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I made the jump to Fastmail and I'm very happy with it. Web interface is at least as good as Gmail's. Thunderbird keeps a local copy of my emails, I control the
by user3939382 4y ago
I made the jump to Fastmail and I'm very happy with it. Web interface is at least as good as Gmail's. Thunderbird keeps a local copy of my emails, I control the email domain. I can create backups. The second you get back in you gotta get off this platform.
- Daniel_sk 4y agoThe Apple Mail app on iOS and MacOS is pretty decent. No need to use the official Fastmail client (if you are on Apple and prefer the simple Apple alternative).
- dontlaugh 4y agoAlso, iCloud+ allows the use of a custom domain. It may be an easier option for some.
- danillonunes 4y agoI believe the major problem is having your email attached to a big tech general account. If your son decides to download a pirated game to your iphone, out whatever other unrelated minor offense, and Apple determine it's worth nuking your entire account, your email is gone. Granted, Google is worse at this matters, and when you own the domain at least you can point it to somewhere else, but it's still a hassle.
- hacym 4y agoDoes Apple have a history of doing that? This is the first time I’ve heard of that.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoNo
- yumraj 4y agoEven if that happens, it’s not a problem. Why? You go to your register and point your domain to another email provider, and you’re back in business.
- rwalle 4y agoNot a problem? All your previous emails are lost, aren't they? Even you have local backup of them somehow, they are not equivalent to emails saved to your server?
- xuki 4y agoIf you have a local back up and the provider supports IMAP, you can just sync it back to the new provider.
- edmundsauto 4y agoLosing backups is problematic, but IMO the bigger issue is losing access. I care 10x more about emails that I haven't received yet, compared to my history. I am still not wanting to lose that history... but it is just not as big a deal.
- nephanth 4y agoIf you're using an email client, chances are you have an offline copy of your emails (depending on how you configured it)
- yumraj 4y agoThe only way to cover that case is run your own mail server. I've done that in the past, don't recommend it unless you have a real need and know what you're doing. It wasn't hard, but just extra work that I wasn't sure was worth it.
- interactivecode 4y agoIs it possible to recieve the icloud mail from a custom domain also in my non apple email app? For example on my desktop?
- cjwit 4y agoI recently switched things to an iCloud custom domain that I access through the Spark iPhone and macOS apps. It’s been an upgrade, though I’m still in the stage of finding and switching over accounts that use my gmail. I feel like that will never end.
- sho 4y agoA big plus one to Fastmail (no economic link, just happy customer). I use the apple apps to access. I've never actually had any problem but I have confidence if I ever do, it will be solved quickly and painlessly by a human who cares because I'm a paying customer. I don't know why we ever thought free email was a good idea. Of course Google doesn't care about a free email user. They're just another useless eater out of billions. And yet so many of us (me included, until switching) basically built our whole online existences around gmail. Email is important. Important things are worth paying for. You have status and recourse if anything goes wrong. Gmail works until it suddenly doesn't and you are reduced to desperate moves like begging for relief on HN. Move away before that happens, and vote with your wallet for fair service for a fair price.
- KMnO4 4y ago> Of course Google doesn't care about a free email user I pay $180/year for Google Workspace and Google still doesn’t care about me.
- ticviking 4y agoRealizing that was when I moved on. I'm looking for a good alternative to the office suite, Microsoft has better customer service but not by much and it's not always easy to use cross platform(I wind up using Win, Mac, and Linux weekly and play with FreeBSD occasionally
- kybernetyk 4y agoTo make the transition easier you can configure Gmail to automatically forward mails you your FastMail address. They all then appear in the fastmail acc and you don't have to touch Gmail ever again.
- noisy_boy 4y agoThats exactly what I do - get a bit tiring to manage emails on both side during the intermediate phase (which I'm still in) but I have already migrated most of my financial and government contacts to fastmail.
- malepoon2 4y agoI migrated the important stuff and then just incrementally moved things over whenever I happened to login somewhere. At this point, the only emails I get on Gmail are random crap I don't care about. It's so nice to have my Gmail only for Android and other Google services. It was a big relief.
- coffeefirst 4y agoI also added a rule in Fastmail to automatically label things forwarded from Gmail. This became an easy map of what to update. In about 6 months almost nothing still comes to gmail.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoDoes Fastmail offer an option to set this up for you using the Gmail REST API after an import from Gmail into your Fastmail account? If not, please do so Fastmail folks if you read this! https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/AutoForwarding https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/Au...
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoyep, I have 2 gmail accounts that have been forwarding to fastmail for something like 10 years now. I'm really unsure on the timeline, but it's been a very long time. google is good at spam filtering so those accounts became the accounts I give out to people publicly.
- frereubu 4y agoThe only thing that I find isn't as good about Fastmail is the spam filtering. I see more spam in my inbox and my spam folder than I did in Gmail, but despite that the trade-offs (particularly less of my data going through and sitting in Google's systems) still feel worth it.
- noisy_boy 4y agoFor me, it is the other way round - their spam filter is quite aggressive and I routinely find non-spam messages in the spam folder. Hopefully the training I'm providing makes the filtering better.
- sph 4y agoThat might not be the case, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34118182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34118182 tl;dr: Fastmail custom spam filtering needs some time to actually do anything. Now no more 2 spam emails a year get through the filter.
- aendruk 4y agoIronically Gmail is one is the largest sources of spam hitting me at Fastmail.
- ajross 4y agoI make this point in most of these threads, but this is falling to an anecdata fallacy. Gmail is thousands or tens of thousands of times bigger than Fastmail[1]. When you have have a scale difference that large, you're going to have a huge, huge imbalance of problem reports like this that has nothing to do with actual reliability. All providers mess stuff up occasionally. Everyone has a customer support crisis at some point, with someone. In point of fact I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable. [1] Which seems great, btw. I'm actually looking at moving my vanity domain to them as I'm sick of chasing standards trying to host it myself. This is absolutely not a ding at Fastmail.
- KyleJune 4y agoI use my own domain with fastmail, so if they were to fail, I could at least keep using the same address. Although I would need to find another provider that supports wildcard addresses going to the same inbox because I've found myself using the pattern companyname@ my domain for each business I give my email to. It makes it easy to block emails if a business doesn't let me unsubscribe or they share my email with spammers.
- ajross 4y agoYou realize that "My Domain Got Stolen and the Registrar Won't Fix It" is another whole subgenre of this kind of anecdata, right? My point is just that there's no free lunch. Everything breaks, but on balance I'd trust Big Tech to get it right more than little companies like Fastmail or your domain registrar.
- KyleJune 4y agoOP's post isn't about his email or domain getting stolen, it's about him getting locked out of his account with no way to get back in. There are many different providers for both email and domains that provide good support. Sure it's possible I could still get locked out of either. I feel like smaller companies that I'm actually paying are more likely to be responsive to my issues than a large company that I'm using for free.
- BMorearty 4y agoI love Gmail’s automated inbox categories. Looks like Fastmail doesn’t have that? (I know I can set up manual filters. I prefer it to be done for me automatically.)
- mistrial9 4y agoso, they read and profile your emails, and then categorize that for you, and you love that? ok, we are different
- BMorearty 4y agoAre you implying there is any email provider that doesn't have access to your emails? How does Fastmail determine which ones are spam?
- rwalle 4y agoThis probably does not help, but... I used to love that automated categories and had 4 categories. One day I suddenly felt that that was too many and reduced it to two, "Primary" and "Updates" (similar to mail.live.com's "focused" and "other") and found it actually easier to manage my emails. Of course that is still two not one, but just want to say that you might also realize that you don't need so many categories.