5 ms·

Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. It truly is no-nonsense but the speed of the UI blew me away. Opening an emai

Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. It truly is no-nonsense but the speed of the UI blew me away. Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air. Its almost like I didn't realise that web email clients could be fast & that Gmail was "good enough".

emptyparadise 5y ago
Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.
michaelbuckbee 5y ago
You mentioned the fast UI, but I've found the actual sending+delivery to be very quick as well. I use Fastmail for a variety of alerts and support communications and it's just outstanding.
nuker 5y ago
> Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.
- Redoubts 5y ago
  That literally de-googles, but I could see someone not being inclined to move from one tech giant to another. Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.
- 1_player 5y ago
  I cannot overstate how a _really_ bad idea it is to register your most important asset, your email, on someone else's domain. I wish we techies would teach this to non computer literates, yet I see plenty software engineers doing this very rookie and dangerous mistake. Get your own domain ASAP.
nicolaslem 5y ago
I agree for the browser version, not for the mobile app. It's a shame their Android application is basically just a web app. I often get a notification on my phone, tap on it and have to wait 10 seconds for the web app to do a full refresh and start actually retrieving the message. It also makes the mobile application unusable offline.
- rustyminnow 5y ago
  Totally agree with everything you said, but I really appreciate that you can access ALL of the settings from the android app. It drove me up the wall that you can't manage filters and labels and stuff from the gmail app.
  - seanp2k2 5y ago
    Wish they had https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/ for iOS and Android. I remember K9 for Android used to be decent back in the day when Android was on the G1 and OG Droid, no idea if it’s even still around. Outlook for iOS is surprisingly good.
  - aaravchen 5y ago
    This. It's actually one of the things that drove me away from ProtonMail and into the arms of FastMail (for emails that don't need quite that level of security, i.e. most). For a browser wrapper app though, they've done much better than any other I've seen. It's just slightly slow on notifications, to load, and isn't usable offline.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air. Some of us still have SquirrelMail installed for the odd occasion. :)
- mattl 5y ago
  Webmail for nuts! Is there any hope for SquirrelMail going forward? Last I checked it was a PHP4 application and hard to get running on PHP7.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > The latest stable version 1.4.23-svn is tested with PHP up to version 7.3 and replaces version 1.4.22 which can only run on PHP version 5.0-5.4. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail FreeBSD's Ports has 7.4 and 8.0: * https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/ https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/ There's always Roundcube.

emptyparadise 5y ago

Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.

michaelbuckbee 5y ago

You mentioned the fast UI, but I've found the actual sending+delivery to be very quick as well. I use Fastmail for a variety of alerts and support communications and it's just outstanding.

nuker 5y ago

> Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.

Redoubts 5y ago
That literally de-googles, but I could see someone not being inclined to move from one tech giant to another. Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.
1_player 5y ago
I cannot overstate how a _really_ bad idea it is to register your most important asset, your email, on someone else's domain. I wish we techies would teach this to non computer literates, yet I see plenty software engineers doing this very rookie and dangerous mistake. Get your own domain ASAP.

nicolaslem 5y ago

I agree for the browser version, not for the mobile app. It's a shame their Android application is basically just a web app. I often get a notification on my phone, tap on it and have to wait 10 seconds for the web app to do a full refresh and start actually retrieving the message. It also makes the mobile application unusable offline.

rustyminnow 5y ago
Totally agree with everything you said, but I really appreciate that you can access ALL of the settings from the android app. It drove me up the wall that you can't manage filters and labels and stuff from the gmail app.
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  Wish they had https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/ for iOS and Android. I remember K9 for Android used to be decent back in the day when Android was on the G1 and OG Droid, no idea if it’s even still around. Outlook for iOS is surprisingly good.
- aaravchen 5y ago
  This. It's actually one of the things that drove me away from ProtonMail and into the arms of FastMail (for emails that don't need quite that level of security, i.e. most). For a browser wrapper app though, they've done much better than any other I've seen. It's just slightly slow on notifications, to load, and isn't usable offline.

throw0101a 5y ago

> Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air. Some of us still have SquirrelMail installed for the odd occasion. :)

mattl 5y ago
Webmail for nuts! Is there any hope for SquirrelMail going forward? Last I checked it was a PHP4 application and hard to get running on PHP7.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > The latest stable version 1.4.23-svn is tested with PHP up to version 7.3 and replaces version 1.4.22 which can only run on PHP version 5.0-5.4. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail FreeBSD's Ports has 7.4 and 8.0: * https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/ https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/ There's always Roundcube.