13 ms·

Fastmail – 20 Years Old

233 points by vinw 7y ago

alexcnwy 7y ago
A lot of people probably don’t know that Fastmail was started by Jeremy Howard, one of the creators of https://www.fast.ai https://www.fast.ai which is by far the best way to learn deep learning IMHO :)
- jph00 7y ago
  Thanks! I haven't been involved involved with Fastmail for the last 10 years, so I can take no credit for how amazing they've been throughout that time - but I'm thrilled to see that they're still doing well. I'm still a very happy Fastmail user :) So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.
  - brongondwana 7y ago
    Thanks Jeremy! Glad to hear you're still enjoying the service. I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom back in 2004. Such a long time ago.
jacobr 7y ago
I love Fastmail for email, but moving all my contacts there was also awesome. I can now easily sync a subset of my contacts to my work phone without having to log in to my personal Google or Apple accounts. Feels like as soon as you add a Google connection somewhere you never know what else will be synced.
jagger27 7y ago
I just switched to Fastmail from GSuite this year and also have no complaints.
par 7y ago
I just left gmail for Fastmail this past month, and I have to say I've been really pleased with it. Their web interface has less frills but somehow feels a lot easier to get organized than gmails bloat of features. I use the Mail app on my phone for mobile support, and all the syncing is really seamless.
jml7c5 7y ago
While Fastmail will not save us from the slow, declining viability of self-hosted individual and small business mail servers, their positive effect on the e-mail ecosystem is wonderful. My decision to use their service (even though it is quite pricey, and a cheaper host would do the job for my meager needs) is because of that societally beneficial work. A hearty thank you to all the Fastmail devs who read this; thank you for your good work!
chewz 7y ago
Congratulations!!!
j-me 7y ago
Fun seeing Fastmail on the front page of HN the day after I started trying it out. I setup a free trial with a domain I manage through Route53, had some hickups setting the correct DNS records and reached out to their support. They were quick to respond and provided awesome, detailed technical support/hand-holding and ultimately got me up and running. The experience convinced me the love I keep reading about on here is real -- highly recommend em!
- aladine 7y ago
  If you decide to use Fastmail officially, here is the referal link you can grab to get 10% off for the 1st year: https://ref.fm/u12211285 https://ref.fm/u12211285
danShumway 7y ago
I've been using Fastmail for a little while (I'm still migrating from Gmail), and I love their service. I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails from a new domain in minutes. One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties. With Gmail you can only use `+` and `.`, which makes it easy to derive the base email. With Fastmail, my main email can be something like `ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be `iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`. I didn't realize how useful that would be until I started using it, but it's quickly morphed into a killer feature.
- kornakiewicz 7y ago
  I migrated about one year ago and this is a feature I really love. Every service has unique address and goes to separate folder via rules. Also, there are automatic aliases when you use your own domain. Say, you have name@domain.com, then all *@name.domain.com are also working aliases, like spotify@name.domain.com. Really neat feature.
  - adimitrov 7y ago
    That feature is basically the killer feature for me. I sign up for each service with a custom email and password, and save both in pass or any other pwd manager. It makes it super easy to see which service leaked your email when you get unrelated spam. I wonder whether such an occasion would be grounds for a court case against said company under GDPR.
    - georgyo 7y ago
      Don't all mail service providers that allow a custom domain allow for creating a catch all email?
      - 7y ago
xwowsersx 7y ago
I use Gmail. Don't love it, don't hate it. What's the pitch for switching to Fastmail?
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds. The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the FastMail web UI.) No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate. And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.) When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address at FastMail and the vast majority of stuff moved with me... instantly. FastMail also has tools to import your mail archive using IMAP for what's already in your Gmail account. Now that all of my mail uses my own domain name, if I ever needed to leave FastMail, it'd be painless... none of my mail is going to a FastMail address to begin with. My strong recommendation is that people do this even if they intend to stick with Gmail for the time being, just to give themselves the future option.
      - xwowsersx 7y ago
chappi42 7y ago
Congratulation! And thanks for a stellar service!
acheron 7y ago
Anyone have opinions comparing Fastmail with Protonmail? I know they're not going for the exact same market, but in the more generic market of "email services for people who don't want to use Gmail" I'd be interested in someone's comparison.
- eatwater123 7y ago
  Fastmail is probably the more 'open' of the two; in the sense that you can use any mail client to access your emails without a need for a bridge or anything.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Proton does not offer SMTP or IMAP (except through a special tool which can't be used on mobile devices) so as far as I am concerned they're not a real "email" provider at all. I totally understand why they do that. It's just not for me.
- glofish 7y ago
  Fastmail lets you receive emails for the domains you own. Not forward, but actually be delivered there. Plus you can create other free addresses with domains such as fastmail.us etc. All of which can be seamlessly connected to the same single account - you can then use rules to distribute the incoming emails as you see fit. Switched from Gmail some five years ago, I have been happy with the choice every since!
- Leace 7y ago
  Fastmail is a direct competitor to Gmail. That is Fastmail is Gmail but different. Fastmail is opposed to E2E e-mail encryption as this makes some of their features impossible (e.g. full text e-mail search). Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even cross providers (on https://beta.protonmail.com https://beta.protonmail.com composing an e-mail to Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> will enable encryption). But they don't support all usual e-mail features like IMAP and SMTP (there are bridges but...).
  - radicalriddler 7y ago
deadcast 7y ago
Yay very cool! Been using them for 5+ years now and I love it. Happy to pay. Their web interface has stayed very fast and well organized I think. Love the fact that you get a huge list of domains to choose for your email(s)! imap.cc is one of my favorites. ^_^
dsalzman 7y ago
Awesome. You get what you pay for. And with FastMail you get an awesome email experience. Worth paying money for something we all depend on everyday.
LeoPanthera 7y ago
I don't think the Fastmail UI tells me but I believe I joined Fastmail in 2002 and have been using them since then. (Before that I was using Spamcop's hosted mail.) There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major complaints. Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.
- Leace 7y ago
  > Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though. XMPP pre-Conversations.im was pretty bad anyway but Fastmail could review their stance given some other mail providers re-enabling modern XMPP: https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conversations-visits-mailbox-org-6428 https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conver...
- ssorc 7y ago
  This will show you when you were first invoiced: Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices 2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.
  - james-skemp 7y ago
    Thanks for detailing where to find this. Looks like 2002 (August) as well. Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.
    - lozf 7y ago
      Yay 2002 Club! (December for me.) I'd heard good things so recommended them to a quite non-technical client, and was impressed by how much simpler life got afterwards! Still no complaints. Thanks Fastmail.
sdan 7y ago
Been with Fastmail for a half year now and loving it. I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super easily. Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top (somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service!
- x2f10 7y ago
  >Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested sounding nice.
  - sdan 7y ago
    I go to gmail once a while because my gmail spam doesn't forward to fastmail (there's some important emails that still go to gmail so I have to check) and I see a lot more useful emails at the top than with Fastmail where I completely forget about certain emails because they're buried down. This is partially my fault, but it'd be beneficial to add this as a opt-in feature.
eatwater123 7y ago
Fastmail is fantastic, no complaints at all.... besides the mobile app. I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone. So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in) that just sits there, likely hogging battery life, receiving emails and storing them so that I can read them / access them while in an airplane/foreign country/bad connection spot. If they fix this I would be overjoyed.
- machello13 7y ago
  I would love a native Fastmail app instead of their current one, which seems like just a wrapper around their website. Not only is there no offline access, but it misses out on so many native interactions (on iOS at least) that make it feel super janky.
- jhrmnn 7y ago
  Just wondering: why don't you use your phone's native email app and IMAP?
  - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
    Android 10 (at least on my Pixel 2) doesn't have a native email app (other than Gmail), though of course there are lots of options.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      last time i checked, gmail supports generic IMAP accounts as well.
      - SamBam 7y ago
        But then you're using gmail.
        7y ago
tenpies 7y ago
I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought they would have moved their operations by now.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Agreed! I'm still very surprised they haven't made any attempt to insulate themselves from Australia's anti-privacy laws.
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  This is the singular reason I have chosen their primary competitors over them. In this day & age you need to be aware of these details.
  - ScottFree 7y ago
    Which primary competitors would those be? Asking for a friend...
    - mkskm 7y ago
      ProtonMail is the most promising.
      - erikbye 7y ago
        I've been using ProtonMail and ProtonVPN for over a year, paid subscription. Both web and mobile client is ok, not great. On desktop I use Outlook (Windows) and Thunderbird (Linux). I like the domain @pm.me. Overall happy with the service. Customer support has answered questions competently.
      - cotelletta 7y ago
        Protonmail has a huge gap between promises and what's delivered. Their IMAP bridge is slow and buggy, their mobile app hasn't been meaningfully updated in a year, and even as a paying user they put upsell ads in the sidebar, above your own folders. If PM is not a honeypot, they are incompetent.
alibert 7y ago
I wanted to give a genuine praise for Fastmail in this post but upon looking up my signup year at Fastmail service (2014), I have noticed that they have increased the yearly price of my old (not available anymore) Family plan from $25 to $30. I guess it was not sustainable but I would have liked an notification about it ... Now that I think about it, I have kind of rolled my eye when they announced that their new "snooze" feature was only available to their latest plans or big legacy account [1]. Not a move I was expecting for Fastmail. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html
mikece 7y ago
If only they could implement labels in the same way that ProtonMail and Gmail have! I want incoming emails to show in my inbox while being tagged with a certain label or category; this ins't possible in FastMail, only the ability to move the message to another folder entirely which raises the chance of missing messages altogether.
bachmeier 7y ago
It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage, which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)
techntoke 7y ago
I personally would like to see more efforts going into open source self-host alternatives, and cloud providers enabling one-click distributed mail server deployments that enable all the functionality you'd expect from like Gmail. Such as virtual folders (labels), better mobile apps, and reliable email service. Too much effort lately has been going into cloud hosted solutions, when I know many users would gladly pay $5+ per month for quality self-hosted email service.
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
@brongondwana Great service. I use all features to their potential And appreciate the work and thought you and your team give.
- brongondwana 7y ago
  Thanks! Pleased to hear you've enjoying it.
AhtiK 7y ago
Everyone who is happy with Fastmail, what is your "mobile strategy"? As a Fastmail customer, I find Web app wonderful but mobile app on Android severely lacking UX. Switched to Aquamail for client over IMAP but search is unusable/slow. Suggestions/success stories?
- Quekid5 7y ago
  I'll admit that it's not much of a strategy, but I don't read email on my phone. (I'm not being snarky or sarcastic, btw. Of course, if you actually really need to be responding to email in real time then I'm afraid I cannot help.) My philosophy about this can be summed up as: If it's important enough you'll call me (... and you'll call me again if I don't pick up the first time)... and I'll take your urgency VERY seriously. If you invest effort into communicating with me, then I'll reciprocate. If you're just firing off email... nah.
- LilBytes 7y ago
  I've been using BlueMail for a while, but search is poor and it's quite slow. I imagine my frustrations will be similar to yours with Aquamail. I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any good yet. I paid for TouchDown (https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html) but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor search, sluggish. I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(
  - Grimm665 7y ago
    I've been using Edison on Android for a while now. It is pretty clean and basic. I had been using BlueMail before and agree with your complaints. Edison seems to have solved most of my problems, it's a good basic client without much nonsense.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
I've been using fastmail for a few years now and their reliability has been great, prices reasonable, and their web client is fast and convenient. But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, and I cannot figure out how to make it accept me@mydomain.com. There is a help page on setting up identities, but it doesn't work for me. :-( Other than than I'm 100% happy with fastmail.
- reificator 7y ago
  Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?
  - tasty_freeze 7y ago
    My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched. As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail, but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.
    - nmjenkins 7y ago
      You can set up aliases in your Fastmail account to forward mail for these addresses elsewhere: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target
- fractalf 7y ago
  I use my own domain with fastmail. Set it up ages ago. Had to upgrade my plan to make it work, but worth it. Love fastmail
oil25 7y ago
Sincere question - why is JavaScript required to sign up for Fastmail? Is it for browser fingerprinting? If so, what data is collected, how is it used and how long is it retained? No specific mention of it in the privacy policy. If I sign up in a virtual machine, can I later use Fastmail without running scripts?
- brongondwana 7y ago
  You can use IMAP to access Fastmail without running Javascript (or I guess your own JMAP client if you wanted to write one - there isn't one that doesn't use Javascript yet) - but no, you can't use our interface without running Javascript - the client is written entirely in Javascript.
  - oil25 7y ago
    That's too bad, looks like I'll have to stick with GSuite Gmail to have browser-based, non-Javascript access to my email.
fractalf 7y ago
I've used fastmail for 19 years now. Way back in 2000 I was travelig India for 6 months. At that time I was reading email on my university through a telnet connection with the pine client. Quite a hardcore experience! So I decided to get with the program and get a webmail. Hotmail was the hottest those days, but I never liked it. So I picked up a computer magazine on the street in Delhi and came across a review of web based email providers. Guess what. The ranked fastmail as #1! Above all the others. Never looked back since then :)
cfallin 7y ago
Happy Fastmail user for 3.5 years so far. I particularly like (and am happy to support with my subscription fee) that they have active engineering staff building new technology and contributing it back -- in particular, their JMAP protocol work, which is an open standard [1], and behind the scenes their work to improve and contribute back to the Cyrus mail server [2]. Thanks and keep it up! [1] https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standard/ https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standar... [2] https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/ https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/
efiecho 7y ago
I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this is game over. To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift more troublesome.
- tito 7y ago
  1. Start now. But don't use @fastmail.com as your email address. Get a personal domain and email address (i.e. me@efiecho.com), and forward it to fastmail. 2. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com 3. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.
manuelmagic 7y ago
I'm a customer since 2011. I love all the features they added during these years (new UI, 2-step auth, mobile App, etc.) and the fact they actively develop their product is reassuring. The two or three times I contacted the customer support the assistance was excellent, once I even got a response from one of the founders. Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the option for slow connections while traveling abroad. I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions. Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail. The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail address. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html
noisy_boy 7y ago
The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts. One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.
- detritus 7y ago
  For some reason every once in a while Fastmail decides to interpret the shortcut for paste, Ctrl + V, as 'Send Mail' which has led to some curious exchanges (particularly early-on before i clicked what was happening (if not why)).
kup0 7y ago
In a very slow migration process off as many Google properties as possible, including Gmail- and Fastmail is where I've landed for email. Will be using it with a custom domain to permanently avoid any kind of "lock in". I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to separate into its own special zone). But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for me. Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in" you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result, I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said that I had to use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.
gmb2k1 7y ago
Their Android app has no option to logout automatically after a set amount of time. You're logged in indefinitely. I consider that a security risk. Everyone who manages to unlock my phone can completely take over my digital identity. I contacted their support and made a feature request for auto-logout. Their answer was basically: Just lock your phones screen. Not good!

233 points by vinw 7y ago

A lot of people probably don’t know that Fastmail was started by Jeremy Howard, one of the creators of https://www.fast.ai https://www.fast.ai which is by far the best way to learn deep learning IMHO :)

jph00 7y ago
Thanks! I haven't been involved involved with Fastmail for the last 10 years, so I can take no credit for how amazing they've been throughout that time - but I'm thrilled to see that they're still doing well. I'm still a very happy Fastmail user :) So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.
- brongondwana 7y ago
  Thanks Jeremy! Glad to hear you're still enjoying the service. I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom back in 2004. Such a long time ago.

jacobr 7y ago

I love Fastmail for email, but moving all my contacts there was also awesome. I can now easily sync a subset of my contacts to my work phone without having to log in to my personal Google or Apple accounts. Feels like as soon as you add a Google connection somewhere you never know what else will be synced.

jagger27 7y ago

I just switched to Fastmail from GSuite this year and also have no complaints.

par 7y ago

I just left gmail for Fastmail this past month, and I have to say I've been really pleased with it. Their web interface has less frills but somehow feels a lot easier to get organized than gmails bloat of features. I use the Mail app on my phone for mobile support, and all the syncing is really seamless.

jml7c5 7y ago

While Fastmail will not save us from the slow, declining viability of self-hosted individual and small business mail servers, their positive effect on the e-mail ecosystem is wonderful. My decision to use their service (even though it is quite pricey, and a cheaper host would do the job for my meager needs) is because of that societally beneficial work. A hearty thank you to all the Fastmail devs who read this; thank you for your good work!

chewz 7y ago

Congratulations!!!

j-me 7y ago

Fun seeing Fastmail on the front page of HN the day after I started trying it out. I setup a free trial with a domain I manage through Route53, had some hickups setting the correct DNS records and reached out to their support. They were quick to respond and provided awesome, detailed technical support/hand-holding and ultimately got me up and running. The experience convinced me the love I keep reading about on here is real -- highly recommend em!

aladine 7y ago
If you decide to use Fastmail officially, here is the referal link you can grab to get 10% off for the 1st year: https://ref.fm/u12211285 https://ref.fm/u12211285

danShumway 7y ago

I've been using Fastmail for a little while (I'm still migrating from Gmail), and I love their service. I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails from a new domain in minutes. One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties. With Gmail you can only use `+` and `.`, which makes it easy to derive the base email. With Fastmail, my main email can be something like `ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be `iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`. I didn't realize how useful that would be until I started using it, but it's quickly morphed into a killer feature.

kornakiewicz 7y ago
I migrated about one year ago and this is a feature I really love. Every service has unique address and goes to separate folder via rules. Also, there are automatic aliases when you use your own domain. Say, you have name@domain.com, then all *@name.domain.com are also working aliases, like spotify@name.domain.com. Really neat feature.
- adimitrov 7y ago
  That feature is basically the killer feature for me. I sign up for each service with a custom email and password, and save both in pass or any other pwd manager. It makes it super easy to see which service leaked your email when you get unrelated spam. I wonder whether such an occasion would be grounds for a court case against said company under GDPR.
  - georgyo 7y ago
    Don't all mail service providers that allow a custom domain allow for creating a catch all email?
    - 7y ago

xwowsersx 7y ago

I use Gmail. Don't love it, don't hate it. What's the pitch for switching to Fastmail?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds. The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the FastMail web UI.) No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate. And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.) When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address at FastMail and the vast majority of stuff moved with me... instantly. FastMail also has tools to import your mail archive using IMAP for what's already in your Gmail account. Now that all of my mail uses my own domain name, if I ever needed to leave FastMail, it'd be painless... none of my mail is going to a FastMail address to begin with. My strong recommendation is that people do this even if they intend to stick with Gmail for the time being, just to give themselves the future option.
    - xwowsersx 7y ago

chappi42 7y ago

Congratulation! And thanks for a stellar service!

acheron 7y ago

Anyone have opinions comparing Fastmail with Protonmail? I know they're not going for the exact same market, but in the more generic market of "email services for people who don't want to use Gmail" I'd be interested in someone's comparison.

eatwater123 7y ago
Fastmail is probably the more 'open' of the two; in the sense that you can use any mail client to access your emails without a need for a bridge or anything.
LeoPanthera 7y ago
Proton does not offer SMTP or IMAP (except through a special tool which can't be used on mobile devices) so as far as I am concerned they're not a real "email" provider at all. I totally understand why they do that. It's just not for me.
glofish 7y ago
Fastmail lets you receive emails for the domains you own. Not forward, but actually be delivered there. Plus you can create other free addresses with domains such as fastmail.us etc. All of which can be seamlessly connected to the same single account - you can then use rules to distribute the incoming emails as you see fit. Switched from Gmail some five years ago, I have been happy with the choice every since!
Leace 7y ago
Fastmail is a direct competitor to Gmail. That is Fastmail is Gmail but different. Fastmail is opposed to E2E e-mail encryption as this makes some of their features impossible (e.g. full text e-mail search). Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even cross providers (on https://beta.protonmail.com https://beta.protonmail.com composing an e-mail to Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> will enable encryption). But they don't support all usual e-mail features like IMAP and SMTP (there are bridges but...).
- radicalriddler 7y ago

deadcast 7y ago

Yay very cool! Been using them for 5+ years now and I love it. Happy to pay. Their web interface has stayed very fast and well organized I think. Love the fact that you get a huge list of domains to choose for your email(s)! imap.cc is one of my favorites. ^_^

dsalzman 7y ago

Awesome. You get what you pay for. And with FastMail you get an awesome email experience. Worth paying money for something we all depend on everyday.

LeoPanthera 7y ago

I don't think the Fastmail UI tells me but I believe I joined Fastmail in 2002 and have been using them since then. (Before that I was using Spamcop's hosted mail.) There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major complaints. Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.

Leace 7y ago
> Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though. XMPP pre-Conversations.im was pretty bad anyway but Fastmail could review their stance given some other mail providers re-enabling modern XMPP: https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conversations-visits-mailbox-org-6428 https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conver...
ssorc 7y ago
This will show you when you were first invoiced: Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices 2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.
- james-skemp 7y ago
  Thanks for detailing where to find this. Looks like 2002 (August) as well. Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.
  - lozf 7y ago
    Yay 2002 Club! (December for me.) I'd heard good things so recommended them to a quite non-technical client, and was impressed by how much simpler life got afterwards! Still no complaints. Thanks Fastmail.

sdan 7y ago

Been with Fastmail for a half year now and loving it. I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super easily. Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top (somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service!

x2f10 7y ago
>Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested sounding nice.
- sdan 7y ago
  I go to gmail once a while because my gmail spam doesn't forward to fastmail (there's some important emails that still go to gmail so I have to check) and I see a lot more useful emails at the top than with Fastmail where I completely forget about certain emails because they're buried down. This is partially my fault, but it'd be beneficial to add this as a opt-in feature.

eatwater123 7y ago

Fastmail is fantastic, no complaints at all.... besides the mobile app. I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone. So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in) that just sits there, likely hogging battery life, receiving emails and storing them so that I can read them / access them while in an airplane/foreign country/bad connection spot. If they fix this I would be overjoyed.

machello13 7y ago
I would love a native Fastmail app instead of their current one, which seems like just a wrapper around their website. Not only is there no offline access, but it misses out on so many native interactions (on iOS at least) that make it feel super janky.
jhrmnn 7y ago
Just wondering: why don't you use your phone's native email app and IMAP?
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Android 10 (at least on my Pixel 2) doesn't have a native email app (other than Gmail), though of course there are lots of options.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    last time i checked, gmail supports generic IMAP accounts as well.
    - SamBam 7y ago
      But then you're using gmail.
      - 7y ago

tenpies 7y ago

I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought they would have moved their operations by now.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
Agreed! I'm still very surprised they haven't made any attempt to insulate themselves from Australia's anti-privacy laws.
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
This is the singular reason I have chosen their primary competitors over them. In this day & age you need to be aware of these details.
- ScottFree 7y ago
  Which primary competitors would those be? Asking for a friend...
  - mkskm 7y ago
    ProtonMail is the most promising.
    - erikbye 7y ago
      I've been using ProtonMail and ProtonVPN for over a year, paid subscription. Both web and mobile client is ok, not great. On desktop I use Outlook (Windows) and Thunderbird (Linux). I like the domain @pm.me. Overall happy with the service. Customer support has answered questions competently.
    - cotelletta 7y ago
      Protonmail has a huge gap between promises and what's delivered. Their IMAP bridge is slow and buggy, their mobile app hasn't been meaningfully updated in a year, and even as a paying user they put upsell ads in the sidebar, above your own folders. If PM is not a honeypot, they are incompetent.

alibert 7y ago

I wanted to give a genuine praise for Fastmail in this post but upon looking up my signup year at Fastmail service (2014), I have noticed that they have increased the yearly price of my old (not available anymore) Family plan from $25 to $30. I guess it was not sustainable but I would have liked an notification about it ... Now that I think about it, I have kind of rolled my eye when they announced that their new "snooze" feature was only available to their latest plans or big legacy account [1]. Not a move I was expecting for Fastmail. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html

mikece 7y ago

If only they could implement labels in the same way that ProtonMail and Gmail have! I want incoming emails to show in my inbox while being tagged with a certain label or category; this ins't possible in FastMail, only the ability to move the message to another folder entirely which raises the chance of missing messages altogether.

bachmeier 7y ago

It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage, which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)

techntoke 7y ago

I personally would like to see more efforts going into open source self-host alternatives, and cloud providers enabling one-click distributed mail server deployments that enable all the functionality you'd expect from like Gmail. Such as virtual folders (labels), better mobile apps, and reliable email service. Too much effort lately has been going into cloud hosted solutions, when I know many users would gladly pay $5+ per month for quality self-hosted email service.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

@brongondwana Great service. I use all features to their potential And appreciate the work and thought you and your team give.

brongondwana 7y ago
Thanks! Pleased to hear you've enjoying it.

AhtiK 7y ago

Everyone who is happy with Fastmail, what is your "mobile strategy"? As a Fastmail customer, I find Web app wonderful but mobile app on Android severely lacking UX. Switched to Aquamail for client over IMAP but search is unusable/slow. Suggestions/success stories?

Quekid5 7y ago
I'll admit that it's not much of a strategy, but I don't read email on my phone. (I'm not being snarky or sarcastic, btw. Of course, if you actually really need to be responding to email in real time then I'm afraid I cannot help.) My philosophy about this can be summed up as: If it's important enough you'll call me (... and you'll call me again if I don't pick up the first time)... and I'll take your urgency VERY seriously. If you invest effort into communicating with me, then I'll reciprocate. If you're just firing off email... nah.
LilBytes 7y ago
I've been using BlueMail for a while, but search is poor and it's quite slow. I imagine my frustrations will be similar to yours with Aquamail. I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any good yet. I paid for TouchDown (https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html) but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor search, sluggish. I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(
- Grimm665 7y ago
  I've been using Edison on Android for a while now. It is pretty clean and basic. I had been using BlueMail before and agree with your complaints. Edison seems to have solved most of my problems, it's a good basic client without much nonsense.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

I've been using fastmail for a few years now and their reliability has been great, prices reasonable, and their web client is fast and convenient. But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, and I cannot figure out how to make it accept me@mydomain.com. There is a help page on setting up identities, but it doesn't work for me. :-( Other than than I'm 100% happy with fastmail.

reificator 7y ago
Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched. As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail, but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.
  - nmjenkins 7y ago
    You can set up aliases in your Fastmail account to forward mail for these addresses elsewhere: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target
fractalf 7y ago
I use my own domain with fastmail. Set it up ages ago. Had to upgrade my plan to make it work, but worth it. Love fastmail

oil25 7y ago

Sincere question - why is JavaScript required to sign up for Fastmail? Is it for browser fingerprinting? If so, what data is collected, how is it used and how long is it retained? No specific mention of it in the privacy policy. If I sign up in a virtual machine, can I later use Fastmail without running scripts?

brongondwana 7y ago
You can use IMAP to access Fastmail without running Javascript (or I guess your own JMAP client if you wanted to write one - there isn't one that doesn't use Javascript yet) - but no, you can't use our interface without running Javascript - the client is written entirely in Javascript.
- oil25 7y ago
  That's too bad, looks like I'll have to stick with GSuite Gmail to have browser-based, non-Javascript access to my email.

fractalf 7y ago

I've used fastmail for 19 years now. Way back in 2000 I was travelig India for 6 months. At that time I was reading email on my university through a telnet connection with the pine client. Quite a hardcore experience! So I decided to get with the program and get a webmail. Hotmail was the hottest those days, but I never liked it. So I picked up a computer magazine on the street in Delhi and came across a review of web based email providers. Guess what. The ranked fastmail as #1! Above all the others. Never looked back since then :)

cfallin 7y ago

Happy Fastmail user for 3.5 years so far. I particularly like (and am happy to support with my subscription fee) that they have active engineering staff building new technology and contributing it back -- in particular, their JMAP protocol work, which is an open standard [1], and behind the scenes their work to improve and contribute back to the Cyrus mail server [2]. Thanks and keep it up! [1] https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standard/ https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standar... [2] https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/ https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/

efiecho 7y ago

I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this is game over. To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift more troublesome.

tito 7y ago
1. Start now. But don't use @fastmail.com as your email address. Get a personal domain and email address (i.e. me@efiecho.com), and forward it to fastmail. 2. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com 3. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.

manuelmagic 7y ago

I'm a customer since 2011. I love all the features they added during these years (new UI, 2-step auth, mobile App, etc.) and the fact they actively develop their product is reassuring. The two or three times I contacted the customer support the assistance was excellent, once I even got a response from one of the founders. Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the option for slow connections while traveling abroad. I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions. Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail. The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail address. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html

noisy_boy 7y ago

The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts. One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.

detritus 7y ago
For some reason every once in a while Fastmail decides to interpret the shortcut for paste, Ctrl + V, as 'Send Mail' which has led to some curious exchanges (particularly early-on before i clicked what was happening (if not why)).

kup0 7y ago

In a very slow migration process off as many Google properties as possible, including Gmail- and Fastmail is where I've landed for email. Will be using it with a custom domain to permanently avoid any kind of "lock in". I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to separate into its own special zone). But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for me. Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in" you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result, I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said that I had to use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.

gmb2k1 7y ago

Their Android app has no option to logout automatically after a set amount of time. You're logged in indefinitely. I consider that a security risk. Everyone who manages to unlock my phone can completely take over my digital identity. I contacted their support and made a feature request for auto-logout. Their answer was basically: Just lock your phones screen. Not good!