5 ms·

From Fastmail back to Gmail

34 points by pvinis 12y ago

pan69 12y ago
I would switch to Fastmail in a heartbeat if they let me pay for storage (say in 5 gig intervals) and let me mount as many domains and create as many inbox as I want. Other than that, I see no point in paying for email. Sorry. I'm a snob.
- ldite 12y ago
  I pay for email because it's the keystone to my online 'identity' - pretty much the single point of failure for recovering all sorts of accounts, and the thing in the way of theft of many accounts. Technical merits aside, by using a small but well run non-gmail provider for a mere £25 pa I get (i) near instantaneous tech support in my time zone, from people who know more about email & admin than I do. They even have a phone number. (ii) out of the monoculture, thus vastly diminished risk from various canned account theft problems
  - toothbrush 12y ago
    Would you mind sharing who you use as a provider?
    - ldite 12y ago
      https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ - having looked, it turns out they don't have a telephone number, but as all my support emails have been answered within minutes I'd never felt the need :)
- evook 12y ago
  I don't see the problem to rent a small server and host open xchange, zimbra or something similiar yourself? Even postfix isn't that hard to configure and will likely run forever. The same goes for the author. I don't get how gmail is even considered as a mail provider for more than a spam oder mandatory account. The list of better and serious mail providers is tremendous. For my family and me, I am hosting a small exchange server, with a synchronous replica in a datacenter, at home. It's safe, has nearly unlimited disk space and I know where my backups are.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Postfix will run forever, but other hosts won't accept your emails forever unless you keep up with the latest spam techniques (DANE nowadays, isn't it?) Personally, I just use a free smarthost, but that loses some of the privacy advantages.
    - evook 12y ago
      Personally I don't use Postfix, I am going with Zimbra. Postfix was just an example. As well as DANE would require exactly 4 commands to be enabled. For myself I am going with a major commercial antispam solution, which is hosted in two of our datacenters. Since I am working with the developers and admins on regular basis there's no reason not to trust them.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Antispam and security updates are a pain. I ran exim in a colo for years, including handing out free accounts to friends (rookie mistake, yes), and eventually decided to stop bothering after it hit some critical problem while I was on holiday.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    Because then I have to manage that server. I'm suddenly responsible for security, rebooting if there's an outage, keeping things up-to-date, etc. I've had both a small personal Linux server (for web hosting) and Fastmail (for everything else) for several years, and I've easily spent 2-3 times the cost of my Fastmail account in time spent fiddling with my web server over that time period.
cssmoo 12y ago
I use GMail. However remember if you pay for it via Apps, the terms are different so that is worth bearing in mind.
- brohoolio 12y ago
  Google Apps for work is $50 per account per year. The terms of service for apps for work protects your privacy.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
mkpankov 12y ago
I have 4 virtual domains bound to same account. Why isn't it an option? You can filter stuff based on "To:" address to put it in different "Inbox" folders. And storage usage is more optimal since you don't pay for a lot of nearly-empty inboxes.
- lazyjones 12y ago
  Exactly, I don't really see the problem in the article. I have a $40/year (15GB) account and apart from my fastmail and my forwarded pobox.com address, I also receive mail for and host DNS records and web pages for 2 other virtual domains. Also, I'm very happy with spam filtering and Fastmail's service quality (they even post on Twitter things like 'mail is slow currently, investigating...').
  - mkpankov 12y ago
    Well, I can't say I'm happy with spam filtering - I regularly get some stupid spam to the inbox (not even something smart enough to bypass the filters, IMO).
    - corobo 12y ago
      I'm at a point with Gmail where I'd be happy that I'm getting a bit of spam in the inbox. Unfortunately I'm starting to see a lot of false positives recently. I was actually looking to move out of Gmail myself
    - lazyjones 12y ago
      I get some spam too (which passes both pobox.com's and fastmail's filtering), but it's much less than I previously had with gmail and I assume that spam has become more elaborate these days. Also, with gmail I had more false positives.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    Not to mention a federation-friendly XMPP server that supports external domains via SRV records. For this and the features you list, I've also been a very happy FastMail user for the past few years and could never return to the walled garden that is Google.
brohoolio 12y ago
Ahhhh the cost of privacy.
icebraining 12y ago
Without arguing against OP's decision, IFTTT can be wired with any email account, using the Email channel, you just need to set up a rule to forward the emails to their address.
moystard 12y ago
In terms of privacy, the issue is that most people out there use GMail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, so even if you self-host or use a privacy aware service, when you'll send emails to others, or receive them, your privacy won't be fully respected anyway...
scrrr 12y ago
Related to this, especially with regard to privacy, I recommend everyone to check out the LEAP project and also this list of related projects: https://leap.se/email#related-projects https://leap.se/email#related-projects
ansgri 12y ago
For me the killer feature of fastmail is their Calendar. Having recently used Google Calendar I was astonished how totally unusable it is compared to fastmail's. I'd be glad to hear what calendar do you use, what are considered good nowadays.
- x0x0 12y ago
  What did you find better? Thanks!
  - ansgri 12y ago
    * less context switches. In fastmail you do everything in popup windows where in Google you sometimes have to go to a separate task window. * very easy to modify individual occurrences of repeating tasks. Just drag or resize, it'll detach automatically. * the week view is sliding, ie you can view events from Wednesday to Wednesday. * much less clutter in UI and interactions overall.
Uberphallus 12y ago
Looks like it's a decision made for very personal reasons, but some of the issues are not really issues. > As of this writing, I'm up to 4 accounts. They're not all yours, they're your family members'. And given the fact that you have to pay for them, they probably won't really need Fastmail, they can use Gmail and you set up aliases/forwards for their addresses. > FastMail's spam filtering is good, but it's not as good as Google's. My experience is the opposite, somehow. I very rarely get spam in Fastmail, and 99% of the time it falls into spam folders (even having *@myuser.fastmail.fm wildcard, catchall addresses!). I get very few false positives, too. It might be not as heavily targeted by spammers. Meanwhile I get 10-30 a day in Gmail, with roughly 20% of false positives, with so many false positives that I had to switch my email account to Fastmail on certain websites because I missed important emails (like notices of cancelled flight reservations, Amazon refunds, work reminders). It doesn't matter how many times I mark a sender's email as non-spam, Gmail thinks it knows better. > Mailbox being compatible with only Gmail and iCloud accounts. Well, duh. I'm good with Aquamail, mutt and the web client, as Fastmail rules do all the filtering I care about. I wanted to test Google Inbox and Dropbox Mailbox, so I set a forward to my Gmail address. They didn't do anything interesting to me, so I disabled it again, but if you want to use them, you totally can. I have to say, though, that Fastmail Android app is sluggish as hell and, last time I checked, it didn't cache messages (deal breaker for me, I travel a lot and want to have boarding passes and reservations handy). > IFTTT integration Forward to Gmail, enjoy IFTTT.
tdkl 12y ago
I've been looking at Fastmail when switching from Gmail this year, but the lack of flexibility in prices vs. storage size turned me off. All I wanted was a fast IMAP host, with 5-10GB of storage, DAV for calendar and contacts and a simple fast web interface. After some testing, I've found ServerMX [1]. They're EU based (.nl, .de infrastructure) [2], have SOGo for DAV and webmail (offers full size contact pictures, which is really neat for mobile phones), IMAP sync is instant and seamless over all clients (Aquamail on Android, eM Client on Windows desktop, SOGo on webmail) and all that for merely 18€ per year. Their plans are well considered IMHO if you don't need much space [3]. Sorry if this feels like an ad, but I've been more then happy with their service and like to recommend it to people. They have a 30 day free trial to test the service. [1] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html [2] http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html [3] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy
- detaro 12y ago
  While we are recommending mail hosts, http://www.mailbox.org http://www.mailbox.org also is nice. From Germany, privacy-minded (you can have totally anonymous accounts, they encrypt everything with your PGP-key as soon as it arrives, ...), run by people who are quite well-known when it comes to mail servers (author of books on postfix, running conferences, ... so they hopefully know what they are doing) Webinterface is ok, but not perfect.
  - msh 12y ago
    They even offer exchange push sync.
  - tdkl 12y ago
    Oh yeah, I considered mailbox.org too, but was a bit more expensive for the plan with ActiveSync (for mobile), but major argument was that I've found IMAP sync faster (basically instant) then Exchange push in my testing.
    - detaro 12y ago
jakobegger 12y ago
I agree that Fastmail's default spam filter settings are a bit to lenient, I also got around 3 spams a day. After increasing the spam settings I get about 1 spam a week, which is acceptable. There are a few reasons why I'd never switch back to gmail: 1) Reliability: Gmail sometimes had issues with Apple Mail where messages would show up twice, etc. Since switching to Fastmail I had no more problems. 2) Customer support. I once had an issue where all my mail disappeared from my inbox in Gmail. There was noone I could contact, all I found was a user forum with other people complaining about the problem. I never got my email back from the archive to the inbox. When you have a problem with Fastmail, or can't find what you are looking for in the docs, just contact customer support. 3) Backup: Fastmail allows you to restore email from backup (for a limited time). Really nice when you accidentally delete an email. 4) Web interface. I assume that's a matter of taste, but I really prefer Fastmail. 5) Folders instead of labels. I don't like Gmail's labels, and I'm glad Fastmail has proper folders.
- rtpg 12y ago
  what's the difference between gmail's labels and fastmail folders?
  - favadi 12y ago
    A mail can be in multiple labels, but can only in one folder (copy doesn't count).
- Svip 12y ago
  If I may add, Gmail has removed the feature to send from other email addresses. Or rather, they now require you to have an SMTP server to send from other email addresses. Fortunately, the change has not been retroactive, so all my previous addresses were still available, but I couldn't really set up new ones. Which became a deal breaker. That - and the fact that I been looking for something not Gmail for a long time - made me switch to Fastmail. I must say, my experience with Gmail's spam filter has been the reverse. There are a lot of false positives in my Gmail's spam folder. But I am new to Fastmail, so maybe it'll bother me at some point.
- 12y ago
nly 12y ago
I think good old POP and mailbox discipline needs to make a come back... at least for Average Joe users. I have a similar Fastmail setup to the OP. My parents get $10 Lite accounts and I set them up to fetch all their mail via POP, so their mailbox never gets full. I also downgraded my own account from Enhanced ($40) to Full ($20) some time ago after I used Fastmails superior web interface and search to finally prune my inbox (I imported something like 10,000 unread emails from Gmail). All this is less than the cost of one GApps user. I have all my important mail from the last 8 years or so and I'm only using something like ~500MB.
- chkuendig 12y ago
  he might (like me) still have a grandfathered-in account which is free (with ads) for up to 10 users. [edit: parent edited complete comment]
  - tallanvor 12y ago
    Originally they allowed more than 10 users... My account lets me have up to 200 users.
  - nly 12y ago
    Sorry about the edit... I decided refuting the arithmetic was a fairly blunt way to deal with the debate. I moved from an older (50 user) free GApps account to Fastmail. If I had been paying I would have saved $150/year, but just saving my time, and avoiding the now shitty experience of managing my mail via Gmail, was well worth the cost to me. Early on Gmails web interface was a revelation, now it's just below standard... and any momentum from their multi-GB storage giveaway doesn't cut it anymore. I think the final nail was one of principle... Google just aren't interested in offering premium personal mail services, like own-domain hosting to families or individuals. Using free GApps made me feel like an unwanted freeloader... a second-class citizen.
antihero 12y ago
I'd switch back to Gmail if I could somehow change my Google account to incorporate my real e-mail (and pay), as opposed to having a separate Google Apps for Domains account for e-mail that was separate from my real e-mail and is on my old Gmail address. Does anyone know if this is remotely possible?
- reustle 12y ago
  I simply stopped using my old gmail account. Switching email addresses is a pain, absolutely, but at least leaving gmail is as easy as an MX record change in the future.
  - antihero 12y ago
    Yeah but what about things like App purchases, calendar, Drive, etc?
stefanve 12y ago
To each there own I guess. I have been a happy fastmail user for many years, I get some spam maybe 1 or 2 mails per month and I just use the default spam settings. Seems like a personal choice not a tech or feature driven decision. Not sure why this is on the front page
bad_user 12y ago
He mentions the availability of Mailbox as a useful third-party app. However the fact that Mailbox only works with proprietary services, being restricted to GMail and iCloud, should send red flags, because this app is not provided by Google, but by Dropbox and personally I'm seeing a conflict of interest and given that it isn't based on standards, you can bet that it won't last. I also tried it out and I found it half-baked. This point was weird. It's because of Google's poor support for standards that I'm considering ditching Google Apps. Because GMail and Google Calendar are all fine only as long as you're using the official apps.
bismark 12y ago
I'm a happy Fastmail user but one thing I wish they would bring over from Gmail is SASL OAuth. I understand it's still in a draft extension but any improvement to the state of email authentication would be great (restricting read/write access based on IMAP folder on a token by token basis would be even better). The idea of handing out my email credentials in plain text to email SaaS products just gives me the willies.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  We're looking at making this easier, but you can already set up a separate login token for the individual SaaS products - just create a regular password alternative login with something from pwgen or your favourite line noise source. https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html You can then revoke the individual token. Per-folder permissions isn't something on our radar yet. You could hack it up with a family/business and separate accounts with folder sharing, but it costs money and is a right pain to administrate.
tiatia 12y ago
I wanted to leave google due to privacy concerns. Fastmail is based in Australia - not an option. I did not want anything EU based either. Got a Proton mail account but without IMAP, what is it good for? An email service that is based in Switzerland and that you can use with you own domain: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging
edwinyzh 12y ago
Just in case it's relevant, I'm developing http://ownmycopy.com http://ownmycopy.com for cloud-to-PC backup, aiming at for backing up cloud-only services.
jorams 12y ago
I always wonder what people do with their email address to receive that much spam. I have a Fastmail account with a catch-all that receives all mail sent to a domain, and I rarely receive spam. I'm not exactly careful spreading my email address around either. I have noticed that almost all spam I do receive is sent to an address I posted here on HN, so perhaps I just haven't posted any addresses on other sites that are crawled by spammers a lot?
bryanlarsen 12y ago
3 to 5 false spam negatives a day is better than the 1 false positive a week that I get with Gmail, IMO.
hmans 12y ago
tl;dr author switches back to Gmail because it's convenient. I wish the article would simply say that.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
A good article but I just made the opposite decision. I recently switched to using GMail as a catch all email that I check about twice a day and use FastMail with my own domain for email from people close to me. It is not as much an issue of privacy as wanting to slow down the information firehose from Google, Twitter, G+, etc. I would like to reduce the surface area of marketing aimed at me.
manuelmagic 12y ago
Regarding space upgrade, what you write is not true: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a6841cb https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a68... "Purchasing extra space. Rather than upgrade to the next plan, it's possible to just purchase extra mail or file storage. This is charged at: Lite: 100MB for $5 USD/year Full: 500MB for $5 USD/year Enhanced/Premier: 1GB for $5 USD/year"

34 points by pvinis 12y ago

pan69 12y ago

I would switch to Fastmail in a heartbeat if they let me pay for storage (say in 5 gig intervals) and let me mount as many domains and create as many inbox as I want. Other than that, I see no point in paying for email. Sorry. I'm a snob.

ldite 12y ago
I pay for email because it's the keystone to my online 'identity' - pretty much the single point of failure for recovering all sorts of accounts, and the thing in the way of theft of many accounts. Technical merits aside, by using a small but well run non-gmail provider for a mere £25 pa I get (i) near instantaneous tech support in my time zone, from people who know more about email & admin than I do. They even have a phone number. (ii) out of the monoculture, thus vastly diminished risk from various canned account theft problems
- toothbrush 12y ago
  Would you mind sharing who you use as a provider?
  - ldite 12y ago
    https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ - having looked, it turns out they don't have a telephone number, but as all my support emails have been answered within minutes I'd never felt the need :)
evook 12y ago
I don't see the problem to rent a small server and host open xchange, zimbra or something similiar yourself? Even postfix isn't that hard to configure and will likely run forever. The same goes for the author. I don't get how gmail is even considered as a mail provider for more than a spam oder mandatory account. The list of better and serious mail providers is tremendous. For my family and me, I am hosting a small exchange server, with a synchronous replica in a datacenter, at home. It's safe, has nearly unlimited disk space and I know where my backups are.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Postfix will run forever, but other hosts won't accept your emails forever unless you keep up with the latest spam techniques (DANE nowadays, isn't it?) Personally, I just use a free smarthost, but that loses some of the privacy advantages.
  - evook 12y ago
    Personally I don't use Postfix, I am going with Zimbra. Postfix was just an example. As well as DANE would require exactly 4 commands to be enabled. For myself I am going with a major commercial antispam solution, which is hosted in two of our datacenters. Since I am working with the developers and admins on regular basis there's no reason not to trust them.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Antispam and security updates are a pain. I ran exim in a colo for years, including handing out free accounts to friends (rookie mistake, yes), and eventually decided to stop bothering after it hit some critical problem while I was on holiday.
- colanderman 12y ago
  Because then I have to manage that server. I'm suddenly responsible for security, rebooting if there's an outage, keeping things up-to-date, etc. I've had both a small personal Linux server (for web hosting) and Fastmail (for everything else) for several years, and I've easily spent 2-3 times the cost of my Fastmail account in time spent fiddling with my web server over that time period.

cssmoo 12y ago

I use GMail. However remember if you pay for it via Apps, the terms are different so that is worth bearing in mind.

brohoolio 12y ago
Google Apps for work is $50 per account per year. The terms of service for apps for work protects your privacy.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

mkpankov 12y ago

I have 4 virtual domains bound to same account. Why isn't it an option? You can filter stuff based on "To:" address to put it in different "Inbox" folders. And storage usage is more optimal since you don't pay for a lot of nearly-empty inboxes.

lazyjones 12y ago
Exactly, I don't really see the problem in the article. I have a $40/year (15GB) account and apart from my fastmail and my forwarded pobox.com address, I also receive mail for and host DNS records and web pages for 2 other virtual domains. Also, I'm very happy with spam filtering and Fastmail's service quality (they even post on Twitter things like 'mail is slow currently, investigating...').
- mkpankov 12y ago
  Well, I can't say I'm happy with spam filtering - I regularly get some stupid spam to the inbox (not even something smart enough to bypass the filters, IMO).
  - corobo 12y ago
    I'm at a point with Gmail where I'd be happy that I'm getting a bit of spam in the inbox. Unfortunately I'm starting to see a lot of false positives recently. I was actually looking to move out of Gmail myself
  - lazyjones 12y ago
    I get some spam too (which passes both pobox.com's and fastmail's filtering), but it's much less than I previously had with gmail and I assume that spam has become more elaborate these days. Also, with gmail I had more false positives.
- colanderman 12y ago
  Not to mention a federation-friendly XMPP server that supports external domains via SRV records. For this and the features you list, I've also been a very happy FastMail user for the past few years and could never return to the walled garden that is Google.

brohoolio 12y ago

Ahhhh the cost of privacy.

icebraining 12y ago

Without arguing against OP's decision, IFTTT can be wired with any email account, using the Email channel, you just need to set up a rule to forward the emails to their address.

moystard 12y ago

In terms of privacy, the issue is that most people out there use GMail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, so even if you self-host or use a privacy aware service, when you'll send emails to others, or receive them, your privacy won't be fully respected anyway...

scrrr 12y ago

Related to this, especially with regard to privacy, I recommend everyone to check out the LEAP project and also this list of related projects: https://leap.se/email#related-projects https://leap.se/email#related-projects

ansgri 12y ago

For me the killer feature of fastmail is their Calendar. Having recently used Google Calendar I was astonished how totally unusable it is compared to fastmail's. I'd be glad to hear what calendar do you use, what are considered good nowadays.

x0x0 12y ago
What did you find better? Thanks!
- ansgri 12y ago
  * less context switches. In fastmail you do everything in popup windows where in Google you sometimes have to go to a separate task window. * very easy to modify individual occurrences of repeating tasks. Just drag or resize, it'll detach automatically. * the week view is sliding, ie you can view events from Wednesday to Wednesday. * much less clutter in UI and interactions overall.

Uberphallus 12y ago

Looks like it's a decision made for very personal reasons, but some of the issues are not really issues. > As of this writing, I'm up to 4 accounts. They're not all yours, they're your family members'. And given the fact that you have to pay for them, they probably won't really need Fastmail, they can use Gmail and you set up aliases/forwards for their addresses. > FastMail's spam filtering is good, but it's not as good as Google's. My experience is the opposite, somehow. I very rarely get spam in Fastmail, and 99% of the time it falls into spam folders (even having *@myuser.fastmail.fm wildcard, catchall addresses!). I get very few false positives, too. It might be not as heavily targeted by spammers. Meanwhile I get 10-30 a day in Gmail, with roughly 20% of false positives, with so many false positives that I had to switch my email account to Fastmail on certain websites because I missed important emails (like notices of cancelled flight reservations, Amazon refunds, work reminders). It doesn't matter how many times I mark a sender's email as non-spam, Gmail thinks it knows better. > Mailbox being compatible with only Gmail and iCloud accounts. Well, duh. I'm good with Aquamail, mutt and the web client, as Fastmail rules do all the filtering I care about. I wanted to test Google Inbox and Dropbox Mailbox, so I set a forward to my Gmail address. They didn't do anything interesting to me, so I disabled it again, but if you want to use them, you totally can. I have to say, though, that Fastmail Android app is sluggish as hell and, last time I checked, it didn't cache messages (deal breaker for me, I travel a lot and want to have boarding passes and reservations handy). > IFTTT integration Forward to Gmail, enjoy IFTTT.

tdkl 12y ago

I've been looking at Fastmail when switching from Gmail this year, but the lack of flexibility in prices vs. storage size turned me off. All I wanted was a fast IMAP host, with 5-10GB of storage, DAV for calendar and contacts and a simple fast web interface. After some testing, I've found ServerMX [1]. They're EU based (.nl, .de infrastructure) [2], have SOGo for DAV and webmail (offers full size contact pictures, which is really neat for mobile phones), IMAP sync is instant and seamless over all clients (Aquamail on Android, eM Client on Windows desktop, SOGo on webmail) and all that for merely 18€ per year. Their plans are well considered IMHO if you don't need much space [3]. Sorry if this feels like an ad, but I've been more then happy with their service and like to recommend it to people. They have a 30 day free trial to test the service. [1] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html [2] http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html [3] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy

detaro 12y ago
While we are recommending mail hosts, http://www.mailbox.org http://www.mailbox.org also is nice. From Germany, privacy-minded (you can have totally anonymous accounts, they encrypt everything with your PGP-key as soon as it arrives, ...), run by people who are quite well-known when it comes to mail servers (author of books on postfix, running conferences, ... so they hopefully know what they are doing) Webinterface is ok, but not perfect.
- msh 12y ago
  They even offer exchange push sync.
- tdkl 12y ago
  Oh yeah, I considered mailbox.org too, but was a bit more expensive for the plan with ActiveSync (for mobile), but major argument was that I've found IMAP sync faster (basically instant) then Exchange push in my testing.
  - detaro 12y ago

jakobegger 12y ago

I agree that Fastmail's default spam filter settings are a bit to lenient, I also got around 3 spams a day. After increasing the spam settings I get about 1 spam a week, which is acceptable. There are a few reasons why I'd never switch back to gmail: 1) Reliability: Gmail sometimes had issues with Apple Mail where messages would show up twice, etc. Since switching to Fastmail I had no more problems. 2) Customer support. I once had an issue where all my mail disappeared from my inbox in Gmail. There was noone I could contact, all I found was a user forum with other people complaining about the problem. I never got my email back from the archive to the inbox. When you have a problem with Fastmail, or can't find what you are looking for in the docs, just contact customer support. 3) Backup: Fastmail allows you to restore email from backup (for a limited time). Really nice when you accidentally delete an email. 4) Web interface. I assume that's a matter of taste, but I really prefer Fastmail. 5) Folders instead of labels. I don't like Gmail's labels, and I'm glad Fastmail has proper folders.

rtpg 12y ago
what's the difference between gmail's labels and fastmail folders?
- favadi 12y ago
  A mail can be in multiple labels, but can only in one folder (copy doesn't count).
Svip 12y ago
If I may add, Gmail has removed the feature to send from other email addresses. Or rather, they now require you to have an SMTP server to send from other email addresses. Fortunately, the change has not been retroactive, so all my previous addresses were still available, but I couldn't really set up new ones. Which became a deal breaker. That - and the fact that I been looking for something not Gmail for a long time - made me switch to Fastmail. I must say, my experience with Gmail's spam filter has been the reverse. There are a lot of false positives in my Gmail's spam folder. But I am new to Fastmail, so maybe it'll bother me at some point.
12y ago

nly 12y ago

I think good old POP and mailbox discipline needs to make a come back... at least for Average Joe users. I have a similar Fastmail setup to the OP. My parents get $10 Lite accounts and I set them up to fetch all their mail via POP, so their mailbox never gets full. I also downgraded my own account from Enhanced ($40) to Full ($20) some time ago after I used Fastmails superior web interface and search to finally prune my inbox (I imported something like 10,000 unread emails from Gmail). All this is less than the cost of one GApps user. I have all my important mail from the last 8 years or so and I'm only using something like ~500MB.

chkuendig 12y ago
he might (like me) still have a grandfathered-in account which is free (with ads) for up to 10 users. [edit: parent edited complete comment]
- tallanvor 12y ago
  Originally they allowed more than 10 users... My account lets me have up to 200 users.
- nly 12y ago
  Sorry about the edit... I decided refuting the arithmetic was a fairly blunt way to deal with the debate. I moved from an older (50 user) free GApps account to Fastmail. If I had been paying I would have saved $150/year, but just saving my time, and avoiding the now shitty experience of managing my mail via Gmail, was well worth the cost to me. Early on Gmails web interface was a revelation, now it's just below standard... and any momentum from their multi-GB storage giveaway doesn't cut it anymore. I think the final nail was one of principle... Google just aren't interested in offering premium personal mail services, like own-domain hosting to families or individuals. Using free GApps made me feel like an unwanted freeloader... a second-class citizen.

antihero 12y ago

I'd switch back to Gmail if I could somehow change my Google account to incorporate my real e-mail (and pay), as opposed to having a separate Google Apps for Domains account for e-mail that was separate from my real e-mail and is on my old Gmail address. Does anyone know if this is remotely possible?

reustle 12y ago
I simply stopped using my old gmail account. Switching email addresses is a pain, absolutely, but at least leaving gmail is as easy as an MX record change in the future.
- antihero 12y ago
  Yeah but what about things like App purchases, calendar, Drive, etc?

stefanve 12y ago

To each there own I guess. I have been a happy fastmail user for many years, I get some spam maybe 1 or 2 mails per month and I just use the default spam settings. Seems like a personal choice not a tech or feature driven decision. Not sure why this is on the front page

bad_user 12y ago

He mentions the availability of Mailbox as a useful third-party app. However the fact that Mailbox only works with proprietary services, being restricted to GMail and iCloud, should send red flags, because this app is not provided by Google, but by Dropbox and personally I'm seeing a conflict of interest and given that it isn't based on standards, you can bet that it won't last. I also tried it out and I found it half-baked. This point was weird. It's because of Google's poor support for standards that I'm considering ditching Google Apps. Because GMail and Google Calendar are all fine only as long as you're using the official apps.

bismark 12y ago

I'm a happy Fastmail user but one thing I wish they would bring over from Gmail is SASL OAuth. I understand it's still in a draft extension but any improvement to the state of email authentication would be great (restricting read/write access based on IMAP folder on a token by token basis would be even better). The idea of handing out my email credentials in plain text to email SaaS products just gives me the willies.

brongondwana 12y ago
We're looking at making this easier, but you can already set up a separate login token for the individual SaaS products - just create a regular password alternative login with something from pwgen or your favourite line noise source. https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html You can then revoke the individual token. Per-folder permissions isn't something on our radar yet. You could hack it up with a family/business and separate accounts with folder sharing, but it costs money and is a right pain to administrate.

tiatia 12y ago

I wanted to leave google due to privacy concerns. Fastmail is based in Australia - not an option. I did not want anything EU based either. Got a Proton mail account but without IMAP, what is it good for? An email service that is based in Switzerland and that you can use with you own domain: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging

edwinyzh 12y ago

Just in case it's relevant, I'm developing http://ownmycopy.com http://ownmycopy.com for cloud-to-PC backup, aiming at for backing up cloud-only services.

jorams 12y ago

I always wonder what people do with their email address to receive that much spam. I have a Fastmail account with a catch-all that receives all mail sent to a domain, and I rarely receive spam. I'm not exactly careful spreading my email address around either. I have noticed that almost all spam I do receive is sent to an address I posted here on HN, so perhaps I just haven't posted any addresses on other sites that are crawled by spammers a lot?

bryanlarsen 12y ago

3 to 5 false spam negatives a day is better than the 1 false positive a week that I get with Gmail, IMO.

hmans 12y ago

tl;dr author switches back to Gmail because it's convenient. I wish the article would simply say that.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

A good article but I just made the opposite decision. I recently switched to using GMail as a catch all email that I check about twice a day and use FastMail with my own domain for email from people close to me. It is not as much an issue of privacy as wanting to slow down the information firehose from Google, Twitter, G+, etc. I would like to reduce the surface area of marketing aimed at me.

manuelmagic 12y ago

Regarding space upgrade, what you write is not true: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a6841cb https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a68... "Purchasing extra space. Rather than upgrade to the next plan, it's possible to just purchase extra mail or file storage. This is charged at: Lite: 100MB for $5 USD/year Full: 500MB for $5 USD/year Enhanced/Premier: 1GB for $5 USD/year"