13 ms·

From Gmail to Fastmail

145 points by etix 12y ago

mariodiana 12y ago
I'm currently reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, NO PLACE TO HIDE, and I have to say that a person should take much comfort in the fact that Fastmail is in Australia rather than the U.S. Australia is a member country in what the NSA terms the "Five Eyes" (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) These countries are thick as thieves when it comes to sharing signal intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- mariodiana 12y ago
  s/should/shouldn't/ (Sorry for the typo.)
  - teach 12y ago
    Can't you edit your comment? You ought to be able to go that within the first hour or so.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
stevenleeg 12y ago
I also recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and haven't looked back. The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, IMAP works great across all of my devices (which makes me more inclined to use OpenPGP when I can), and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com. They're also working on CardDAV and a web calendar (with CalDAV support), which will get me completely off of google once completed. The only thing I really miss is push notifications to my phone, but I've found that 15 minute fetching works well enough for the time being. Overall I've been really happy with it over the last 3 months. Definitely worth the $40/yr in my eyes.
- etix 12y ago
  IMAP IDLE works great, it's not as efficient as push on mobile because of the battery drain but at least you'll get instant notifications. That's what I use with K-9 on Android.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    IDLE opens a TCP connection for every folder the client is IDLE-ing on. It surely drains the battery. I haven't used it, but NuevaSync provides Exchange ActiveSync for IMAP accounts.
- chjj 12y ago
  Just curious, does it support 2FA for the web login and api key (or device keys, whatever google calls them) access for IMAP?
  - etix 12y ago
    For the webmail yes, definitely. For IMAP I don't think it would work, I personally use OTP when I do IMAP on an insecure device.
  - nnx 12y ago
    It does. You can append your current 2FA TOTP code right after the password when your email client requests the password.
  - chmars 12y ago
    No, Fastmail does not support actual 2FA. You can add alternative login methods, for example Google Authenticator, but you can always login with your password only, i.e., it is not like Gmail where you have to use 2FA for untrusted devices or logins from strange locations plus specific passwords for IMAP etc. And the configuration screen is a mess: http://i.imgur.com/NzW8o5h.png http://i.imgur.com/NzW8o5h.png http://i.imgur.com/dmoBbpy.png http://i.imgur.com/dmoBbpy.png
- kunstmord 12y ago
  Never heard of FastMail before this post, and I'm considering switching now. I have a personal mail server, but it was a PITA to set up, and it probably needs AWS SES (since everything I send mostly ends up in people's spam folders), and there's always the possibility of the VPS going offline for some time.
Aoyagi 12y ago
Something I think is another huge plus people don't mention: you get an actual, living person for technical and other support.
- dueprocess 12y ago
  Responsive customer support is such a huge thing, and yet so few companies do it right.
  - etix 12y ago
    Probably because it's hard. Answering is easy, anyone can do it but making customers happy is way more difficult.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Especially for something as crucial as email. I am probably still sticking with gmail for a while, but I can't imagine the horror of suddenly being locked out and not being able to get on the phone with anyone.
- vadvi 12y ago
  yes! a week ago I opened a support ticket because of a bug. 2 days later it was fixed. pretty amazing!
- danieldk 12y ago
  Yep. I recently filed a feature request and a bug report. Both were replied to and fixed within one or two days by one of their developers.
sandstrom 12y ago
I've been eying Fastmail for a while. It's really sad that they won't offer Icelandic-only hosting, it would give some additional comfort. But perhaps that will change?
- etix 12y ago
  It would be a wise choice. I really hope they'll do it too.
- mercer 12y ago
  Is there any good reason why they haven't done this already? It seems to me privacy is a major selling point, especially after the Snowden revelations.
  - dueprocess 12y ago
    It's likely the NSA reads your Fastmail at the breakfast table. Their servers are on US soil. It would take some wicked mental gymnastics to rationalize that fact away.
  - brongondwana 12y ago
    Basically, we just don't have the hardware in Iceland to support both running a full replica of everything from New York and also running production traffic in Iceland. A fair bit of that is my personal fault for not pushing the extraction from Opera's racks into our own separate racks. We've been paying for capacity in Iceland for 3 months that we're not using yet.
    - etix 12y ago
      Can we expect Fastmail to run a complete production traffic replica in Iceland in the future? I would gladly pay up to 1.5x the price for having my primary storage there instead of the US.
nilkn 12y ago
I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.
- vosper 12y ago
  I think the tabs are great. With little or no training they're right 99% of the time and are a very effective way of separating "real email" - friends, colleagues, family - from the automated stuff that's not spam but which I also don't care about as much.
  - nilkn 12y ago
    The tabs are great for mobile, where I can use them to control which emails generate push notifications. On the web, though, the entire new Gmail interface in general is so much less efficient at conveying information that I find that any categorization provided by the tabs is just not a big enough of a positive to justify using that interface.
- lcnmrn 12y ago
  You can disable Hangouts (chat), the top tabs and G+ from the standard interface too. I'm using this with Mail Notifr app along with two Gmail accounts. I get instant notifications and the web interface loads in an instant for each email inbox. This way I avoid crappy email clients.
xkarga00 12y ago
I have been looking for a free e-mail provider that takes privacy seriously. Isn't there anyone out there?
- DanBC 12y ago
  What's your privacy risk assessment?
  - xkarga00 12y ago
    I just don't want advertising companies or the NSA sniffing around my personal communications. It has to be private as private should be.
    - ForHackernews 12y ago
      > It has to be private as private should be. But you also don't want to pay any money for it?
      - xkarga00 12y ago
        No. Do you believe that by paying money your privacy is guaranteed? Even Fastmail's privacy is doubtful regarding its non-US clients -which would be my case if i used it.
        ForHackernews 12y ago
        Ok, but why would anyone set up and run an extremely privacy-hardened service for you, for free?
        xkarga00 12y ago
        Probably because i am not the only one who would use it.
        12y ago
bratsche 12y ago
I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I like it so far. For me, scanning my email to show me ads didn't really bother me that much. But the thing that I really like with Fastmail is that my outbound email alias works the way I want. The university I graduated from gives us email aliases for life, and I prefer to use my university alias instead of my Gmail address. It obviously works fine when I receive mail, but when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever). And so for a lot of people, when they would add me to their address books they'd end up adding my gmail address because that's how it was presented to them. With Fastmail everyone just sees my jhu.edu address as I prefer.
- spindritf 12y ago
  when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever) You can configure Gmail to use your university's SMTP server and then Gmail is simply an e-mail client. They steer you away from that option but it's available.
  - _pius 12y ago
    If that's true, would love to see some documentation for it.
    - spindritf 12y ago
      http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another...
      - _pius 12y ago
        Nice, thanks.
mercer 12y ago
I've been looking into doing this, so this post came at a good time. Especially the UI/keyboard shortcuts appeal to me, as that was the main reason I stuck with google over other solutions.
_mikz 12y ago
80k emails per ... a day? month? edit: or it might be accounts?
- etix 12y ago
  Total. Article updated.
braveheart1723 12y ago
any offers / coupons / deals for hackernews readers ?
_mikz 12y ago
What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues. If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?
- etix 12y ago
  Beside the non-standard way of managing folders (duplicate emails caused by labels) I find it slow compared to others.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server) And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in size, and big slower disk for the rest. The index metadata is also on the SSDs, so most common usage patterns can be served entirely from SSD. Those SSDs are a RAID1 pair of Intel DC3700 drives, which are enterprise drives and very fast even for SSDs. We dropped a chunk of money on moving to this setup, and it's made both IMAP and regular web usage very nice. So basically, we're optimised for IMAP and we're optimised for speed. Every server has local storage, and the local storage is fast. It gives quite predictable performance, and very fast performance. That's my story as both the author/maintainer of our IMAP server, and the designer of the server architecture. That's not saying that GMail is awful, just IMAP isn't so much their focus, and they don't optimise for it.
  - emiunet 12y ago
    I am curious what sort of storage solution Google is using to compare to this one..
    - brongondwana 12y ago
      I believe it's based on BigTable. There doesn't seem to be a published article that I can find on the exact internals, so I'm basing it off discussions on the protocol mailing lists.
personZ 12y ago
I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.
- davidbarker 12y ago
  Suspicious, how so? I've been using Fastmail for a few months and highly recommend it. My initial thought RE: the number of comments would be that many of the people who've switched to Fastmail are vocal in their support because they had specific reasons to switch.
- etix 12y ago
  I'm not related to Fastmail in any way, you can verify that easily. I'm just a simple but happy customer who likes to share when he think that it might be of interest to others.
  - whichdan 12y ago
    Same here. I've been with them since 2007 and they've made huge strides, especially with the recent interface overhaul.
  - brongondwana 12y ago
    I am related with FastMail (also pretty easily verifyable) - and we love how popular we are on HN. We do get kind of surprised at how often people post about loving us as well, but we're not complaining (I'm sitting on my laptop during the break at my choir rehearsal today and reading through this thread to see if there are any questions I can answer. I'm doing this instead of going to get a coffee... which now that I think about it must mean I'm insane, because I'm going to need coffee to survive the next set of rehearsals. Madness. If anyone at Melbourne wants to come to an awesome concert next weekend, email me or something)
- gress 12y ago
  I find it suspicious that every time a post that isn't supportive of Google is submitted, someone attempts to undermine it with innuendo.
ender7 12y ago
There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great: "Getting my data back under control In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data." If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1]. It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2]. [1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic. [2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  There's two types of "data under your control" at play here. The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?). The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'm almost certainly not qualified to sysadmin a machine that needs to be secure against the NSA.
  - kylec 12y ago
    You probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      How? Fastmail is...another mail provider. Paying for email service might be a good idea for a lot of reasons, but people have an extremely absurd sense that they're "fighting the man". You know - by paying in US dollars, to a US company, using US banks.... EDIT: Something I did just see is that Fastmail gives you sieve scripting. Since going from hosting my own inbound email to Gmail, I've really missed having a good email sorting language.
sivers 12y ago
I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to. Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day. The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused. Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless. Choose the Business email option - https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html - if you want them to keep an automatic archive of the emails you download via POP. When I signed up under the Personal Email option I found they didn't have this archive option, but they switched me over to the business account on request. It's so worth the measly $15/year, considering the importance a good email/webmail experience, and how much it affects your every-day life. I've helped a few friends switch over, and they've all been thrilled with it.
- ikusalic 12y ago
  I have the same experience. I find the interface just beautiful and pleasure to use. The same is true when using it from phone. One of the best tool-related decisions I ever did.
- eknkc 12y ago
  Same here! Have been using fastmail for ~6 months now. I was hesitant, thought I'd miss push mail on iOS but it has been just fine. Also, there are some iOS mail clients that can push on FastMail (http://mymail.my.com http://mymail.my.com) I always hated Gmail's slow/weird IMAP behavior. Switched to Office365 at some point. Exchange was great but so freaking slow. FastMail has standard, fast IMAP. I also use the included DNS server for a couple of domains that had been lying around and the static file host for some http placeholder pages and stuff. I'd never go back to Google at this point.
  - chmars 12y ago
    Fastmail seems to support IMAP Idle only. And IMAP Idle is not an option for mobile devices since the mail client has to keep the connection open all the time, so there goes your battery …
phaed 12y ago
ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.
- erikb 12y ago
  Just FYI, they don't have the main feature I am using GMail for: priority inbox. Or at least I didn't find it in their feature lists.
Morgawr 12y ago
The idea of privacy with email is, unfortunately, very ephemeral. As seen in other articles also submitted to hn in the past, even if you stop using Gmail, Google will still have a very huge chunk of your data to track simply because the vast majority of the people you communicate with have a Gmail account. There is no easy/apparent way out.
- ronaldx 12y ago
  This is not a good argument for using or staying with Gmail. In fact, writing this another way potentially identifies a more compelling reason to leave: By using Gmail, you are incrementally harming the privacy of everyone you communicate with.
djokkataja 12y ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail about a year ago after using exclusively Gmail for email since 2007. I've been very happy with Fastmail since then. Primarily I was bothered by getting the service for "free" from Google--it's not free for them to provide it (no such thing as a free lunch), which means they have to find ways to monetize my personal communications with others without me directly paying them. Obviously there are the ads, but then there's the matter of having to stay up to date on their privacy policies... long story short, Google creeps me out a little, and I'd rather pay a bit of money to feel like I'm not a host for some kind of sprawling global parasite. Anyway, pros: - The Fastmail web interface is fast. I've never seen it take longer to load than 1 second on any computer or internet connection; it's noticeably faster to load up the entire interface than Gmail. - Fastmail also uses basically the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail (j/k to go up and down, x to select, # to delete, y to archive, z to undo, r to reply, f to forward, a to reply-all, ctrl-enter to send--works from any field in fastmail rather than just the body or title as in gmail, which is handy for forwarding things). - Sometimes sending/opening messages in Gmail was kind of slow; sending messages from Fastmail has always been virtually instantaneous, and opening them is definitely instantaneous. I think Fastmail preloads email content into the client so that it only has to request images from the server, because it definitely opens email too quickly to have done a round trip to the server to get the email contents. If you press 'o' to open an email, it will be open by the time your 'o' key comes back up. - Fastmail can help with setting up DNS for emails for custom domains. - Fastmail has this "Pin" feature that lets you pin emails so that they stick to the top of whatever folder they're in. I always wanted something like this in Gmail (like if starred messages stuck to the top or something). I think there's an option to toggle whether or not they float to the top if you're not a fan. Anyway, I'm not sure that having this feature has actually been beneficial to me in any way, but I like it a lot. Cons: - The Fastmail interface is not as pretty as the Gmail interface. There is no option to get a big, beautiful background picture, and the interface doesn't really have space for it anyway. This bothered me a little at first, but these days I don't care... if I'm gazing longingly at the mountains in the background picture of my email, I'm being extraordinarily unproductive. - Fastmail's auto-complete when you're typing in the recipient list does not keep track of who you send to most frequently and push them automatically to the top of the list. This still bothers me sometimes. - Fastmail's settings pages are a little confusing. There are a couple different ways to get to them, and it can be a little tricky to figure out where you're supposed to find something. I've never been a fan of the way settings are organized in any email client, though... Gmail and Outlook have settings pages that aren't as terrible these days; Fastmail's settings are a little less refined. On the other hand, it seems like you can do a lot more with the settings in Fastmail (so this is a bit of a pro, not strictly a con). - Fastmail has a folder system with nesting like Outlook. I don't think this is really a bad thing; I like the concept of Gmail's labels a lot, but I never found it to be significantly more useful than folders. What sucks about Fastmail's implementation is that to create folders or rearrange them, you have to enter this special folder management menu. Then to create a folder, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and type the new name, and if you want it to be at the top, then you have to drag it up past all of the other folders, and there seems to be a max speed on how quickly you can drag it up, and it starts arbitrarily selecting the text as you're dragging and sometimes gets a little janky as you get to the top. Definitely my least favorite part of the interface. Ambiguous: - Not strictly a pro or a con in my opinion: there is no chat interface built-in (actually I'm not certain about that, there might be some option to enable chat and put in chat credentials, etc. but I haven't looked for it). Overall I think this has been very good for getting me in and out of my inbox very quickly and productively without any risk of distraction. I actually stopped using any form of chat until more recently when I needed it for work, and I think my quality of life was improved for it, but I know that for many people chat is an important part of communicating. But I haven't missed it in my webmail one bit. Wow, that was a lot more than I expected to write! Anyway, to sum up, from my perspective as a web developer: - Fastmail is faster and contributes better to getting things done, in my experience (worth the $60/yr for that reason alone) - Fastmail has some nice options if you're setting up email inboxes for yourself for custom domains. I don't know if I would recommend it yet as a mail option for clients since it's a little less polished than Gmail and some of the settings options are a good deal more technical. - Fastmail is a nice gateway drug to freeing yourself from the idea that Gmail is the be-all-end-all of email. Still waiting for someone more productive than myself to combine webmail, Trello, and Google Calendar into a glorious productivity app that ushers in a new era for humanity.
plg 12y ago
"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer" This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer. With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product. With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information. I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction. Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly. Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.
- bigtones 12y ago
  Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Fastmail also has PFS: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-forward-secrecy-with-httpstls-connections/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...
  - dan1234 12y ago
    FastMail also claims PFS support http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-forward-secrecy-with-httpstls-connections/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...
United857 12y ago
Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge. If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.
Semaphor 12y ago
Just in case people are missing things like the priority inbox I'd like to mention Sanebox [0]. In my opinion they are better than what google does plus they offer more features (for a price). [0] https://www.sanebox.com/ https://www.sanebox.com/
tpeng 12y ago
Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.
- psychometry 12y ago
  As someone who actually switched from Fastmail TO Gmail several years ago, this definitely resonates. "Fastmail" is not easily recognized by most people and becomes especially unclear if you're reciting your email address over the phone. Fastmail doesn't even own fastmail.com! They do have many domains available [1] but none are that great. [1] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html
- joedavison 12y ago
  They have one really great domain: sent.com I have never had a problem communicating it.
- zokier 12y ago
  You should be using your own domains regardless of who is your email provider. That way switching email provider is only one MX record change away if the need ever arises.
kretor 12y ago
The spacing around "i"s is too much.
philwelch 12y ago
The only downside I've seen switching from Gmail to Fastmail is that Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good. But I can live with it.
ausjke 12y ago
After reading this I plan to switch to fastmail as well. Thanks for sharing the good stuff!
songgao 12y ago
I made up my decision and finally made the switch this evening, after reading this post. So far I'm pretty happy about it. Thanks etix! Several things I'd like to share here: 1. XMPP Fastmail actually comes with a XMPP server. This is a big bonus feature that I didn't expect. It can also keep chat logs in an IMAP folder named 'chat'. Read more here: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html 2. External Account If you want to manage other email accounts (receive emails from them), Fastmail seems only support POP (in contrast to Gmail supporting both POP and IMAP). Also, unlike Gmail which checks email with a dynamic frequency based on how many emails you receive at the time, Fastmail uses a fixed interval for checking emails from external account. The minimum interval you can set is 1 hour. I couldn't find a way to manually trigger a POP check in Fastmail either. One hour is a bit too long for me, but fortunately I adapted to a better way than using external account. I simply set an auto-redirect rule in my other email accounts (e.g. my school uses MS Exchange) and that actually results in instant delivery of emails from external account. I guess this is the right way to handle the problem (other than making your primary email service pull emails from external account like what I did in Gmail before).
- etix 12y ago
  Glad you like it as much as I do. 1. I did not mention the XMPP server primarily because I already use another server but it's always a welcome addition indeed. 2. I've read somewhere (can't remember where though) that when you're logged in the frequency is automatically increased and you can force a retrieval manually by using the refresh button. Maybe @brongondwana can comment on this matter.
iancarroll 12y ago
Just moved my domain over to Fastmail. I can live with $10 per three months.
napoleond 12y ago
The coolest thing about Fastmail is a feature I didn't expect before making the switch: Fastmail is actually faster than Gmail. IMAP is quicker, webmail loads quicker, everything is just snappier. I still use Google mail for a lot of stuff (and actually only have one inbox at Fastmail currently) but I have been extremely impressed with Fastmail so far.
YooLi 12y ago
I moved to from Gmail to Fastmail last April, but this April, I moved back to Gmail. I have an email address (on my own domain) that I've used since the late 90's. It's all over the Internet in newsgroup archives, forums, etc. from before anyone was hiding emails from spam scrapers. Consequently I get several hundred spam per day. The FM spam filtering is no where near as good as G filtering. I had to manually flag as spam a couple dozen mails every day as well and go through the spam filter and pick out the false positives. I have no problems with G's spam filtering. The other problem with FM is administering multiple accounts on my domain. While it true it's only something I need to do once, as has been mentioned already, the settings/administration leaves much to be desired. Overall, using Gmail is just more pleasant to me, enough so that it outweighs the concerns (read: Google being creepy) that caused me to leave last April.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Did you train the spam filter with the minimum number of e-mails that is required to activate your personal bayes classifier? Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to classify your incoming mail. Because it's been trained by the exact type of messages you receive, it is normally significantly more accurate at classifying spam than our general database. However, it can only do so once it's been properly trained, which is why we have to wait until it has seen 200 of each type of message before it is activated. Source: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html
  - etix 12y ago
    Even though some spam reaches my inbox (around 10 per day) but I can live with that since it stops an other hundred of them.
Derbasti 12y ago
I recently switched from Gmail to a mail provider called Posteo. They are a German mail provider much like Fastmail. Here is the neat thing: You can create a mail account and physically mail them paper money, without ever giving them your name or address. I wish more services would be doing that! In particular, I think we sorely need an anonymous way of paying money on the web, like physical money.
- etix 12y ago
  That's neat. Is it a German only website or do they have an English version available?
  - Derbasti 12y ago
    As far as I know, the website is in German only. The webmail interface can be switched to any language you want though. I guess you could sign up for it with the help of a German friend or maybe even Google Translate. Since payment is completely anonymous (or paypal), that won't be a problem. To quote from the FAQ: The webmail interface can be switched to other languages. However, the rest of the service is in German, i.e. sign-up, EULA, mail settings (forwarding, POP download, …), payment information etc. If you don't know any German, you might miss some things. Der Webmailer lässt sich auf andere Sprachen umstellen. Allerdings ist unser Angebot ansonsten komplett deutschsprachig, also Anmeldung, AGBs, Einstellungen rund um die Mailadresse (Weiterleitungen, POP-Sammeldienst,…), Zahlungshinweise usw. Wer gar kein Deutsch kann, geht da vielleicht etwas verloren.
    - etix 12y ago
      Thanks for the explanation.
chmars 12y ago
I moved from Gmail to Fastmail too but I am not that happy. And no, Fastmail does not protect you from the NSA since Australia is one of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes I moved from Gmail to Fastmail because my personal CRM's mail integration depends on Apple Mail. Gmail and Apple Mail do not go well together because Gmail is not IMAP (and Apple Mail has some issues too, even with the latest improvements). So with Fastmail's 'real' IMAP implementation, that issue was resolved. But Fastmail is lacking in comparison to Gmail in many areas, just two examples: Filtering: Spam, phishing etc. filtering cannot compare with Gmail. And for your own filters, you cannot create them directly from a mail and see immediately the result as you can in Gmail. You have to create your filters via the setting menu and have to manually check if they actually work … Security: I use 2-factor authentication as often as possible. Gmail has a very balanced approach to 2-factor authentication. Fastmail on the other hand does not allow you to use 2-factor authentication as a general security measure but only as an _additional_ login. And the configuration is not user-friendly. And since it is only an _additional_ login, you do not get (or need) backup codes or another backup way for your 2-factor authentication like SMS. Fastmail works fine as a very traditional mail provider but that is not far away from what hosting providers offer anyway. Your mileage might vary of course. If you are looking for a traditional mail provider with reliable IMAP support, Fastmail is certainly a great choice.
- cpach 12y ago
  The only trustworthy way to make sure that only the recipient is reading your message is to use end-to-end encryption. Which for e-mail means GnuPG.
- vsl 12y ago
  I moved from FastMail to Gmail a few years back because of poor spam filtering. Recently, Gmail was getting worse and worse at filtering spam for me. Plus IMAP was never reliable, so I switched back to FastMail last year and its spam filtering is now considerably better than Gmail's for me. FastMail's 2FA is indeed horrible, horrible thing, I wish they fixed that. Unfortunately, most of the development attention seems to be on Fastmail's webmail UI these days, something I use only very rarely. Still, I'm satisfied overall and like the setup much better than Gmail. I learned my lesson about using my own domain for email, though, to make any future migrations painless.
motters 12y ago
The lesson of Levison is that privacy assurances by email service providers are not necessarily trustworthy. Levison balked, but most wouldn't want to shut down their businesses. For now the best bet is either to self host (it's not that hard, especially for most folks reading this) or to use something like ProtonMail where the content can't be routinely exfiltrated and the provider can't give the inbox keys to any third party.
tagrun 12y ago
The GET part of the fastmail link in this blog post suggests this is a fastmail sponsored ad rather than honest opinions of an unbiased user: http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553 http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553 Also, I don't see how "Getting my data back under control" is achieved by shifting from a free service to a paid service; if you're serious about this, you should rather setup your own mail server on a spareable machine (Raspberry Pi etc. + an ordinary desktop mail client + Roundcube etc). And unless you use something like GPG, your email data is as secure as your corresponding mailbox.
- etix 12y ago
  Sorry but I wouldn't spend my time writing good reviews for a service I don't like just to get few dollars off my next subscription (which is going to be in 2 years anyway). And yes I've used my referral ID to link to their website. I don't see what's wrong with that since I mentioned it in the article and everyone is free to remove it and I'm pretty sure a lot of the readers did anyway.
ausjke 12y ago
I was going to signup with Fastmail. But the Terms is pretty strict, i.e. they can terminate you without notice, not a warning, also they don't really care about refunds, no matter whatever the reason is? I'm hesitated again. Is the hosting-your-own-mail-server the only way out? 8. TERMINATION The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments. The Service Provider may also terminate or suspend your account for inactivity, which is defined as failing to sign-in to the Service for an extended period of time, as determined by the Service Provider. The amount of time that the Service Provider currently considers as an "extended" period of time may be viewed from the Help link. Upon termination of the Service, your right to use the Service immediately ceases. The Service Provider shall have no obligation to maintain any content in your account or to forward any unread or unsent messages to you or any third party. 8.1. NO REFUNDS Any refunds are at the sole discretion of the Service Provider. The Service Provider may choose to make a refund at its sole unfettered discretion, however the Service Provider shall have no obligation to refund any portion of any payments, in the event that You wish to discontinue use of all or part of the Service, or in the event that your access is terminated by the Service Provider.

145 points by etix 12y ago

I'm currently reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, NO PLACE TO HIDE, and I have to say that a person should take much comfort in the fact that Fastmail is in Australia rather than the U.S. Australia is a member country in what the NSA terms the "Five Eyes" (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) These countries are thick as thieves when it comes to sharing signal intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

mariodiana 12y ago
s/should/shouldn't/ (Sorry for the typo.)
- teach 12y ago
  Can't you edit your comment? You ought to be able to go that within the first hour or so.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

stevenleeg 12y ago

I also recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and haven't looked back. The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, IMAP works great across all of my devices (which makes me more inclined to use OpenPGP when I can), and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com. They're also working on CardDAV and a web calendar (with CalDAV support), which will get me completely off of google once completed. The only thing I really miss is push notifications to my phone, but I've found that 15 minute fetching works well enough for the time being. Overall I've been really happy with it over the last 3 months. Definitely worth the $40/yr in my eyes.

etix 12y ago
IMAP IDLE works great, it's not as efficient as push on mobile because of the battery drain but at least you'll get instant notifications. That's what I use with K-9 on Android.
- danieldk 12y ago
  IDLE opens a TCP connection for every folder the client is IDLE-ing on. It surely drains the battery. I haven't used it, but NuevaSync provides Exchange ActiveSync for IMAP accounts.
chjj 12y ago
Just curious, does it support 2FA for the web login and api key (or device keys, whatever google calls them) access for IMAP?
- etix 12y ago
  For the webmail yes, definitely. For IMAP I don't think it would work, I personally use OTP when I do IMAP on an insecure device.
- nnx 12y ago
  It does. You can append your current 2FA TOTP code right after the password when your email client requests the password.
- chmars 12y ago
  No, Fastmail does not support actual 2FA. You can add alternative login methods, for example Google Authenticator, but you can always login with your password only, i.e., it is not like Gmail where you have to use 2FA for untrusted devices or logins from strange locations plus specific passwords for IMAP etc. And the configuration screen is a mess: http://i.imgur.com/NzW8o5h.png http://i.imgur.com/NzW8o5h.png http://i.imgur.com/dmoBbpy.png http://i.imgur.com/dmoBbpy.png
kunstmord 12y ago
Never heard of FastMail before this post, and I'm considering switching now. I have a personal mail server, but it was a PITA to set up, and it probably needs AWS SES (since everything I send mostly ends up in people's spam folders), and there's always the possibility of the VPS going offline for some time.

Aoyagi 12y ago

Something I think is another huge plus people don't mention: you get an actual, living person for technical and other support.

dueprocess 12y ago
Responsive customer support is such a huge thing, and yet so few companies do it right.
- etix 12y ago
  Probably because it's hard. Answering is easy, anyone can do it but making customers happy is way more difficult.
- mercer 12y ago
  Especially for something as crucial as email. I am probably still sticking with gmail for a while, but I can't imagine the horror of suddenly being locked out and not being able to get on the phone with anyone.
vadvi 12y ago
yes! a week ago I opened a support ticket because of a bug. 2 days later it was fixed. pretty amazing!
danieldk 12y ago
Yep. I recently filed a feature request and a bug report. Both were replied to and fixed within one or two days by one of their developers.

sandstrom 12y ago

I've been eying Fastmail for a while. It's really sad that they won't offer Icelandic-only hosting, it would give some additional comfort. But perhaps that will change?

etix 12y ago
It would be a wise choice. I really hope they'll do it too.
mercer 12y ago
Is there any good reason why they haven't done this already? It seems to me privacy is a major selling point, especially after the Snowden revelations.
- dueprocess 12y ago
  It's likely the NSA reads your Fastmail at the breakfast table. Their servers are on US soil. It would take some wicked mental gymnastics to rationalize that fact away.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  Basically, we just don't have the hardware in Iceland to support both running a full replica of everything from New York and also running production traffic in Iceland. A fair bit of that is my personal fault for not pushing the extraction from Opera's racks into our own separate racks. We've been paying for capacity in Iceland for 3 months that we're not using yet.
  - etix 12y ago
    Can we expect Fastmail to run a complete production traffic replica in Iceland in the future? I would gladly pay up to 1.5x the price for having my primary storage there instead of the US.

nilkn 12y ago

I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.

vosper 12y ago
I think the tabs are great. With little or no training they're right 99% of the time and are a very effective way of separating "real email" - friends, colleagues, family - from the automated stuff that's not spam but which I also don't care about as much.
- nilkn 12y ago
  The tabs are great for mobile, where I can use them to control which emails generate push notifications. On the web, though, the entire new Gmail interface in general is so much less efficient at conveying information that I find that any categorization provided by the tabs is just not a big enough of a positive to justify using that interface.
lcnmrn 12y ago
You can disable Hangouts (chat), the top tabs and G+ from the standard interface too. I'm using this with Mail Notifr app along with two Gmail accounts. I get instant notifications and the web interface loads in an instant for each email inbox. This way I avoid crappy email clients.

xkarga00 12y ago

I have been looking for a free e-mail provider that takes privacy seriously. Isn't there anyone out there?

DanBC 12y ago
What's your privacy risk assessment?
- xkarga00 12y ago
  I just don't want advertising companies or the NSA sniffing around my personal communications. It has to be private as private should be.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    > It has to be private as private should be. But you also don't want to pay any money for it?
    - xkarga00 12y ago
      No. Do you believe that by paying money your privacy is guaranteed? Even Fastmail's privacy is doubtful regarding its non-US clients -which would be my case if i used it.
      - ForHackernews 12y ago
        Ok, but why would anyone set up and run an extremely privacy-hardened service for you, for free?
        xkarga00 12y ago
        Probably because i am not the only one who would use it.
        12y ago

bratsche 12y ago

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I like it so far. For me, scanning my email to show me ads didn't really bother me that much. But the thing that I really like with Fastmail is that my outbound email alias works the way I want. The university I graduated from gives us email aliases for life, and I prefer to use my university alias instead of my Gmail address. It obviously works fine when I receive mail, but when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever). And so for a lot of people, when they would add me to their address books they'd end up adding my gmail address because that's how it was presented to them. With Fastmail everyone just sees my jhu.edu address as I prefer.

spindritf 12y ago
when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever) You can configure Gmail to use your university's SMTP server and then Gmail is simply an e-mail client. They steer you away from that option but it's available.
- _pius 12y ago
  If that's true, would love to see some documentation for it.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another...
    - _pius 12y ago
      Nice, thanks.

mercer 12y ago

I've been looking into doing this, so this post came at a good time. Especially the UI/keyboard shortcuts appeal to me, as that was the main reason I stuck with google over other solutions.

_mikz 12y ago

80k emails per ... a day? month? edit: or it might be accounts?

etix 12y ago
Total. Article updated.

braveheart1723 12y ago

any offers / coupons / deals for hackernews readers ?

_mikz 12y ago

What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues. If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?

etix 12y ago
Beside the non-standard way of managing folders (duplicate emails caused by labels) I find it slow compared to others.
brongondwana 12y ago
FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server) And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in size, and big slower disk for the rest. The index metadata is also on the SSDs, so most common usage patterns can be served entirely from SSD. Those SSDs are a RAID1 pair of Intel DC3700 drives, which are enterprise drives and very fast even for SSDs. We dropped a chunk of money on moving to this setup, and it's made both IMAP and regular web usage very nice. So basically, we're optimised for IMAP and we're optimised for speed. Every server has local storage, and the local storage is fast. It gives quite predictable performance, and very fast performance. That's my story as both the author/maintainer of our IMAP server, and the designer of the server architecture. That's not saying that GMail is awful, just IMAP isn't so much their focus, and they don't optimise for it.
- emiunet 12y ago
  I am curious what sort of storage solution Google is using to compare to this one..
  - brongondwana 12y ago
    I believe it's based on BigTable. There doesn't seem to be a published article that I can find on the exact internals, so I'm basing it off discussions on the protocol mailing lists.

personZ 12y ago

I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.

davidbarker 12y ago
Suspicious, how so? I've been using Fastmail for a few months and highly recommend it. My initial thought RE: the number of comments would be that many of the people who've switched to Fastmail are vocal in their support because they had specific reasons to switch.
etix 12y ago
I'm not related to Fastmail in any way, you can verify that easily. I'm just a simple but happy customer who likes to share when he think that it might be of interest to others.
- whichdan 12y ago
  Same here. I've been with them since 2007 and they've made huge strides, especially with the recent interface overhaul.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  I am related with FastMail (also pretty easily verifyable) - and we love how popular we are on HN. We do get kind of surprised at how often people post about loving us as well, but we're not complaining (I'm sitting on my laptop during the break at my choir rehearsal today and reading through this thread to see if there are any questions I can answer. I'm doing this instead of going to get a coffee... which now that I think about it must mean I'm insane, because I'm going to need coffee to survive the next set of rehearsals. Madness. If anyone at Melbourne wants to come to an awesome concert next weekend, email me or something)
gress 12y ago
I find it suspicious that every time a post that isn't supportive of Google is submitted, someone attempts to undermine it with innuendo.

ender7 12y ago

There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great: "Getting my data back under control In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data." If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1]. It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2]. [1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic. [2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.

ForHackernews 12y ago
There's two types of "data under your control" at play here. The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?). The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'm almost certainly not qualified to sysadmin a machine that needs to be secure against the NSA.
- kylec 12y ago
  You probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    How? Fastmail is...another mail provider. Paying for email service might be a good idea for a lot of reasons, but people have an extremely absurd sense that they're "fighting the man". You know - by paying in US dollars, to a US company, using US banks.... EDIT: Something I did just see is that Fastmail gives you sieve scripting. Since going from hosting my own inbound email to Gmail, I've really missed having a good email sorting language.

sivers 12y ago

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to. Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day. The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused. Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless. Choose the Business email option - https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html - if you want them to keep an automatic archive of the emails you download via POP. When I signed up under the Personal Email option I found they didn't have this archive option, but they switched me over to the business account on request. It's so worth the measly $15/year, considering the importance a good email/webmail experience, and how much it affects your every-day life. I've helped a few friends switch over, and they've all been thrilled with it.

ikusalic 12y ago
I have the same experience. I find the interface just beautiful and pleasure to use. The same is true when using it from phone. One of the best tool-related decisions I ever did.
eknkc 12y ago
Same here! Have been using fastmail for ~6 months now. I was hesitant, thought I'd miss push mail on iOS but it has been just fine. Also, there are some iOS mail clients that can push on FastMail (http://mymail.my.com http://mymail.my.com) I always hated Gmail's slow/weird IMAP behavior. Switched to Office365 at some point. Exchange was great but so freaking slow. FastMail has standard, fast IMAP. I also use the included DNS server for a couple of domains that had been lying around and the static file host for some http placeholder pages and stuff. I'd never go back to Google at this point.
- chmars 12y ago
  Fastmail seems to support IMAP Idle only. And IMAP Idle is not an option for mobile devices since the mail client has to keep the connection open all the time, so there goes your battery …

phaed 12y ago

ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.

erikb 12y ago
Just FYI, they don't have the main feature I am using GMail for: priority inbox. Or at least I didn't find it in their feature lists.

Morgawr 12y ago

The idea of privacy with email is, unfortunately, very ephemeral. As seen in other articles also submitted to hn in the past, even if you stop using Gmail, Google will still have a very huge chunk of your data to track simply because the vast majority of the people you communicate with have a Gmail account. There is no easy/apparent way out.

ronaldx 12y ago
This is not a good argument for using or staying with Gmail. In fact, writing this another way potentially identifies a more compelling reason to leave: By using Gmail, you are incrementally harming the privacy of everyone you communicate with.

djokkataja 12y ago

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail about a year ago after using exclusively Gmail for email since 2007. I've been very happy with Fastmail since then. Primarily I was bothered by getting the service for "free" from Google--it's not free for them to provide it (no such thing as a free lunch), which means they have to find ways to monetize my personal communications with others without me directly paying them. Obviously there are the ads, but then there's the matter of having to stay up to date on their privacy policies... long story short, Google creeps me out a little, and I'd rather pay a bit of money to feel like I'm not a host for some kind of sprawling global parasite. Anyway, pros: - The Fastmail web interface is fast. I've never seen it take longer to load than 1 second on any computer or internet connection; it's noticeably faster to load up the entire interface than Gmail. - Fastmail also uses basically the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail (j/k to go up and down, x to select, # to delete, y to archive, z to undo, r to reply, f to forward, a to reply-all, ctrl-enter to send--works from any field in fastmail rather than just the body or title as in gmail, which is handy for forwarding things). - Sometimes sending/opening messages in Gmail was kind of slow; sending messages from Fastmail has always been virtually instantaneous, and opening them is definitely instantaneous. I think Fastmail preloads email content into the client so that it only has to request images from the server, because it definitely opens email too quickly to have done a round trip to the server to get the email contents. If you press 'o' to open an email, it will be open by the time your 'o' key comes back up. - Fastmail can help with setting up DNS for emails for custom domains. - Fastmail has this "Pin" feature that lets you pin emails so that they stick to the top of whatever folder they're in. I always wanted something like this in Gmail (like if starred messages stuck to the top or something). I think there's an option to toggle whether or not they float to the top if you're not a fan. Anyway, I'm not sure that having this feature has actually been beneficial to me in any way, but I like it a lot. Cons: - The Fastmail interface is not as pretty as the Gmail interface. There is no option to get a big, beautiful background picture, and the interface doesn't really have space for it anyway. This bothered me a little at first, but these days I don't care... if I'm gazing longingly at the mountains in the background picture of my email, I'm being extraordinarily unproductive. - Fastmail's auto-complete when you're typing in the recipient list does not keep track of who you send to most frequently and push them automatically to the top of the list. This still bothers me sometimes. - Fastmail's settings pages are a little confusing. There are a couple different ways to get to them, and it can be a little tricky to figure out where you're supposed to find something. I've never been a fan of the way settings are organized in any email client, though... Gmail and Outlook have settings pages that aren't as terrible these days; Fastmail's settings are a little less refined. On the other hand, it seems like you can do a lot more with the settings in Fastmail (so this is a bit of a pro, not strictly a con). - Fastmail has a folder system with nesting like Outlook. I don't think this is really a bad thing; I like the concept of Gmail's labels a lot, but I never found it to be significantly more useful than folders. What sucks about Fastmail's implementation is that to create folders or rearrange them, you have to enter this special folder management menu. Then to create a folder, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and type the new name, and if you want it to be at the top, then you have to drag it up past all of the other folders, and there seems to be a max speed on how quickly you can drag it up, and it starts arbitrarily selecting the text as you're dragging and sometimes gets a little janky as you get to the top. Definitely my least favorite part of the interface. Ambiguous: - Not strictly a pro or a con in my opinion: there is no chat interface built-in (actually I'm not certain about that, there might be some option to enable chat and put in chat credentials, etc. but I haven't looked for it). Overall I think this has been very good for getting me in and out of my inbox very quickly and productively without any risk of distraction. I actually stopped using any form of chat until more recently when I needed it for work, and I think my quality of life was improved for it, but I know that for many people chat is an important part of communicating. But I haven't missed it in my webmail one bit. Wow, that was a lot more than I expected to write! Anyway, to sum up, from my perspective as a web developer: - Fastmail is faster and contributes better to getting things done, in my experience (worth the $60/yr for that reason alone) - Fastmail has some nice options if you're setting up email inboxes for yourself for custom domains. I don't know if I would recommend it yet as a mail option for clients since it's a little less polished than Gmail and some of the settings options are a good deal more technical. - Fastmail is a nice gateway drug to freeing yourself from the idea that Gmail is the be-all-end-all of email. Still waiting for someone more productive than myself to combine webmail, Trello, and Google Calendar into a glorious productivity app that ushers in a new era for humanity.

plg 12y ago

"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer" This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer. With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product. With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information. I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction. Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly. Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.

bigtones 12y ago
Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Fastmail also has PFS: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-forward-secrecy-with-httpstls-connections/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...
- dan1234 12y ago
  FastMail also claims PFS support http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-forward-secrecy-with-httpstls-connections/ http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...

United857 12y ago

Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge. If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.

Semaphor 12y ago

Just in case people are missing things like the priority inbox I'd like to mention Sanebox [0]. In my opinion they are better than what google does plus they offer more features (for a price). [0] https://www.sanebox.com/ https://www.sanebox.com/

tpeng 12y ago

Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.

psychometry 12y ago
As someone who actually switched from Fastmail TO Gmail several years ago, this definitely resonates. "Fastmail" is not easily recognized by most people and becomes especially unclear if you're reciting your email address over the phone. Fastmail doesn't even own fastmail.com! They do have many domains available [1] but none are that great. [1] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html
joedavison 12y ago
They have one really great domain: sent.com I have never had a problem communicating it.
zokier 12y ago
You should be using your own domains regardless of who is your email provider. That way switching email provider is only one MX record change away if the need ever arises.

kretor 12y ago

The spacing around "i"s is too much.

philwelch 12y ago

The only downside I've seen switching from Gmail to Fastmail is that Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good. But I can live with it.

ausjke 12y ago

After reading this I plan to switch to fastmail as well. Thanks for sharing the good stuff!

songgao 12y ago

I made up my decision and finally made the switch this evening, after reading this post. So far I'm pretty happy about it. Thanks etix! Several things I'd like to share here: 1. XMPP Fastmail actually comes with a XMPP server. This is a big bonus feature that I didn't expect. It can also keep chat logs in an IMAP folder named 'chat'. Read more here: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html 2. External Account If you want to manage other email accounts (receive emails from them), Fastmail seems only support POP (in contrast to Gmail supporting both POP and IMAP). Also, unlike Gmail which checks email with a dynamic frequency based on how many emails you receive at the time, Fastmail uses a fixed interval for checking emails from external account. The minimum interval you can set is 1 hour. I couldn't find a way to manually trigger a POP check in Fastmail either. One hour is a bit too long for me, but fortunately I adapted to a better way than using external account. I simply set an auto-redirect rule in my other email accounts (e.g. my school uses MS Exchange) and that actually results in instant delivery of emails from external account. I guess this is the right way to handle the problem (other than making your primary email service pull emails from external account like what I did in Gmail before).

etix 12y ago
Glad you like it as much as I do. 1. I did not mention the XMPP server primarily because I already use another server but it's always a welcome addition indeed. 2. I've read somewhere (can't remember where though) that when you're logged in the frequency is automatically increased and you can force a retrieval manually by using the refresh button. Maybe @brongondwana can comment on this matter.

iancarroll 12y ago

Just moved my domain over to Fastmail. I can live with $10 per three months.

napoleond 12y ago

The coolest thing about Fastmail is a feature I didn't expect before making the switch: Fastmail is actually faster than Gmail. IMAP is quicker, webmail loads quicker, everything is just snappier. I still use Google mail for a lot of stuff (and actually only have one inbox at Fastmail currently) but I have been extremely impressed with Fastmail so far.

YooLi 12y ago

I moved to from Gmail to Fastmail last April, but this April, I moved back to Gmail. I have an email address (on my own domain) that I've used since the late 90's. It's all over the Internet in newsgroup archives, forums, etc. from before anyone was hiding emails from spam scrapers. Consequently I get several hundred spam per day. The FM spam filtering is no where near as good as G filtering. I had to manually flag as spam a couple dozen mails every day as well and go through the spam filter and pick out the false positives. I have no problems with G's spam filtering. The other problem with FM is administering multiple accounts on my domain. While it true it's only something I need to do once, as has been mentioned already, the settings/administration leaves much to be desired. Overall, using Gmail is just more pleasant to me, enough so that it outweighs the concerns (read: Google being creepy) that caused me to leave last April.

danieldk 12y ago
Did you train the spam filter with the minimum number of e-mails that is required to activate your personal bayes classifier? Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to classify your incoming mail. Because it's been trained by the exact type of messages you receive, it is normally significantly more accurate at classifying spam than our general database. However, it can only do so once it's been properly trained, which is why we have to wait until it has seen 200 of each type of message before it is activated. Source: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html
- etix 12y ago
  Even though some spam reaches my inbox (around 10 per day) but I can live with that since it stops an other hundred of them.

Derbasti 12y ago

I recently switched from Gmail to a mail provider called Posteo. They are a German mail provider much like Fastmail. Here is the neat thing: You can create a mail account and physically mail them paper money, without ever giving them your name or address. I wish more services would be doing that! In particular, I think we sorely need an anonymous way of paying money on the web, like physical money.

etix 12y ago
That's neat. Is it a German only website or do they have an English version available?
- Derbasti 12y ago
  As far as I know, the website is in German only. The webmail interface can be switched to any language you want though. I guess you could sign up for it with the help of a German friend or maybe even Google Translate. Since payment is completely anonymous (or paypal), that won't be a problem. To quote from the FAQ: The webmail interface can be switched to other languages. However, the rest of the service is in German, i.e. sign-up, EULA, mail settings (forwarding, POP download, …), payment information etc. If you don't know any German, you might miss some things. Der Webmailer lässt sich auf andere Sprachen umstellen. Allerdings ist unser Angebot ansonsten komplett deutschsprachig, also Anmeldung, AGBs, Einstellungen rund um die Mailadresse (Weiterleitungen, POP-Sammeldienst,…), Zahlungshinweise usw. Wer gar kein Deutsch kann, geht da vielleicht etwas verloren.
  - etix 12y ago
    Thanks for the explanation.

chmars 12y ago

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail too but I am not that happy. And no, Fastmail does not protect you from the NSA since Australia is one of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes I moved from Gmail to Fastmail because my personal CRM's mail integration depends on Apple Mail. Gmail and Apple Mail do not go well together because Gmail is not IMAP (and Apple Mail has some issues too, even with the latest improvements). So with Fastmail's 'real' IMAP implementation, that issue was resolved. But Fastmail is lacking in comparison to Gmail in many areas, just two examples: Filtering: Spam, phishing etc. filtering cannot compare with Gmail. And for your own filters, you cannot create them directly from a mail and see immediately the result as you can in Gmail. You have to create your filters via the setting menu and have to manually check if they actually work … Security: I use 2-factor authentication as often as possible. Gmail has a very balanced approach to 2-factor authentication. Fastmail on the other hand does not allow you to use 2-factor authentication as a general security measure but only as an _additional_ login. And the configuration is not user-friendly. And since it is only an _additional_ login, you do not get (or need) backup codes or another backup way for your 2-factor authentication like SMS. Fastmail works fine as a very traditional mail provider but that is not far away from what hosting providers offer anyway. Your mileage might vary of course. If you are looking for a traditional mail provider with reliable IMAP support, Fastmail is certainly a great choice.

cpach 12y ago
The only trustworthy way to make sure that only the recipient is reading your message is to use end-to-end encryption. Which for e-mail means GnuPG.
vsl 12y ago
I moved from FastMail to Gmail a few years back because of poor spam filtering. Recently, Gmail was getting worse and worse at filtering spam for me. Plus IMAP was never reliable, so I switched back to FastMail last year and its spam filtering is now considerably better than Gmail's for me. FastMail's 2FA is indeed horrible, horrible thing, I wish they fixed that. Unfortunately, most of the development attention seems to be on Fastmail's webmail UI these days, something I use only very rarely. Still, I'm satisfied overall and like the setup much better than Gmail. I learned my lesson about using my own domain for email, though, to make any future migrations painless.

motters 12y ago

The lesson of Levison is that privacy assurances by email service providers are not necessarily trustworthy. Levison balked, but most wouldn't want to shut down their businesses. For now the best bet is either to self host (it's not that hard, especially for most folks reading this) or to use something like ProtonMail where the content can't be routinely exfiltrated and the provider can't give the inbox keys to any third party.

tagrun 12y ago

The GET part of the fastmail link in this blog post suggests this is a fastmail sponsored ad rather than honest opinions of an unbiased user: http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553 http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553 Also, I don't see how "Getting my data back under control" is achieved by shifting from a free service to a paid service; if you're serious about this, you should rather setup your own mail server on a spareable machine (Raspberry Pi etc. + an ordinary desktop mail client + Roundcube etc). And unless you use something like GPG, your email data is as secure as your corresponding mailbox.

etix 12y ago
Sorry but I wouldn't spend my time writing good reviews for a service I don't like just to get few dollars off my next subscription (which is going to be in 2 years anyway). And yes I've used my referral ID to link to their website. I don't see what's wrong with that since I mentioned it in the article and everyone is free to remove it and I'm pretty sure a lot of the readers did anyway.

ausjke 12y ago

I was going to signup with Fastmail. But the Terms is pretty strict, i.e. they can terminate you without notice, not a warning, also they don't really care about refunds, no matter whatever the reason is? I'm hesitated again. Is the hosting-your-own-mail-server the only way out? 8. TERMINATION The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments. The Service Provider may also terminate or suspend your account for inactivity, which is defined as failing to sign-in to the Service for an extended period of time, as determined by the Service Provider. The amount of time that the Service Provider currently considers as an "extended" period of time may be viewed from the Help link. Upon termination of the Service, your right to use the Service immediately ceases. The Service Provider shall have no obligation to maintain any content in your account or to forward any unread or unsent messages to you or any third party. 8.1. NO REFUNDS Any refunds are at the sole discretion of the Service Provider. The Service Provider may choose to make a refund at its sole unfettered discretion, however the Service Provider shall have no obligation to refund any portion of any payments, in the event that You wish to discontinue use of all or part of the Service, or in the event that your access is terminated by the Service Provider.