tasn/webext-signed-pages (+ SRI and CSP for subresources) Also, you might be more likely to get malware browser extensions than OS-level malware. Maybe?? On the upside, the web is more auditable by default (of course you can obfuscate JS and WASM just like you can obfuscate anything, but "view source" is still much easier on the web). > ProtonMail keeps your email encrypted only while it is at rest IIRC it's also end-to-end between ProtonMail addresses or something?
- Axiol 8y agoSame here. FastMail with a custom domain name. First I was planning to self host. But I thing mails are quite touchy and doing it myself may be a risk.
- fovc 8y agoJust to provide some balance to the feedback: I've been using FastMail for 2 years and am mostly "meh" on it. My issues are with the web interface (which is largely why I use them instead of running my own server): - No delay send/undo send. Allegedly in the works for ages - Very buggy editor. Randomly slows to a crawl while composing, scrolls up and down erratically - Cannot handle very long threads very well. (since unfortunately the business world uses top replies with Html email) E.g., undo can pin a core and crash the page. - Notifications randomly show up twice and then freeze on screen
- bogomipz 8y agoGood to know, thanks. Can you say how is the search functionality and indexing on the inbox on Fastmail?
- brongondwana 8y agoOur search is built on top of the Xapian search engine. We blogged about the underlying tech a while ago. You can sign up a free trial and have a play pretty easily. https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/01/email-search-system/ https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/01/email-search-system/
- fovc 8y agoSearch works decently, but they index the whole message, including quoted text. So a search term shows up in the original message, as well as all the replies downthread.
- brongondwana 8y agoYeah, we're working on identifying whether something is in quoted or non-quoted text. That one is quite tricky to get 100% right, so we err on the side of matching more messages.
- brongondwana 8y agoThanks for the feedback - I've passed that to the product team. We're busy working on the JMAP replacement web interface, which has a fair bit rewritten.
- sumek83 8y agoProtonmail? Based in Switzerland, client-side encryption https://protonmail.com/blog/switzerland/ https://protonmail.com/blog/switzerland/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]