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Ask HN: Is anyone using Fastmail for their business?

• annagrigoryan2 4y ago
  I do! It's just me an my cofounder, we love it. Privacy focused, good shared calendar. The UI is not always my cup of tea but I still choose it instead of Google or other services just because of the product mission.
• velmu 4y ago
  I've been with them for maybe five+ years now. Very happy with them for email, calendar and contacts. Which is what I want from them. This is mostly for personal use, but I do have a sole proprietorship too and wouldn't have an issue using it for "real business".
• philliphaydon 4y ago
  Been considering Fastmail for personal use so I’m keen to hear others opinions. Proton seems good too but worried I can’t use the apps I want to use.
  • humps 4y ago
    I've been using Fastmail for several months now having migrated away from Gmail. I've found it to be very reliable, extremely fast, and just as importantly-it just does what it says on the tin. No gimmicks, ads, or hassle. The one problem I've faced is my Fastmail email address ending up in the spam folder of friends and family and having to explain to them how to prevent that. I think that may be a leftover from the days when Fastmail offered free accounts. A bit annoying, but definitely not a deal breaker for me.
    • philliphaydon 4y ago
      Do you use your own domain or one of the Fastmail domains?
      • beardedetim 4y ago
        Not OP but I do both. I pay for a fastmail account and have <myname>@<one of their domains> which all my _personal_ things go to and then I have my business emails all route via their Aliases and certificate pointing. There have been some instances where both the fastmail domain and my business domain ended up in Spam for the receiver but that is less than a handful of times and I used Fastmail via Nodemailer as a proof of concept for a newsletter service so (ab)used the service without any issue.
        • humps 4y ago
          I also really like their masked email feature, it's so useful to click and create a throwaway email address to use for different sites and services.
          • philliphaydon 4y ago
            Sounds good. I already have a domain to use just been on the fence about what service to use. Will pull the trigger on Fastmail. Thanks.
      • humps 4y ago
        I use both, but also pipe in gmail to ensure I don't miss any emails during what inevitably ends up being a long transition process.
  • gen3 4y ago
    I've used both. If you don't care that Fastmail is Australian and that your emails don't sit encrypted at rest, they come with more features. ie: Mobile client that does contacts/calendar/notes/drive Mobile setup was really easy on iOS with a policy Drive lets you host a static website or photo gallery Custom domain catchall Proton needs a bridge to use any client but theirs. DMARC/SPF/DKIM was a pretty easy setup for both. Proton is missing mobile clients for their new apps (drive/calendar). Its nice they give you another GB of storage a year, a VPN, and a bunch of the nolog/encryption niceties.
  • Jayschwa 4y ago
    I switched from Gmail to FastMail about 4 years ago and have been very happy with it. At the time, FastMail had no problem importing a decade's worth of emails from Gmail, and I still have the deprecated Gmail address forward to my FastMail account. I'm on their ~$50/year Standard Plan so that I can use it with my own domain names. I point my domains to FastMail's nameservers, and it automatically configures all email-related DNS settings. It can be setup to accept mail to arbitrary addresses, so I now use service.tld@my.tld when I create accounts on other websites, which can help with filtering or seeing who is leaking my info. Any other type of DNS record can be manually added, so I can still generally point my domains to my GitHub pages. I can recall only one outage since I've been using the service. I use their web client and Android app (which is just a thin wrapper around the web client). They are not glamorous, but they are functional and feel snappy. One thing to be aware of is that FastMail is based in Australia, which I believe has some backwards laws with respect to Internet privacy.
    • philliphaydon 4y ago
      As a kiwi… shakes fist at Australians Not too worried. I only use email for signing up and all that. Not really a friend/family communication took anymore. Just want to get away from google. I like the idea on the domain catch all because some sites won’t accept + anymore.
• ergonaught 4y ago
  I’ve used it for the past 5 years without any issues at all.
• nicolaslem 4y ago
  Fastmail does one thing and does it very well. Their webmail is light and snappy, they offer standard protocols (IMAP, caldav...) so you can interact with it with third-party software. During my single interaction with their support I had an answer within the hour. My only complaint is that their mobile app is basically a webview of their webmail. This means that it does not work offline. The good news is that because they support standard protocols the mobile app is not the only option. On iOS the default Mail, Contact and Calendar apps work out of the box. I am quite confident when I say that Fastmail will be a huge step up from GoDaddy.
• dewey 4y ago
  > Any issues with uptime, deliverability, and support, especially given the latter is email only? None. > Have you felt restricted by Fastmail's lack of cloud integrations and other services that Google Workplace and and Microsoft 365 have? No, but this also really depends on your use case. Do you want to add employees and share resources like in Google Apps with mailing lists, calendars, storage? Then it's probably not the right provider for you. If it's just about "regular" email then there should be no issues.
• itsmemattchung 4y ago
  Love fastmail and use it to run my small business. While lacking in some integrations, it's not a huge deal since my CRM integrates with inbound emails to BCC addresses. In regards to system availability, have no qualms around uptime and support. In the 5 years I've used them, only 1-2 major incidents where email was inaccessible during the outage. On a separate note, really love their integration with 1Password + Masked emails: * https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Masked-Email https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...
• lukeqsee 4y ago
  Yes. Pretty happy with it. * Shared mailboxes work well enough. * Deliverability seems good. * UI is good. IMAP is good. They do email, calendars, and contacts, and they do it well. :)
• core-utility 4y ago
  I use Fastmail for my business, after moving there from Namecheap's solution "Private Email". Haven't had a single issue or hiccup, pricing model is straightforward, and I have multiple domains/accounts all under one umbrella and management plane.
• joyed 4y ago
  Try mailbox.org, with cloud integrations and an amazing support team.
• mejutoco 4y ago
  I use them. Once every 2/3 years maybe they are under attack for half a day and the email cannot be accessed. Very happy with them. It is easy to create aliases and rules, they have phone and iPad apps that are simple and snappy. The pricing is reasonable too. In my opinion it is a feature that they only do email (and calendar, contacts, as you say), instead of an office productivity suite.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• troyvit 4y ago
  Our company is closing in on 100 employees and we use Fastmail. We don't miss the cloud integrations that google workplace, etc. have, but I personally do miss the UI and UX polish that gmail had. + Calendar sharing in the organization is opt-in, so it can force more coordination to make a meeting. Maybe that's a good thing? + Other peoples' calendars often appear in the same color as mine, so if I have somebody else's calendar in my view I might think I've been invited to a ton of meetings. + Email contacts are weird in a way that I can't quantify. With gmail, when I hired somebody, I often ended up with both their personal email and their work email in my address book. Gmail knew to default to the work email after they were hired. Fastmail does the opposite so I have to remember to delete my new employees' personal emails from my contacts so that I don't accidentally send invites to the wrong address. All that said keyboard control of fastmail is cooler than gmail and the rules are really fun to work with. I like that you can use sieve rules with it. In fact the lack of tight integration makes it easier to use different services for different things. No longer do I have to unselect "make this a google meet" link or whatever that was.
  • giancarlostoro 4y ago
    > but I personally do miss the UI and UX polish that gmail had. Is this not achieved by Outlook, Thunderbird or other desktop email clients? I cannot stand using web based mail clients. I know OP wanted webmail, but I'm just curious if anyone else has achieved a good UX with a desktop client / Fastmail combo.
    • stingraycharles 4y ago
      I’ve been heavily dissatisfied with the performance of desktop email clients. Not sure if I’m classified as a heavy power user or not, but at least on Linux, the whole situation is a shitshow if you frequently have threads with 25+ replies. I’ve tried all email clients, either their Office365 integration sucks, or their Gmail integration sucks, or their performance sucks, or their compatibility sucks, or their UI sucks, and more frequently than not they suck in multiple of these dimensions. They also almost always lack calendar integration, which implies I need to get back to a webapp extremely often anyway. I have surrendered, just give me a good web app and I’ll manage.
• pawelduda 4y ago
  I've been using Fastmail for 3-4 years. I don't think I've had a single complaint during that time. A few points I remember from top of my head: - Both desktop and mobile apps are miles ahead in terms of smoothness compared to GMail (though I stopped using it a long time ago, so that comparison could be outdated). - I'm proxying my GMail inbox and parking my own subdomain email for wildcard addresses. No problems here. - I have a bunch of saved searches that I revisit regularly. - Calendar work well with auto adding events from incoming mail. - Not using contacts book too much, I just know that it's there but I'm mostly autocompleting recipients if needed. - Recently they added scheduled email sending, that was the last feature I was missing. I don't think I had to fall back to GMail even once. Fastmail just says what it does and does it well.
  • kayson 4y ago
    Does their mobile app support push email, rather than polling?
    • zumzumzum 4y ago
      Yes it does.
      • nicolaslem 4y ago
        But notifications do not actually download messages. This means that pressing a notification opens the app, but shows a blank page for a second or two while downloading the message. This was annoying enough that I stopped using their mobile app for a native client.
        • mikepurvis 4y ago
          Dang, that's annoying— you'd think pre-downloading pushed emails would have been a standard feature for like the past twenty years, given how Mike Lazaridis used to talk about that in speeches and keynotes as one of his, like, critical insights when directing the engineering of the original BlackBerry units, like "hey guys, what if we waited to buzz the device until the message was fully downloaded and actually ready to read?"
• iasay 4y ago
  I was. No problems with it at all other than the native iOS Fastmail app was useless without a data connection. You couldn’t do anything offline. Also it’s difficult to export all your data from calendars and contacts. And there is no notes API or back capability at all. I’m now using apple iCloud+ for all of this as it is basically free for me anyway and everything works offline.
  • giancarlostoro 4y ago
    > You couldn’t do anything offline. This is awful especially since data can be spotty on mobile, but I noticed other mobile mail apps have this issue. I prefer when my email client caches the emails so it doesnt matter where I am, I can at least look at a historic account of things.
    • dylan604 4y ago
      Isn't that called POP instead of IMAP? It makes some sense that you need to be online to see your messages stored online.
      • giancarlostoro 4y ago
        Probably true, but POP to my understanding also deletes the emails from the server. Not sure of your technical background but I think of a list and you "pop" and item off of it.
        • ipaddr 4y ago
          Deleting is a setting in your email client.
      • 8ytecoder 4y ago
        Both POP and IMAP can work offline. Point of data - iOS mail works perfectly when you’re offline and syncs the changes when you get back online. These protocols were designed during the days when data was at a huge premium. Fastmail’s own app seems like a mobile app interface to their website than a real mail client. I have setup iOS Mail to download and keep a copy of last 30 days but use fastmail for most day to day stuff.
• rcoder 4y ago
  I've been a Fastmail customer for...8 years? 10? I dunno. A long time. Initially I just replaced my self-hosted personal domain email as deliverability to e.g. Gmail dropped off a cliff for anything _not_ run by a BigCo. Fastmail, despite not being "big" in the Google/MS/Yahoo sense is expertly-run and established enough that I generally get messages through. (Delivery failures I see from FM-hosted addresses usually have to do with age of the _domain_, not anything about their email infra.) Being able to pay for _just_ email from a company that isn't also harvesting my mail contents for ad targeting and search relevance is honestly a huge relief to me. When I have to discuss something sensitive via email -- think medical care, financial deals and other business secrets, even hobbies and interests that I wouldn't want blasted across the Googleplex -- it goes to Fastmail, every time. (And yes, I know about encrypted email and tried to do everything with GPG signatures + payload encryption for years...along with re-sending 99% of those messages b/c the recipient could do literally nothing with them.) For business use I'm also a big fan of their mailing-list-esque offering Topicbox (https://topicbox.com https://topicbox.com). It lets me opt-in particular outside trusted vendors and collaborators for ongoing discussion w/o having the bring them onto our domain, keeps a permanent archive of our discussions, and hosts public mailing lists for newsletters, customer discussions, etc. just as well. Disclaimer: I am not a Fastmail employee, marketing partner, or affiliate, and I have always paid full price for my service. They're just damn good at email and one of the last effective defenders against the GOOG/MS duopoly's centralization of email and IMHO worthy of regular public recommendations for that. (Self-hosting is fun and fine for personal domains where deliverability is a nice-to-have, but for business purposes I need something that _works_ and am willing to pay for that.)
  • boulos 4y ago
    Disclosure: I used to work for Google Cloud. > Being able to pay for _just_ email from a company that isn't also harvesting my mail contents for ad targeting and search relevance is honestly a huge relief to me. GMail (consumer) stopped scanning your mail for ads personalization five years ago [1]. IIUC, the paid version already wasn't (never did?). [1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
• voiper1 4y ago
  Pretty happy fastmail user - business of 2. I migrated away from gmail to avoid the possibility of being locked out without recourse. I use shared labels heavily when onboarding my assistant for him to respond to emails (from his own email) and to assign emails for him to look at.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Yes, obviously no problems -- Fastmail is the gold standard for indy email hosting. I don't want "integration" from my email provider. Their web client is so good I have stopped using native imap clients. On mobile I use the native exchange client with my own service that proxies to imap, so I can't say anything about their mobile support. Recently we lost connectivity from our colo to their IMAP endpoint and although I already knew it was some BGP cluster-f, I pitched in a support ticket just to see what would happen. Received a reply noting the known BGP cluster-f peering with <our transit provider> and providing the exact time that connectivity had been restored. Can't expect much better than that. They actually responded quicker than our transit provider did.
• kieloo 4y ago
  I love FastMail but I had to stop using it for my business because emails sent to Outlook would regularly bounce. I contacted support but their replies often took a week so I gave up. Based on the other replies, it seems like i was unlucky so I may give it another try.
  • glukkanta 4y ago
    Yeah, based on the other responses, sounds like your case is an outlier... Were you using a custom domain, and do you know if your SPF, DKIM, DMARC were set up correctly?
    • kieloo 4y ago
      I was but I was monitoring DMARC and everything seemed properly set up. It's possible that there was something I missed though. Or maybe I just happened to be on a bad IP range. Most emails to Outlook were still getting delivered but a few weren't and that was enough to be annoying.
• pomatic 4y ago
  The biggest problem we faced, migrating a couple of months ago, was the discovery that you cannot duplicate an email to a folder, you can only move the original. The means, for example, you can't have a shared folder for the submission of expenses whilst retaining the original receipt in your own folder. It's also not possible to block a contact if you have previously communicated with them without first deleting the contact from your address book. Why FM can't just do that automatically (and indeed, why it is a requirement in the first place) I have no idea - but it is really annoying. Lastly, as someone else said, calendar colours frequently conflict. So overall, it works - but lacks polish. It's almost like they don't dog-food their own app. On the plus side, the data import from google was very fast and worked flawlessly for mail. We ended up in some confusion over calendars which I don't know the finer details of, however.
  • glukkanta 4y ago
    Great to know about the copy function in the web interface. Doing some cursory reading -- and someone correct me if I'm wrong -- I think if your Fastmail account is configured to use folders, you can only copy an email to multiple folders when using a third-party client that supports the functionality, however, if you enable labels, you can assign multiple labels to a single email in the web client and have that email be reflected as copied in folders of the same label name in any third-party client. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278282-Labels-IMAP https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278282-La...
  • sph 4y ago
    > you cannot duplicate an email to a folder Have you tried enabling labels? IIRC Fastmail defaults to a "folder" system, but you can switch to GMail-like labels, and a message can be in multiple labels. Then it's just a matter of adding that email to the shared "Expenses" label. IMO this is much better than duplicating emails.
  • trinsic2 4y ago
    > It's also not possible to block a contact if you have previously communicated with them without first deleting the contact from your address book. Why FM can't just do that automatically (and indeed, why it is a requirement in the first place) I have no idea - but it is really annoying. I'm seeing this kind of complaint a lot and I wonder if people that need this kind of business level functionality considered that Fastmail is not a CRM solution. Its designed for email and it has very limited features for contacts and calendar. IMHO if you want that level of control you really should be using a full on CRM solution like ZohoCRM.
• martin1975 4y ago
  I administer a website + MX for a friend who runs a solar panel installation business for a number of years now... they've been very happy with their domain being hosted on fastmail.
• steve_avery 4y ago
  I have been using fastmail as a single personal account for the past year or so, so I don't have much to add to your technical assessment. However, I have been considering changing providers because of the political position of the Australian government. I've done a cursory search just now and can't find anything to back up my opinion, but my impression is that they have a pretty permissive stance on gov't access to data or just crappy Internet privacy laws, which I disdain. I have been thinking about making the jump to protonmail as my provider instead.
  • j22jfineman 4y ago
    I believe you are referring to this? <https://fastmail.blog/legal-policy/access-and-assistance-bill/ https://fastmail.blog/legal-policy/access-and-assistance-bil...> Basically any company is going to turn over any data they are legally required to do so. The US is not that much different. Plus the US has a law that says any data older that 6 months does not need a warrant! I see a law was introduced to prevent that, but I could not tell if it passed the Senate and was signed.
• sph 4y ago
  Fastmail is great, but the only issue I have, in case some Fastmail engineer is in this thread, is that they should open up their JMAP push API already. They have a cool protocol only they support, but the push API is restricted to Fastmail-only clients, so you can't create your own script that tells you when you have new mail. It's been a year and still there's no movement: https://github.com/fastmail/JMAP-Samples/issues/7 https://github.com/fastmail/JMAP-Samples/issues/7
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  I don't find Fastmail to be a super reliable provider, their docs aren't thorough, device support is minimal, and their customer support is a bit lacking. Spam filtering seems iffy. Also bizarre that their mobile client doesn't cache mail. I would treat them as any other mail provider; use IMAP and SMTP with your own client, only use the features built into the protocol specs, use a custom domain. By not leaning heavily on custom features you can change providers quickly, and there's fewer things to break. Also, you should probably mirror all your mail to a different provider so you have a backup in an emergency.
• eastbound 4y ago
  Using Fastmail with company of 5. - Upside: Having a catchall account where I see all email which didn’t reach any existing mailbox. - Upside: Google doesn’t have our data. - Upside: Excellent service, and we can talk to a human when we have an account question. - Downside: Everyone has a personal gmail account anyway for Google Spreadsheets or for the Chrome synchronization (and Chrome will nag you till no end).
• knighthack 4y ago
  Why wouldn't Google Workspace suffice? If you need something more private, try ProtonMail. They're great too, and support all the things you need.
  • trinsic2 4y ago
    Yea, I dunno know If I would really trust ProtonMail to be private, even though that's what they advertise. https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/request-from-french-police-compelled-protonmail-to-reveal-ip-logs/ https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/request-from-french... Its more likely a government honey pot for criminals and political dissents.
• Psquared 4y ago
  have you tried Zoho mail...we are using it for our business.
• Psquared 4y ago
  we use zoho mail and it seems pretty good for our needs.
• kid64 4y ago
  Aside from the closed JMAP push API, my only complaint is that the spam folder doesn't work as you'd expect in IMAP. Specifically, moving a message to the spam folder doesn't influence the spam detection algorithm, as it does in the Web interface. To achieve this in IMAP, you must create a 2nd spam folder that is specifically configured to behave this way, which is really stupid.
• kuboble 4y ago
  I have moved with personal and business email from Gmail to fastmail. My main problem with Gmail was that often emails from two unrelated customers where joined in one conversation and I have mistakenly confused who I am communicating with. That happens if two unrelated people send an email with a title "problem with x" or "bug report". That hasn't happen in fastmail yet. One thing I am missing is Google search through email. Even though I have migrated emails from Google I still sometimes fallback to Gmail search over old emails.
• holsta 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I used to care enough about problems to write to support. I got canned responses to the point where I have stopped writing to them. I am two years into Fastmail. Fastmail's web UI is meh. I find that when I accept invites from customers, and then move the event from eg. my Billable calendar to Sales, the event is listed as "No response" -- when I respond again, the customer is sent another accept. Showing other people's calenders gets confusing due to the default choice of colours. The iOS app does not work offline. The default SPF records are much too relaxed. I could understand if they just didn't enable SPF by default but allowed you to enable sane records. You only need to scratch at the surface to find problems: https://internet.nl/site/fastmail.com https://internet.nl/site/fastmail.com I could go on.
  • PascLeRasc 4y ago
    I had two job interview cycles derail when I used Fastmail because they didn't receive my event RSVPs and in one case lost the meeting details. I like Fastmail's customizability, but it's been incredibly harmful to me and now I think it's as dangerous as Tesla autopilot and the Juul.
    • glukkanta 4y ago
      Oof, good to know. So it was a calendar issue? Did you ever contact Fastmail support about it?
      • PascLeRasc 4y ago
        I did open a support ticket, they kept re-assigning it and asking for the same background information before I gave up.
  • glukkanta 4y ago
    Thanks for the info! Are you still using Fastmail or have you moved to another service?
    • holsta 4y ago
• oblib 4y ago
  I peeked at their website and didn't find if there is a way to send an email from a web app. Do they have an API that makes that easy? (or at least doable?)
  • PascLeRasc 4y ago
    This person says they use Matlab and R to send emails from Fastmail, does that help? https://thefiringneuron.com/tag/fastmail/ https://thefiringneuron.com/tag/fastmail/
• callahad 4y ago
  I worked at a company that used Fastmail for ~150 employees. In my personal experience, the email side was rock solid and support was both responsive and helpful. I miss Fastmail's extremely fast web interface and handy features like being able to create smart folders from saved search queries. Calendaring would have been fine for a smaller company, but it was not suitable at our scale. This is mainly because there's no way to make your free/busy status visible to everyone in the company, so you ended up having to manually share your availability with each person you might want to meet with. Our sales / marketing / recruiting folks lamented the lack of integration into their external CRM tools, but I'm not in that field so I can't speak to it directly. Similarly, our IT folks didn't like how it was a separate account system to manage, instead of integrating into some other SSO system or being a source of truth for SSO itself... but again, at a smaller scale that's not a problem.
  • glukkanta 4y ago
    Those definitely sound like pain points at scale, but like you said, probably not an issue with our size. Do you know if the company ended up migrating to another platform?
    • callahad 4y ago
      I believe they've reluctantly moved (or are moving) to Google Workspace in response to the calendaring and CRM integration woes.
• mhdhn 4y ago
  I use both a lot, so here are some thoughts comparing Gmail with the Fastmail web client: - Fastmail has a slightly buggy rich text editor, but it's pretty feature rich, including full bidirectional language support. It's not as slick overall as Gmail's, but it's overall usable enough to not make me want to switch to Gmail. - mail search is not as slick as Google's, which is like world-class search smarts applied to just your inbox. Fastmail's is still pretty good, just not able to compare. Advanced search is also clunkier in Fastmail in various ways, and takes an extra click to get back into when you have to refine an advanced search. There are two features in Fastmail web client that Gmail web client does not support (that I'm aware of) that I would not want to live without: (1) Edit as New, and (2) Send a Copy.
  • benhurmarcel 4y ago
    > mail search is not as slick as Google's, which is like world-class search smarts applied to just your inbox My workplace switched to Gmail not long ago, and many people complain that the search doesn't work for partial words. For example if an email contains the reference a12b3456789, it won't show up when you search for a12b.
    • mhdhn 4y ago
      In a case like this, where it's just a partial substring of an arbitrary string of characters, Fastmail would not do any better.