6 ms·

Fastmail is much cheaper if you need many gigs of storage, but you don't get the encryption Proton offers.

currysausage 5y ago
On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.) Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not having platform-independent IMAP access. It’s certainly a sensible tradeoff for more security-minded folks though.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few months ago and it’s been great. Don’t miss Gmail at all.
- stavros 5y ago
  I switched from Gmail to Fastmail years ago (it only takes a few minutes of you own your domain) and whenever I have to use Gmail (for work) it seems slow and bloated. Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.
  - currysausage 5y ago
    Indeed, I have wanted to switch away from Gmail for a long time, especially because of the stories of randomly terminated accounts, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that Gmail somehow managed to break the compose window: when I select/replace/delete text using the keyboard or do undo/redo, sometimes there are weird glitches that creep me out. I don't care that they haven't added meaningful new features in a long time, I don't care that they rearrange the UI every now and then, but breaking core functionality for no tangible reason is just unacceptable. I switched to Gmail in 2008 because they cared about auto-saving drafts while other webmail just lost drafts when the session had expired and I clicked "send". Nowadays, I guess they mostly care about Material Design and streering me towards their latest clusterf**k of a chat/conference app.
- pkulak 5y ago
  And the Fastmail mobile apps are better than the Gmail mobile apps. Way better. It's crazy.
  - blaser-waffle 5y ago
    am interested, elaborate
crossroadsguy 5y ago
Fastmail doesn’t allow custom domains on it’s first tier paid plan, does it? $50 per year - custom domain, 30GB $30 per year - no custom domain, no IMAP, 2GB (yes, 2GB!) That’s some pricing! The last thing you want is use an email that’s paid and not on your domain! Fastmail’s Basic paid plan is absurd not only price/feature wise, it’s useless just for not letting custom domain use. I would rather stick to alternatives.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  $30 / 12 = $2.5 I had the same idea when I first learned of them (and price was even lower) but after doing the same math it occured to me what: a) they DO have clients who are happy to use their domains (and they have a lot of them) b) ~$4/m is absurdingly cheap for the service they provide. c) it is the casual "we prefer what you pay us $N, but if you insist there is a cheaper alternative (with some restrictions) for $M" And finally, I checked my plan and I'm still on Business Lite, $20/y ($1.66/m) and 750MB of storage. Sure, each couple of years I go in and cull the old irrelevant messages, but even with a bunch of messages from providers up from 2014 I still use only 372MB, 50% of my message box. Sure, I'm not using it a lot for a correspondence with an actual people, but I'm pretty fine with it, particulary because I like what I don't have 9999+ notifications from social networks about someone's birthdays etc.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Yeah, the $30 plan doesn't meet my needs for the same reasons. I don't mind paying $50 though so it's not a problem. I'm really happy with fastmail. Anything sent to anything@anything.mydomain goes in my inbox, and I can apply filtering based on those. It also lets me generate @fastmail.com emails if I don't want to expose my domain. It also scrapes my ~5 old gmail addresses and copies those emails into my inbox. It's awesome.
- prirun 5y ago
  I initially bought the Fastmail $50 plan for personal and a 2nd for business. After getting everything transferred from Gmail, I realized that I only had 3GB of email stored at Google after over 10 years, and most of that I never looked at. So as an experiment, I converted the personal account back to a $30 account with the 2GB limit. My focus is on keeping my Inbox nearly empty except for actually pending things. FM says my storage is 6% full and I'm using 0.1GB of 2GB, but even that is just trash. I have the Trash folder set to autopurge email after 1 year and think I won't ever run out of space. And if I do, I can just delete the trash earlier. For me this isn't about the $20, but more about making do with less. If I had a higher quota, the only thing it would allow me to do is accumulate more trash email! I do agree with you though that for $30/yr, they should allow custom domains.
gray_charger 5y ago
ProtonMail is just PGP, nothing special about it.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.) Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not having platform-independent IMAP access. It’s certainly a sensible tradeoff for more security-minded folks though.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few months ago and it’s been great. Don’t miss Gmail at all.
stavros 5y ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail years ago (it only takes a few minutes of you own your domain) and whenever I have to use Gmail (for work) it seems slow and bloated. Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.
- currysausage 5y ago
  Indeed, I have wanted to switch away from Gmail for a long time, especially because of the stories of randomly terminated accounts, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that Gmail somehow managed to break the compose window: when I select/replace/delete text using the keyboard or do undo/redo, sometimes there are weird glitches that creep me out. I don't care that they haven't added meaningful new features in a long time, I don't care that they rearrange the UI every now and then, but breaking core functionality for no tangible reason is just unacceptable. I switched to Gmail in 2008 because they cared about auto-saving drafts while other webmail just lost drafts when the session had expired and I clicked "send". Nowadays, I guess they mostly care about Material Design and streering me towards their latest clusterf**k of a chat/conference app.
pkulak 5y ago
And the Fastmail mobile apps are better than the Gmail mobile apps. Way better. It's crazy.
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
  am interested, elaborate

crossroadsguy 5y ago

Fastmail doesn’t allow custom domains on it’s first tier paid plan, does it? $50 per year - custom domain, 30GB $30 per year - no custom domain, no IMAP, 2GB (yes, 2GB!) That’s some pricing! The last thing you want is use an email that’s paid and not on your domain! Fastmail’s Basic paid plan is absurd not only price/feature wise, it’s useless just for not letting custom domain use. I would rather stick to alternatives.

justsomehnguy 5y ago
$30 / 12 = $2.5 I had the same idea when I first learned of them (and price was even lower) but after doing the same math it occured to me what: a) they DO have clients who are happy to use their domains (and they have a lot of them) b) ~$4/m is absurdingly cheap for the service they provide. c) it is the casual "we prefer what you pay us $N, but if you insist there is a cheaper alternative (with some restrictions) for $M" And finally, I checked my plan and I'm still on Business Lite, $20/y ($1.66/m) and 750MB of storage. Sure, each couple of years I go in and cull the old irrelevant messages, but even with a bunch of messages from providers up from 2014 I still use only 372MB, 50% of my message box. Sure, I'm not using it a lot for a correspondence with an actual people, but I'm pretty fine with it, particulary because I like what I don't have 9999+ notifications from social networks about someone's birthdays etc.
thebean11 5y ago
Yeah, the $30 plan doesn't meet my needs for the same reasons. I don't mind paying $50 though so it's not a problem. I'm really happy with fastmail. Anything sent to anything@anything.mydomain goes in my inbox, and I can apply filtering based on those. It also lets me generate @fastmail.com emails if I don't want to expose my domain. It also scrapes my ~5 old gmail addresses and copies those emails into my inbox. It's awesome.
prirun 5y ago
I initially bought the Fastmail $50 plan for personal and a 2nd for business. After getting everything transferred from Gmail, I realized that I only had 3GB of email stored at Google after over 10 years, and most of that I never looked at. So as an experiment, I converted the personal account back to a $30 account with the 2GB limit. My focus is on keeping my Inbox nearly empty except for actually pending things. FM says my storage is 6% full and I'm using 0.1GB of 2GB, but even that is just trash. I have the Trash folder set to autopurge email after 1 year and think I won't ever run out of space. And if I do, I can just delete the trash earlier. For me this isn't about the $20, but more about making do with less. If I had a higher quota, the only thing it would allow me to do is accumulate more trash email! I do agree with you though that for $30/yr, they should allow custom domains.

gray_charger 5y ago

ProtonMail is just PGP, nothing special about it.