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My experience with FastMail as a Gmail replacement
- mtgx 13y agoI heard on Security Now (twit.tv) that they (among other companies) were asked if they ever provided master keys to US law enforcement, and they refused to reply.
- josteink 13y agoTo clarify on that: As far as I read it they refused to reply to the question about them having handed out masterkeys. They did not reply that they refused to hand out masterkeys. This sort of denial is hard to read as anything else than that they have already handed over the keys and aren't allowed to talk about it. It has caused me serious concerns about if I should bother doing a full trial with fastmail, which otherwise seemed like an excellent (although somewhat pricey) replacement for gmail. You can say it has definitely validated my concerns about fastmail using a US-based hosting provider. If I was fastmail I would be extremely busy looking for a reliable hosting partner elsewhere. People looking to jump ship from Google are doing it for one of two reasons: 1. Enough with the Google or 2. Enough with the US spying on everything you do. Stuck with a US datacenter they wont be able to grab near the amount of customers the market is more or less throwing at them right now.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoPlease see my response to the GP.
- levosmetalo 13y agoMaybe they refused to answer because it's the only option they have if they don't want to lie to their users. Note that US law enforcement actively forbids the company to disclose spying.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoPlease see my response to the GP and stop the speculation.
- e_proxus 13y agoYou should add clarification to your answer that you work with / own Fastmail.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoThanks. I've editing my original comment.
- levosmetalo 13y agoThe speculation is only due to lack of information. However, even if you indeed handed the keys to the US government, you will be bound by them not to disclose it, so there's no much point answering either "yes" or "no" as long as you or any of your company assets are in the reach of US government. The same line of thought applies to any company connected with the US in any way, not just to Opera/FastMail. Anyways, thanks for the update.
- chris_mahan 13y agoLack of transparency leads to speculation.
- workhere-io 13y agoAs levosmetalo mentioned, we're forced to speculate when it comes to NSA spying, since companies apparently can be forced to not disclose anything. Which is why I think FastMail should see this as a great opportunity to move all servers to Norway. That would stop the speculation.
- workhere-io 13y agoWhich is why they should break all ties to the US completely. Shouldn't be too hard for an Australian/Norwegian company.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoWe did not refuse to reply. We have contacted the author to find out who he contacted within the company, because it was the first time we have heard about it! Edit: I work for Opera Software/FastMail.FM
- spiantino 13y agoI just made the switch, and I have to add some things missing here Cons: - No priority inbox - FastMail service is pretty poor
- e_proxus 13y agoAnother con that I didn't really expect: Their address book is okay via the web (pretty much like Gmail's), but can only be accessed read-only via LDAP (and can't sync with iOS, you can search it but you can't populate the iOS address book with it). So, the only way to edit contacts is via web, and you can't keep your mobile address book up to date with it. For now, I'm stuck with Google Contacts until I find a better provider.
- levosmetalo 13y agoTried Zoho lately? I played with it two years ago, but decided going with Google Apps free tier at that time. It might be interesting to people sick of Google, though won't help much with the NSA issues.
- e_proxus 13y agoCouldn't find anything that looking like contact hosting. Also, Zoho feels a bit overkill for that scenario.
- alfiejohn_ 13y agoAbove the header in your folder you'll see the following buttons: "All mail", "Unread", "Personal", "Notifications", "Mailing lists" and pinned sorting.
- e_proxus 13y agoStill no priority inbox based on bayesian filtering. (hint: feature request). In fact, I'm amazed that most other mail clients / providers haven't taken this further than Google. I mean, it would be great with bayesian filtering for everything (labels, folders, categories, stars, whatnot). I would love to be able to train it to filter email into different folders based on me just clicking "Belongs here" / "Does not belong here".
- cpursley 13y agoI'd pay twice the fastmail pricing package if they cut all ties with the the USA, including moving their servers. I already switched from dropbox to Jottacloud - a Norwegian company with their servers in Norway. Edit: looks like there are several good alternatives at this site: http://www.internationalman.com/78-global-perspectives/945-nsa-scandal-shows-importance-of-offshoring-your-digital-presence http://www.internationalman.com/78-global-perspectives/945-n... http://www.SwissMail.org/ http://www.SwissMail.org/ Based in Switzerland. http://www.neomailbox.net/ http://www.neomailbox.net/ Based in Switzerland. https://secure.runbox.com/ https://secure.runbox.com/ Based in Norway, which has strong privacy laws. Runbox is generally considered a cheap and quality option. https://www.jumpshipservices.co/ https://www.jumpshipservices.co/ Parent company is incorporated in Hong Kong with servers located in Switzerland.
- oellegaard 13y agoYeah, I don't get all the hype about Fastmail. To me, every US hosted solution is like uploading your content to the US. As mentioned by countless blog posts, I don't have anything to hide, but I should have the right to privacy. Until I find a proper email solution within Europe, I don't see any reason to switch from Gmail.
- workhere-io 13y agoThere's Runbox (http://www.runbox.com/ http://www.runbox.com/ - servers hosted in Norway), but their web mail client is terrible, both on mobile and desktop. If you use IMAP/POP I'm sure you'll be alright, though.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stock_toaster 13y agoFor me my primary motivation to move away from Gmail was to leave Google's umbrella (ads/being-a-product-not-a-customer/worse usability as time went on), not to escape the USA/NSA (I moved before the NSA stuff came to light).
- maaaats 13y agoI'd like if the fastmail website provided some screenshots and other info about the product. Right now the only thing I'm told is the size of my inbox and some other numbers.
- workhere-io 13y agoHere's what the Minimal Theme looks like: http://i.imgur.com/N8pqIG6.png http://i.imgur.com/N8pqIG6.png. Also, there's a free 60-day trial: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html
- alpyne 13y agoCon: No labels. Saved searches go some of the way, but not as convenient. Folder-based storage feels old. Whatever the UI terminology (labels, playlists, tags), its clear that the trend is to embrace the non-physicality of information and allow it to "live" in many "places" simultaneously.
- Osmium 13y ago"Most of FastMail.fm's pages have an outdated look to them - only the Minimal theme looks modern. Apple's success should be enough to convince everyone that design matters." Ironically, Apple could take this advice too; it's not like their webmail design is anything special (in my opinion). Looks too much like a desktop app when it should look more like a web app and feels slow to boot. Re. Fastmail: I'm trying them for 6 months. I'm happy enough so far and think I'll stick with them. Still holding out for push support for iPhone and more secure on-server email storage though... Both of which are offered by Rackspace, which seems to have a good reputation as well, so I'm tempted to switch.
- bcl 13y agoI've been a happy customer for several years now. I've had zero problems with them, but I also don't use the web interface for anything other than managing my accounts (one feature is you can easily setup and manage family members accounts). I don't think that moving outside the US would make any practical difference. Any mail sent to their servers from my regular correspondents would pass through NSA monitored sites as they left the US and I pull everything off using IMAP over SSL anyway so there isn't anything stored there for them to seize. Your email correspondence, unless encrypted with pgp, really should be considered no different than sending a postcard in the mail. It can be intercepted and copied at any number of points along the way.
- workhere-io 13y agoAny mail sent to their servers from my regular correspondents would pass through NSA monitored sites as they left the US Sure, but a lot of HN readers and potential FastMail customers live in places where traffic to/from FastMail's servers wouldn't be intercepted by the NSA (if the servers were in Norway). So while moving servers to Norway wouldn't make a difference to you, it would for a lot of other people.
- bcl 13y agoMaybe. But I wouldn't count on it, and you're better off assuming that you are monitored instead of depending on a server location. To me the most compelling argument would be seizure laws. If you are one of those people who use the mail server as a data store then it would be worthwhile to have it in a place that would resist attempts to grab the hardware.
- jfb 13y agoI've been a Fastmail user for ages now. As I abhor and abjure web applications, my personal calculus is different than that of someone seeking to flee the UI changes that Google is implementing. Their IMAP service is rock solid and very, very few spam emails get through their filters. That's all I want, and Fastmail's ability to provide is why I'll continue to send them my money. I'm out on the edge of the email usage distribution, however, so I try not to generalize my experiences and biases too much.
- zw 13y agoI'm toying with running my own mail, calendar, and contacts on a VPS. Tired of being a second class citizen in Google's eyes for not using their apps.
- mbesto 13y agoYou missed a very big con - Does not support push on mobile.
- workhere-io 13y agoWell, I'd prefer the mobile web version anyway. Which works, but isn't as slick as the desktop version.
- diroussel 13y agoMy experience is that I've been using fastmail for 15 years, and have no need to switch away. It's interesting that the comments in the article made me login to the web interface for the first time in a long time. As I tend to just use IMAP between 3 computers and a few iOS devices. It works very well. Back when I chose fastmail, the ability to set rules server side was a big deal, and I still use this, but haven't needed to change them in some time. I have all my notification emails (amazon, linkedin etc) go into a notifications folder so they don't clog up my inbox. Also I can make mailing list subscriptions go into subfolders too. All very handy. Another nice feature: If I have an email to 20 people, and one of the email addresses is wrong, when I hit Send in Mail.app, I get an error saying which email is wrong, and the email doesn't get sent. So I can correct it an retry. This is much better, where the first mail works, but bounces on some people, and then others in the group reply to the bad email.
- FridayWithJohn 13y agorather costly if you ask me.
- workhere-io 13y agoYou can pay up to five years in advance and save money.
- hkarthik 13y agoNo calendar is a pretty big downside. I would venture to say this is even more important to me than staying on Gmail now. Especially with shared calendars between myself and my spouse.
- workhere-io 13y agoZoho Calendar (https://www.zoho.com/calendar/ https://www.zoho.com/calendar/) is the only real alternative if you want something web-based, but let's face it; it's not as good as Google Calendar.
- adestefan 13y agoCalendar is one thing that I miss. I still use both GMail and Fastmail. My fastmail account has basically taken over as my "personal" email while GMail is now the all the other junk account.
- michaelmior 13y agoI don't understand this point. Gmail doesn't have a calendar either. Google Calendar is a separate product. I don't even find the integration between the two particularly strong.
- osxical 13y agoBut if you have iCal, just store your .ics file in the FastMail file store and give the http url to whoever you like and viola - instant group/family calendar. iCal will do all the work for you once you set it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICal
- fingerprinter 13y agoThis is going to sound trite, but I won't pay for something sight unseen. There is no preview option and there are no screenshots on their website. I literally have no idea what their webmail interface looks like. How could I possibly sign up for this service?
- workhere-io 13y agoThere's a free 60-day trial, no credit card required. https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html. What more could you ask for? :)
- fingerprinter 13y agoThanks, not sure how I missed that! Signed up, checked it out.
- elo 13y agoI asked FastMail support about their US data center a few weeks ago, suggesting they offer an alternative. This was their reply: "We DO plan to set up a non-US data centre, and are making progress towards this. However it is expensive and time-consuming, and we're not ready to offer this as an extra yet. We will definitely make it known when such an option becomes available."
- jfb 13y agoCool. I hope they do make it an extra-cost option, because +1 for price discrimination.
- bjourne 13y agoI'm in the process of moving my gmail account to fastmail. Trying to move 250k mail (7 gb) from one provider to another is painful. I'm using the imapcopy.pl script which works by reading one mail from the source account and then uploading it to the target. Apparently it's a pretty expensive process as I'm getting my access throttled both by gmail and fastmail. Gmail even shuts of imap access entirely if you hammer their servers hard enough. Well if they didn't want me to flood them, they should have made it possible to download your mail archive in a single tarball... So far, after running imapcopy.pl for almost a whole week, only 100k mails have been successfully copied.
- ndwns 13y agoDid you try their "Migrate IMAP Mailbox" which grabs directly from your GMail? It pulled across 3GB in about 30 minutes and worked well.
- bjourne 13y agoThanks for the tip. I've tried that option but it doesn't seem to work at all for large mailboxes. Also gmail doesn't expose any api for exporting mailboxes, so fastmail still has to copy each message individually which is very time consuming.
- WordSkill 13y agoI paid for FastMail for about 5 years until they lost a lot of customers' data, including mine, and refused to come clean about it.
- stock_toaster 13y agoCan you provide some more information about this? As a current FastMail customer I am quite interested!