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Fastmail is such an obviously better choice than Gmail these days. I moved over a few years ago, and I have zero regrets. I'm a bit nervous that someday they'll
by hungie 2y ago
Fastmail is such an obviously better choice than Gmail these days. I moved over a few years ago, and I have zero regrets. I'm a bit nervous that someday they'll sell out or run out of things to build and enshittification will set in, but honestly I haven't seen anything like that yet.
The day they start trying to put AI trash in Fastmail, though, is the day I start looking elsewhere.
- kwanbix 2y agoHow is it better? Honest question.
- bluGill 2y agoThey are not an ad company at all and so they don't have a division making a lot of money tracking you. Even if you pay for gmail, that ad division is making a lot more money and is looking for why to track you.
- homebrewer 2y agoThis applies to any commercial service (I am using a different one, but it's all the same): no tracking because they have no incentive to (they have the opposite incentive, actually), and responsive support provided by real humans when you need it. Search on HN or elsewhere for what happens when Google's automated systems ban your account and you lose access to email and everything tied to it. You have no recourse and no chance to recover it unless you have inside contacts or manage to stir up a social media shitstorm. You can also use your own domain (for example, tied to your real identity: firstname@lastname.com) and move it to a different provider if your current one goes to pieces. Additionally, I use a separate email address for each service (hn@domain.com, paypal@domain.com, amazon@domain.com, etc.) and can simply remove the alias if it starts receiving spam. You know then who leaked your email to spammers. You can add a random "IV" to be sure (i.e. amazon-5VoXwj5@domain.com).
- hungie 2y agoI can bring my own domains easily, I'm someone who gives companies <companyname>@example.com. That way if I start getting spam, I can block it easily and I know which company sold my email or had a breach. But they land in the same inbox. I find the UI much snappier, and I don't have to deal with some of the accessibility frustrations of gmail. Plus, it's a service I pay for, and isn't an ad tech offering.
- troyvit 2y agoI use Fastmail for my personal account. I use gmail at work. Fastmail's UI is a ton more user-centric. It just feels more thoughtful to me. Fastmail treats keyboard shortcuts as first class citizens, so you can run it almost completely mouse free. Spam filtering is on par with gmail, if not better. Aliases and throwaway accounts are easy to use if you have your own domain. I don't know how gmail handles that. When you click a link from fastmail it doesn't pass through a fastmail server as gmail does, but instead goes directly to the source. The calendar is decent but it's a hassle to import .ics files. It's readable and searchable though. If you attach external calendars then there's some delay when you change something on the external calendar. That can be annoying. The Contacts manager is OK. It's definitely not special but that also means it's not over-engineered. They have some file storage and notes capabilities which I don't use, and honestly I worry that it's the beginning of adding features for features' sake, but if that continues I can always keep fastmail and move back to Thunderbird or whatever, although that would suck a little bit. The android app seems good, but I came from K9 mail which wasn't the most polished. I don't use gmail on my phone so I can't compare, but to me Fastmail's app proves the adage that the better a tool is, the less you're aware you're even using it. It just does its job and stays out of the way, which is cool. I guess adding new calendar entries on a phone can be annoying. Like you tab the box to add a contact and the dropdown menu is obscured by the edge of the screen, stuff like that.
- qup 2y agoI use the notes. It's nothing special, just a text box. I can write them on my PC and easily edit them on my phone, without any system to maintain for that. One annoyance is that editing notes doesn't auto-save. I've lost some big edits.
- commandersaki 2y agoThe files storage is handy and is like a lite version of Google Drive / Dropbox and in other ways has a few more features. Upload files (or save attachments) to folders. Okay that's pedestrian. But then you can share links to the individual files or a folder as a .zip, which is heaps handy. So far google drive can do this already. You can also convert a folder into a website using fastmail's domain or a custom address using your own domain, to share as a listing of files or photo gallery, optionally password protected. I've used this quite a bit.
- stavros 2y agoReally fast/responsive, both the UI and the mail itself, great features, support is great, even power-user stuff is supported in the UI and support knows to set it all up if you talk to them. I really can't recommend Fastmail enough, I'm just sorry I wasted years on Gmail.
- commandersaki 2y agoWorks fantastic with catch-all aliases, being able to compose or reply with a custom alias, and automatically selecting the correct alias when replying to an email. I've yet to find a provider's web interface that does this correctly, or allows you to do it at all. Gmail is hostile when it comes to alias / catch-all.
- brongondwana 2y agoThanks! We're all pretty happy to keep doing what we're doing for a long time yet :) Have plenty of new stuff on the go (see the email work happening at IETF, a lot of it's being led or shepherded by someone from Fastmail) AI is... yeah. I can see in theory being able to have an AI answer questions like "who sent me a question I haven't replied to yet?" or "who have I emailed something expecting a response to and not heard back from?" could be powerful - but the tech is really immature and it hallucinates the craziest things. I don't think it's something we need to do in-house - it's something that could be added on with an IMAP or JMAP connector for those who want it.