10 ms·

An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

311 points by neogodless 1mo ago

neogodless 1mo ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
totallygeeky 1mo ago
Fastmail is fantastic, I've been a very happy customer for at least a couple years now. Masked emails have been so nice for throwaway/sketchy sites. It's done everything I could ask, would highly recommend for anyone looking to make the switch from elsewhere.
steve_adams_86 1mo ago
Fastmail is the service I've paid for longer than any other, without any pauses, and with the most satisfaction of any subscription. Like the author says, email isn't exciting, it isn't a fun or interesting subscription, but it works perfectly for me and offers excellent value for what I pay. It's so gratifyingly functional and boring.
- ColdStream 1mo ago
  Same, been about 10 years now and it is the definition of 'It just works'. I do like that they are up front with how the data is handled and what that can mean for privacy. They are just working within the system but being transparent with it.
- raffraffraff 1mo ago
  Private Email (a Namecheap product) makes me wish I didn't move that account off Gmail. I'll take a look at Fastmail.
beart 1mo ago
Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most. For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.
- Vinnl 1mo ago
  > Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most. That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
  - denkmoon 1mo ago
    A few hours pf effort to liberate your email from Google. Well worth imo.
    - Vinnl 1mo ago
      Well, at least the emails that I don't send at least one Gmail user... (Don't get me wrong, I still want to do it, but it's still daunting.)
  - georgemcbay 1mo ago
    > That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately. You don't have to do it all in one go. It isn't like you have to move everything all at once like you're moving to a new apartment. I started moving away from gmail years ago. It took probably like 5-10 minutes to set up email under my own DNS control and to set a forwarding address on gmail that pointed to that email. I didn't even bother to do an initial bulk move of things over to the new email, I just switched things over individually as needed in a sort of on-demand fashion. 30-60 seconds here and there moving over individual accounts one at a time and only when it became obvious that I was moving over something worth keeping up on. Spread out like that it felt like almost no effort at all.
    - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
      This is the way! Every time google did something to piss me off I moved an account or two in anger. It felt good. It felt so good that when I searched my gmail and only found google-related hits in my password manager, I was slightly disappointed lol
    - dietr1ch 1mo ago
CJefferson 1mo ago
My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.
- threecheese 1mo ago
  Same; I was a sucker for GitHub SSO as well. I have no idea how to unwind it all, but (like Google SSO) it certainly had its benefits while I was using it. I remember there was an “open” SSO provider - OpenID maybe - back in the 2000s when a federated identity made interacting with blogs and such much easier. It’s the same with GitHub today, with various 3rd parties who need access to your code. They don’t have a “give me an git+ssh url” and so you almost need GitHub.
- ColdStream 1mo ago
  Hmmm, that is an interesting pickle. Some are probably fairly easy to swap over but it is so dependent on each service. Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
- jacquesm 1mo ago
  Make a new account then?
- laweijfmvo 1mo ago
  i’m not sure i’ll ever delete my google accounts, but my goal was to stop using them. if someday an email comes in, it’ll still get auto forwarded, and if i need to login, i’ll have access to it.
  - kenhwang 1mo ago
    I don't even bother with forwarding mail from Gmail, it's just a black hole for marketing emails that I'd only occasionally glance at when I'm looking for a discount code.
  - thisislife2 1mo ago
asgraham 1mo ago
But can I still give all my emails to OpenAI?? (semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
- nmjenkins 1mo ago
  Sure, if you really want to, you connect whatever AI you like: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ – but there's no LLM built in to Fastmail itself; it's a personal choice.
HeadOfProbing 1mo ago
Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?
- thebitguru 1mo ago
  I wish they would improve their iOS app. It does leave a bit to be desired.
  - kiwijamo 1mo ago
    FYI Fastmail works really well with the iOS native Mail/Calendar app if you wanted to try that out. iOS is pretty much the only platform I don't use the Fastmail app on.
- Klonoar 1mo ago
  Is it still a Webview?
  - HeadOfProbing 1mo ago
    Some of it feels like so.
- i1856511 1mo ago
  I know that this is at least somewhat on their radar. Scrolling used to not be 60 FPS either, now it is.
etothet 1mo ago
I'm in the process of migrating away from my custom domain on Google (I'm grandfathered in from back when they offered it for free). So far getting all my old email, contacts, and calendar info FastMail has been seamless. All that's left is to repoint the DNS. Like another comment, I too have a couple of services connected to "Sign in w/ Google". Until I actually delete my Google org, those will still remain active. Since I'm not paying, I feel OK about this.
- dfee 1mo ago
  keep going – i was in your shoes 24mo ago.
GiorgioG 1mo ago
I moved to Fastmail from gmail a few years ago. I'm thrilled to not have Google searching my primary email address any longer. I still use gmail for SSO for a lot of things from my 'gmail.com' account.
- 0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
  You may already know this, but in case anyone else doesn't, you can create a Google account using a non-Google email address, so your SSO doesn't have to depend on a Gmail address if you don't want
anonthrownaway 1mo ago
I recently switched over 6 gmail accounts (both personal and business) from gmail to fastmail. I have been suddenly bombarded with a mountain of spam that the goog must have been catching. It doesn't seem like my constant flagging is doing anything. I ended up building a convoluted mess of filters that will probably cause me to misflag something important one day. :-/ Also, I really miss the auto categorization into primary, promotions, social and updates. This is a killer feature! I'm happy to be rid of the goog's convoluted management console, but wondering why fastmail's spam filters aren't up to snuff...
- thibaut_barrere 1mo ago
  I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
- tomaskafka 1mo ago
  Thank you for this report - I tried leaving gmail 2 years ago and returned quickly exactly because of this. Sad to hear the situation remains unchanged. Meanwhile, on my other account, I have hacked together a basic email classification with n8n and cheap LLM model, and it works awesomely and costs peanuts. I wonder why services who want to be google's competitors don't do this?
- WarmWash 1mo ago
  Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with. It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
- kiwijamo 1mo ago
  Interestingly, I have found it the other way around for me. While my main inbox is at Fastmail, I also have a historical Gmail account. My Fastmail inbox gets a few spam messages week. My Gmail account on the other hand gets hundreds a month (if not weekly) that slip past the google filters. This is mainly why I stopped forwarding emails from Gmail to Fastmail as >95% of the spam was sent via Gmail, and I suspect Fastmail doesn't try to filter those. Anyway, a helpful tip for you is that the Fastmail spam filter is configurable. You may want to look at making it more aggressive. Go to Fastmail > Settings > Filters & Rules > Filters > Spam protection > Advanced settings. Here you can either just select the 'Aggressive' preset or even customise your own thresholds for flagging a message as spam. Here you can also check how many messages are have been learnt by the filters. If you're forwarding emails from Gmail I'd also suggest turning that off or setting up a rule to dump the Gmail forwarded messages into a separate folder. I suspect you'll find most of the spam has been passed on by Gmail.
bix6 1mo ago
Anyone have thoughts on proton vs fastmail?
- nsagent 1mo ago
  I'm in the process of leaving Proton and moving to Fastmail. I'm now paying for Mullvad and Fastmail, but haven't had a chance to port over a bunch of Simplelogin aliases I have over to Fastmail yet (my fault for not using a custom domain for those, which I've now rectified with Fastmail). Despite having Proton since 2018, I've really gotten fed up with their service quality — they seem to half-ass most of their services and it's a real pita to use their ecosystem. People have been complaining for ages and nothing changes, so I've decided to take my business elsewhere. Hopefully I don't get flamed for my decision; that's another annoying aspect about Proton. There's a vocal portion of the userbase that are zealots and really take you to task when they feel you are criticizing Proton in any way.
  - bix6 1mo ago
    I’ve liked their VPN so I’m considering my email there but people seem to have a really strong preference for fast mail so I’m curious why. Are you leaving just because general annoyance or improved feature set or what? It’s a lot of work to migrate so I don’t want to be back here in 2 years swapping again.
    - nsagent 1mo ago
      I moved because I found the Proton service to be poor. That includes reaching out to support for issues with my email and not really getting a good resolution. What's worse is that I ported all my emails over to Proton, which meant my data usage was above the free tier, so I was essentially hostage to keep paying (even though my actual usage is on Proton is much below the free tier). While they do label the emails you import, it's useless because it gets intermingled if they are part of the same thread (for example, all my bills that switched over were tagged as imported even when I got a new bill; this was an issue for even direct email threads with other people). Furthermore, it's nearly impossible to bulk delete anything, you have to use their web interface (which is very limiting). If you try to delete using something like Thunderbird, the emails stay in All Mail, so it's not really deleted (thus keeps using your disk space, preventing you from moving to the free tier). It took me nearly a week to devise a way to properly delete the imported emails without accidentally deleting real emails. Using the web interface is SLOW. It was painful doing the deletes that way because Proton struggled to keep up with the deletes, it was glitching like crazy. Needless to say, that was a shitty shitty experience, and I'm positive that's part of their approach to lock users into their platform.
martin1975 1mo ago
I got the same capabilities from mxroute.com, another worthwhile alternative - hosted in the USA. Plus they offer a no subscription, 10GB one time fee (I think $150 at the time I got it) account...unlimited domains/subdomains, etc -everything managed thru directadmin. Replaced my Google Workspace email w/this and never looked back. I still use Google for authentication and Google Drive.
- john01dav 1mo ago
  The sustainability of this is dubious to me because you're taking a one time fee for service forever, and eventually someone (possibly a future owner) is going to want to get more money out of you over this. Also, there are recurring costs to host this that continue forever, even with no further income from you.
  - rationalist 1mo ago
    Maybe they're betting on new people always signing up and paying, but not using it much. Still a risky endeavor.
    - jmm5 1mo ago
      They heavily limit the number of lifetime subscriptions they sell to avoid it becoming a sustainability issue. That product isn't available right now, for example.
- AnonC 1mo ago
  The issue with mxroute is that it's run by one person, AFAIK. Of course, you can always move with a custom domain, but I'd rather have a team of people involved to manage risks better. Migadu (which I'm not a customer of) provides almost the same, but with a team and for a subscription. The lowest tier as of this comment is $19 a year.
frereubu 1mo ago
I'm a happy user of Fastmail, but I would prefer a properly EU-hosted service. (Fastmail now have data storage in the EU, but much of their infrastructure is in the US and data still passes through there - something that they're open about, but I'd prefer not to happen). The last time I looked at mailbox.org the offer wasn't nearly as good as Fastmail in terms of storage, catch-all email addresses etc, but I took another look recently and it seems to be better. Does anyone here have first-hand experience of mailbox.org?
- kay_o 1mo ago
  I use mailboxorg its acceptable. The webmail has io.ox in the URL so I assume it is hosted ox (www.ox.io of softwares) which is SIGNIFICANTLY worse performance and usability wise compared to the Fastmail webmail -- I don`t use SMTP/IMAP so I do not know what that is like. Routinely on restricted networks that only allow HTTP/HTTPS so it is a webmail only experience opinionated in mine.
  - frereubu 1mo ago
    Thanks.
- jorvi 1mo ago
  As Fastmail themselves have pointed out many times, e-mail is inherently a multi-party activity with both parties holding a copy of the e-mails. Aside from the microscopic amount of people GPGing their e-mail and sending it over good servers, your e-mail is as private as the other party treats it. Which isn't very much. And you can't do anything about that. You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
  - 0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
    The bigger issue isn't a privacy one, it's a security one. For many people, if you can get access to their email box, you can account-reset your way into any other account they own. So if an authoritarian state compromises your account (because they control the servers), there goes your everything
paxys 1mo ago
> Going and updating my accounts with a new address was easier than I was expecting Is this really true? Out of the probably many hundreds of online accounts I use I can think of very few that actually let you change the underlying email (which in almost ever case is the username) without having to create a brand new account.
- rationalist 1mo ago
  When I made the switch from @Gmail to my own email domains hosted by Fastmail, I never had any problem changing the email on my 100+ accounts with various services. That was about five years ago, I imagine it might have been more difficult in the past, say 10+ years ago.
- anonthrownaway 1mo ago
  The majority of mine are changeable, but the process is typically convoluted. The two that I have run into so far that I can't change are OpenRouter and Ecobee.
- kiwijamo 1mo ago
  Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule? I haven't really seen this sort of thing in the wild to be honest. Maybe one or two over 20+ years? I think the norm is using a username or an internal identification number (such as an UUID). It is rare the email address is actually used as the primary key to identify an account.
  - Marsymars 1mo ago
    > Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule? Philips Hue. I've run into others, but that one sticks out because it's the only account I still have using my old email, since creating a new account would also involve re-pairing all of my Hue products.
  - LeapingLennie 1mo ago
    https://www.coles.com.au/ https://www.coles.com.au/ (the 2nd largest supermarket chain in Australia) and https://makerworld.com/ https://makerworld.com/ are two I've come across.
dbgobrrr 1mo ago
Good move! I was there before, and the worst part was... I was using a @gmail.com address. Bad mistake on my part. So actually tracking what I used the address with, that was my real pain. Now everything is on my custom domain, so if I need to move on from my current provider, it will be painless. In the process I did manage to delete a whole bunch of accounts I didn't use anymore. Incidentally, I also moved to fastmail, and it is just boringly fantastic. It works. It has features I actually need and enjoy (masked emails!) and I recommend it to anyone who asks.
- AustinDev 1mo ago
  >I was using a @gmail.com address. Bad mistake on my part. So actually tracking what I used the address with, that was my real pain. This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI. I recently had a do a migration that I had been putting off for years and it was relatively painless.
  - disposedtrolley 1mo ago
    > This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI. How did you solve this with AI?
    - jkestner 1mo ago
      They said “mostly”. AI solves 90% and then you solve the other 90%.
      - skydhash 1mo ago
        Lol. On almost every post someone comes in to say that $problem was easily solved by AI. Usually out of the whole context of the thread. Snake oil level comments.
      - RadiozRadioz 29d ago
        What is the 90%?
    - 26d ago
frou_dh 1mo ago
I like Fastmail but I'm starting to feel that the subscription cost is a bit overpriced for the way I use it (just IMAP email - not using the app, calendars, contacts, file hosting, ...). I've researched and found some other independent paid email providers that are significantly cheaper, although I suspect most of having a low bus factor with just 1 or 2 people operating them.
- premier_cru 1mo ago
  i have been using posteo.de for the last decade with no problems at all. Exactly the feature set you use. I only recently started to use their Caldav stuff which works. I recommend them.
  - AnonC 1mo ago
    Same here. I don't want a custom domain for certain things, and Posteo (posteo.de) was good. Posteo increased the mailbox storage to 4 GB recently and the default number of free aliases too. I'm satisfied that it's run by a team and not by one person (the low bus factor mentioned above). At EUR 1 per month, it's way cheaper than Fastmail for multiple mailboxes across family members and provides a lot more value, IMO.
- turpentine 1mo ago
  It's likely that regular Fastmail users are subsidising their AI costs. I've talked to several people who were a bit shocked when Fastmail decided to complicate their offering with the current hyped trash.
  - chrismorgan 1mo ago
    Are you thinking of some other company? The most Fastmail has done in LLM directions is offering an MCP API: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/.
IndySun 1mo ago
FastMail has an admirable bug bounty. Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited? https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/ https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/
- ivankra 1mo ago
  I stopped reading their privacy policy at "Fastmail is an Australian company" - Australia is a five eyes jurisdiction. That said, I'm a happy customer of almost a decade with them, but my email correspondence is pretty boring and not politically sensitive.
  - IndySun 1mo ago
    Interesting. Should any email provider based in any of the 5 Eyes (or even 14) be avoided? But I feel, particularly for everyday folk, we have reached the point at which avoiding some level of surveillance is now virtually impossible.
    - ivankra 1mo ago
      Sadly true. Even if your provider takes privacy seriously, chances are the other side is using US big tech who'd happily give away their copy of your data to any sufficiently credentialed authority.
      - IndySun 27d ago
        Just to follow up. Is it your contention (basically) that any interaction with any of the Five Eyes country is suspect? I realise this puts (guesses off top of head) 95% of all internet traffic, theoretically including such 'privacy focussed' open source projects emanating from the five eyes/95%, as suspect too. Are we all incapable of being apart from that 95% (assuming you're in that 95%)?
stevenhubertron 1mo ago
I have used Fastmail for 5+ years, no real complaints other then some real emails get caught up in spam folder.
muhammadusman 1mo ago
I moved to using Fastmail as my primary over 7 years ago and I still use it as my main email address but I had hoped I could get rid of my gmail but instead it became a catch-all junk inbox similar to OP's gmail. The main issue is that so many websites use Login in with Google as a way to sign-in that I just had to keep my gmail logged in most of the time. So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.
bpbp-mango 1mo ago
fastmail really needs inbox categorization on the level of gmail
- havaloc 1mo ago
  I would move back to Fastmail if they offered it. Yes, I could muck about with MCP but give me AI light features, such as categorization and perhaps AI conditional rules.
Scene_Cast2 1mo ago
I made the move some time ago. There are some unpolished parts here and there, but I'm glad I made the move. Somewhat unrelated criticism of Gmail - during the migration, I found out that there is no way to search for starred archived emails in Gmail. They don't show up in Starred, nor in any search with is:starred. Their star status also doesn't carry over when migrating.
0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
Subdomain addressing really is a killer feature. Since developers are braindead and can't implement a valid email address parser to save their lives, 'foo+bar@mydomain.com', 'foo-bar@mydomain.com', and 'foo.bar@mydomain.com' often get rejected as "invalid email addresses". But 'foo@bar.mydomain.com' always works fine. Fastmail's Gmail integration to injest mails and calendars works fantastically. I've only had the calendar integration fail once, and was easily able to reconnect it. And iirc, you can even send mail through Gmail from Fastmail, so you can use Fastmail as an interface for both systems. Up until recently my biggest gripe was the lack of offline mail, but finally both the web app and mobile app have offline now. The UI is still a teeny bit clunky (the whole email view reloads itself, even in the mobile app, for no reason), but I barely notice it. It's very stable, fast, reliable, and simple. I even use the 'file storage' feature as a replacement for GDrive sharing the occasional file. One thing you don't realize when you leave Gmail is just how much crap you've signed up to over the years. I haven't used my Gmail for several years now but it still gets mail. (I'm keeping the account active so nobody else takes it and uses it for a weird attack)
mindwok 1mo ago
I did this for my business' email about a year ago. A few weeks ago, I moved everything. Fastmail is awesome, but perhaps more important is how bad Gmail's web interface is. Fastmail is way more responsive and fluid and feels almost native.
Asterism 1mo ago
I've used fastmail since 2014. No complaints!
NoboruWataya 1mo ago
I have been very happy with mailbox.org. I recently signed up for early access to Thundermail, which is the new email service being rolled out by the Thunderbird team. I have no particular need to change except that I like the idea of supporting Thunderbird. So I will be keeping an eye on it. If you use a custom domain and email clients rather than webmail, moving around becomes a lot easier. Another tip is to use a service like addy.io where you can create a new alias for every service, to help protect against spam.
snapplebobapple 1mo ago
Did this a half decade ago and hacent looked back.
olivierestsage 1mo ago
I’ve used Fastmail for about 20 years. The worst thing that happened was that because of an outage in 2006, I couldn’t log in to download my homework in time for my teacher to believe I wasn’t faking. The best thing was that I deleted all of my emails in the 2020s due to an IMAP mistake and a human got in contact with me and fixed it. I think that speaks for itself. Definitely not canceling that subscription anytime soon
- stavros 29d ago
  Every time I've sent them an email to ask something, I got a response from a knowledgeable human that solved my problem immediately. They're worth the money.
danpalmer 1mo ago
I have a blog post that I've been meaning to write about why I moved from Fastmail to Gmail. I love Fastmail as a product, but I realised it wasn't what I wanted anymore from my email. I think there's a tension between explicit and implicit organisation. If you want a really good email client, Fastmail is great, but while I did care about that at one point in my life, what I want now is really just the big box at the top of the email telling me about my package arriving today or showing my boarding pass. Fastmail is excellent for explicit organisation, but its implicit organisation isn't great. Gmail is the other way around. I don't like the Gmail UI or any of the organisation features, but I also don't really need to use them.
- righthand 1mo ago
  If you want to be tagged and tracked in that way then there is no better platform than Google services for sure.
- dfee 1mo ago
  but, you're going to pay either way (assuming you have a custom domain).
- shelled 1mo ago
  This is basically what my take has been after chasing everything else for way too long. Though I've not moved back and Gmail honestly isn't something I can now move back to (and no tracking/etc are not the reason). I just wrote a too long comment and I realise now most of that you've said in your short comment. Email for me is just a communication tool that the world still uses. Nothing else.
- Gareth321 1mo ago
  I think the next paradigm shift in software is going to be LLM-inferred user intent. Serving just what you really want, when you want it. Currently all inside whatever interface the LLM provider offers, but soon whatever interface the LLM decides is appropriate. People won't use apps anymore. Your LLM will tell you which emails you need to address, and will automatically triage the rest (and action those which can be actioned autonomously). You won't navigate to Facebook. You'll ask your LLMs what your friends are up to. You won't navigate to TikTok. You'll ask the LLM for some funny videos (or whatever you're in the mood for). We won't need to structure data hierarchically anymore. Just dump it somewhere, an LLM vectorises it, and it's super easy to retrieve later in whichever domain one needs it. The internet is about to undergo radical transformation.
ggm 1mo ago
A shout out to the fastmail management who acquired pobox.com and kept the domain going, leveraging the fastmail infra. I was really pleased my decades long investment in @short.name paid off, and I have been able to keep a short @pobox.com instance, which I undoubtedly would lose in the migration into @fastmail.com Aside from the vanity aspect, the distinction between a real mail provider and a stable forwarding service is a useful one. Thank you Bron (and others) for keeping things going.
- brongondwana 1mo ago
  On behalf of all of us here, you're welcome!
alexmuro 1mo ago
I generally am very satisfied with fastmail but I do have a hard time getting it to learn what is spam, maybe I'm missing something.
paulbgd 1mo ago
One underrated thing is how easy it is to get credentials for sending emails. If you self host a lot of stuff it's quick to get going.
zacwest 1mo ago
The real downside to subdomain addressing is that very few other providers support it. I think Migadu is the only one I could find. If you do end up needing to leave Fastmail, you might have to configure each and every subdomain as a unique email domain somewhere else. I would avoid it if you're starting fresh.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
zazuke 1mo ago
Only thing missing is a Screener, which once you have it, you cant live without. No need for burner adresses, as nobod lands in your inbox unapproves. I added it to my TUI, nvim and markdown first email client, neomd.
Hard_Space 1mo ago
Switched to FastMail two years ago. Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!
xfz 1mo ago
The pricing page is dishonest. It says prominently £4.50/month but that's for an annual subscription (£54 for 12 months is in smaller text below). If you want a monthly price you have to tab across to get the true figure of £5.40. The higher price wouldn't put me off - it's still very low - but the deception erodes trust from the very start.
k4runa 1mo ago
Fastmail is great because every time I get a new startup idea I can set up emails for each domain name I buy and it all goes to the same inbox.
- tomcam 1mo ago
  If you reply to an email, does it use the “primary“ domain name or does it use the same domain it was sent to?
  - grsmvg 1mo ago
    Primary domain name. You pay for the inbox, not the domain.
    - scronkfinkle 1mo ago
      Maybe I am misunderstanding but I don't think this is true. Indeed you pay for the inbox, but it's not the primary domain. You can reply from any of the email addresses you created (which doesn't cost extra) and it automatically sets the FROM to be the email it was received on
      - dboreham 1mo ago
        This is indeed how it works.
        grsmvg 26d ago
        I meant the opposite of what I wrote! I read it wrong
  - mijowi 1mo ago
    If you have Fastmail configured to send from that domain as well, it will automatically reply from the same address the email was sent to. You can pick which address to send from, of those you have set up.
mock-possum 1mo ago
I made this exact move a month or so ago when google threw some money Musk’s way - and I gotta say, the transition was almost imperceptible. An hour, maybe, of configuring and testing, spaced out over a couple days, and boom, it’s like I was never on gmail.
egorfine 1mo ago
I'm using Fastmail for about 15 years and this is one of the services I'm extremely happy with. Definitely recommend!
shelled 1mo ago
Having started down this path of non-big-corp hosted email and my own personal domain (which is definitely not self-hosting, though I'd never want that inflicted upon me) almost a decade ago, I won't say it's been a rabbit hole. But there have been some learnings over the years — realisations, rather. The biggest: I went overboard with everything around moving my email away from Gmail. Almost like what I did with seedboxes over the years, until I realised I didn't need most of what a seedbox offers, and that I didn't need a seedbox in the first place. Whenever this discussion comes up here, or say on Reddit, the focus immediately moves to privacy, anonymity, tracking. Those are valid points, no doubt. What takes a back seat, I suspect, are aspects like reliability and some sort of accountable customer support — and no, a smaller company doesn't need an army of support agents, just a few people and an intention to help and solve problems, delays being okay. Many utterly irresponsible hosted email providers get a pass just because they posture with an activist flag. The whole virtue signalling in this sub-industry muddles things. Some are worse. Some deny you basic email access in the name of things like e2ee. Now e2ee is a fine idea, but enforcing it unilaterally — and yet not really enforcing it, because let's face it, you can't until you "move" your ecosystem, the way Signal has been "moving" it. Locked to the app, locked to the web app, yet your emails flow to other systems and addresses that aren't e2ee (as they should!). You just can't use IMAP, among other things. This has become such a toxic topic on certain forums that I start wondering if maybe I'm the one holding it wrong. Another observation: bundling things that aren't email. This is another contentious topic. I wish there were more mainstream, custom-domain-hosted email providers that just did email, nothing else. I first started using disposable email designed to route to my domain via my mail host (a German one). It was as convoluted as it gets, and still is. Then came Apple's HME, with limitations I wouldn't wish on an enemy. Finally settled on SimpleLogin. Not the best, but what I like is that it gets out of the way — I can receive emails on those addresses and send from them easily. It's also a separate service, not hooked to my mail host, and I wouldn't want that now. What would I do if I had to go back to when I was starting? 1. I wouldn't look for a "private" email provider — just get my own domain (which I did) and sign up with a better-priced, responsible, email-only provider (preferably something larger). 2. Never use the free email that comes with the mail host account. 3. Let go of privacy and tracking on email. It's almost painful to say, but I'm tired of that part. And if Gmail hadn't done idiotic things like forcing "folders" on my account with no way to change or delete them (Important, and whatnot), I might have just stayed with them. At least my emails would have been delivered — unlike with my current host, which doesn't do "emailing" up to standard. For heaven's sake, just let my email through, and let senders get through to me as long as their ID is verified and they're not on any spam list. Hell, I am thinking of moving a domain of mine to Zoho. A company I'd have never imagined thinking of in the same breath and it has not become "better" somehow. But here we go, a decade later. This is just a rant I guess. But I am really exhausted and yes switch mail providers even with your own domain is daunting! The apprehension of downtime, fear of losing emails, something breaking etc are just too much. But at least there's a possibility. tl;dr: If I do it over and Gmail stayed what it was back then, I'd just go back to them, just with "my own domain." Not that Google got better; just shows how disillusioned I am with the personal-domain-hosting hype. My own domain, nothing else. Not the rest of what I've done chasing for "this kind of" mail hosting.
gib444 1mo ago
Long time Fastmail customer here. They need to stop their recent trend of breaking their UI, especially in backwards-incompatible ways. They recently recently removed app-based font size from the backend (but just for mobile), and released an updated Android app which only uses the system-level font scaling, which broke it for people who hadn't upgraded yet. Plus the app-based functionality was useful. Not sure why couldn't just add a new "Use system font-scaling" Then there was the debacle of removing horizontal separators in the list view. After backlash, they added an option.
jim180 1mo ago
Shameless plug - I’ve made an app for Apple platforma, that gives easier access to masked mail (from menu bar on macOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670
Uptrenda 1mo ago
The last tine I tried to switch from Gmail it was a complete failure and the main reason was spam. I get --a lot of it-- and I've even had trolls sign me up for spam lists before. I think conceivably the biggest reason to use Gmail is now gone because LLMs could classify spam almost perfectly. If I were to try switch again I'd look for a mail service that specifically mentioned using LLMs for spam. If they say they're using one of the "open source" spam prevention solutions I can almost guarantee you its not going to do shit. They aren't good enough to catch all the permutations of serious spammers (who probably test on those tools before sending anyway.) Edit: it also occurs to me that you could simply download all your mail locally and pipe it through a local model. That could actually work really well, tbh. If you hosted that on a server you would have the advantages of online access with gmail-grade spam filtering at any standard host.
sabot90260 1mo ago
Subdomain addressing for auto-sorting is clever. Beats writing filter rules one by one.
ArtemKhymenko 1mo ago
a bit overpriced, overall
Arsen-V 1mo ago
[flagged]
jimnotgym 1mo ago
I have been fairly happy with ProtonMail, except for a while back their Android app became unusable, often not sending mail! I started using web mail in a mobile browser, and whilst i have struggled with it for probably 3 years now it is annoying. Tbf using it with outlook on my desktop is annoying too. The bridge often logs out on restart. I was thinking about Fastmail as an alternative
GaryBluto 1mo ago
Considering moving to Fastmail myself. I usually use mailbox.org but they've been having far too many outages recently (some declared on their status page, some not). Problem is I use numerous E-Mail aliases for different services and it seems intimidating to transfer them all. Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?
- theshrike79 1mo ago
  I degoogled myself from Gmail/Calendar ... five years ago now? Zero issues with Fastmail that might've affected my life in any way. I can kinda-sorta remember a few outages, but they were night time in my TZ so I found out about them after the fact. Also I _love_ how they're not doing the Proton route and trying to become an everything-service. They do mail, calendar and contact sync, that's about it. No VPNs or cloud storage or AI offerings.
- commandersaki 1mo ago
  Most providers from my understanding don't handle aliases well. I have a catchall *@domain.tld and Fastmail when it receives an email on an alias, responds correctly with the proper alias. Also when I compose, it let's me write in a custom alias for the From sender. Other providers and email clients seem to want you to create an identity for each alias which is a huge burden.
- jabroni_salad 1mo ago
  It's only anecdotal but for every site that rejects my personal domain they accept a fastmail.com alias just fine.
LeBit 1mo ago
I’ve been with FastMail for probably over 25 years. The only downside is that search is not as effective as Gmail. Other than that, they have everything I would want an email provider to provide. On the last renewal I checked the competition. ProtonMail is nice but they are expensive and the end to end encryption comes at the price of breaking basic email standards. Will I keep using fastmail? If they keep their prices reasonable, I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue with them for another 25 years.
- brongondwana 1mo ago
  I'd be interested in knowing what kind of searches aren't working for you. Rebuilding our search infrastructure is on the roadmap (from the current Xapian to something which is easier to duplicate as tags into the client's local search database as well so online and offline searches don't have as many differences).
letmetweakit 1mo ago
Left gmail 5 years ago for Fastmail, haven't looked back. Their support is super fast and effective, had to use it once. Gmail support is nonexistent.
fossilwater 1mo ago
I really wanted to move all of my "important stuff" to Fastmail but I found the emails I was sending kept getting caught in spam mail of the receivers, especially to Outlook emails. This is using the default fastmail.com domain I know it's not Fastmail's fault but it's a big dealbreaker for me since a lot of professional emails are on Gmail / Outlook. I had this same issue with Proton, missed some opportunities because they didn't even see my mail.
sylware 1mo ago
Is fastmail blocking self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS like gmail.com? (email addresses with IP literals are stronger than SPF). Is fastmail gated with 'whatwg cartel' web engines like gmail.com?
- Godsend69 1mo ago
  [dead]
memset 1mo ago
Thank you for the write up! Question: do you notice that you’re getting spam from unrelated companies after signing up for an alias? (Like, you sign up for a grocery store loyalty program and somehow end up getting pharmacy spam?)
whazor 1mo ago
Fastmail search sucks But now I use the MCP and that seems to resolve all my search problems. Now I let an agent search. Their MCP can still be improved though
balderdash 1mo ago
I moved over to Fastmail a maybe five years ago and it was pretty painless. The actual mechanics I did in an hour or so while half watching a movie. The hardest bit, which you just have to do slowly over the course of 2-6 months is update your new email in services and accounts (banks, insurance, airlines, etc) but with a password manager, you just do it as you use them and it’s pretty easy. The best thing for me was that I’ve had my Gmail for 20+ years, so thinning out the list of companies that have my email is nice - now my Gmail is mostly marketing emails from companies I don’t care about. I go into it occasionally to see if there is anything I need and then just delete in bulk.
- phyzome 1mo ago
  If you use your own domain name for email, you only have to do the slow thing once. When I switched my mail hosting from GMail to Fastmail, all my email addresses stayed the same.
aranaur 1mo ago
When I had more time on my hands, I jumped from CPanel email to Outlook (when they offered free custom domain mail) to Zoho before landing on FastMail. It's been about a decade now and, other than adding the occasional custom domain and the rare service outage, I have made very few configuration changes. Worth every penny. I have zero regrets.
internet_points 1mo ago
Been a paid customer for over 13 years now. I'm very happy with them, have never considered switching to anything else.
buildbuildbuild 1mo ago
Absolutely love Fastmail. I badly wish that they added a few key enterprise features: mandatory 2FA, SSO, provisioning, and more robust audit logs. If you’re reading we would pay for this! Fastmail makes SOC-2 a bit tedious for us to maintain.
xcupapps 1mo ago
[dead]
absoluteunit1 1mo ago
Have been using Fastmail for the last 2 years for my startup. Can't speak for other use cases but highly recommend for solo devs and small teams. Great support, great pricing and never had an issue with their services
jabroni_salad 1mo ago
the subdomain addressing is interesting but not really portable. Personally I only use it for things that I would be okay using a 10minutemail for, and I use plus addressing for anything that would be more permanent.
nunez 1mo ago
Another happy Fastmail user and G-Suite refugee here. I've been using it for several years now and couldn't be happier. It just works, and I greatly appreciate that they don't try to foist "value" onto me like Google does CONSTANTLY with Gemini. Gemini is happy to write emails for you, yet Gmail _still_ doesn't support push email on iOS. Like, what are we even doing here? Fastmail, instead, is like: "Here's a detailed and well-written document on how to set up Fastmail with your Apple Mail, and just in case you need it, and you probably won't, we have the webapp." It's very reminiscent of what Google _used_ to be like back in ye olden days. If someone knows of a good equivalent for Drive, I'm all ears. I'm RAVAGING to get off that platform.
thoughtpeddler 1mo ago
These discussions always gloss over the reliability of delivery (i.e. is your email making it to the intended inbox or getting squashed into spam, or even shot down before making it to the recipient), especially when custom domains are used (which I suspect is often the case with Fastmail). As much as I want openness, independence, portability, etc of my personal digital stack, sometimes "just getting the work done" takes precedence, and email is one of those areas if not THE area where that matters most online.
lurght 1mo ago
Fastmail is quite good, I recently moved an older and recently privately conscious relative to it from Gmail and they've been very pleased and like having their own domain. The initial pain of moving everything over to your own domain in particular, is greatly trumped by the long term enjoyment of having it and knowing moving provider again if I need to wont be nearly as painful.
- dataflow 1mo ago
  Same story here as your first paragraph. But I can't bring myself to make the switch. Not just because of the pain or changing addresses but also because (among other reasons) payment introduces failure modes that I don't find acceptable. E.g., there should be no payment necessary for me to receive mail at my main address. Physical mail doesn't work that way; it's ridiculous for email to. Email is supposed to be better than physical mail, not worse. Even more so if I'm paying for it.
forty 1mo ago
I have been using fastmail for a few years (not coming from gmail) and the service is good indeed (I don't need much tbh). I'm considering switching at some point anyway as I'm trying to move the last parts of my digital life back to Europe, but I have not found an alternative I liked so far
- Winkelmesser 29d ago
  I've been using Mailbox.org for almost a year now and am very happy. They not only host email for you but also online conferencing, simple office suite and storage drive.
  - forty 29d ago
    They are in my list with mailo and mailfence. Mailbox have the benefit of allowing monthly subscription so I can easily try them
b-j-n 1mo ago
Do not recommend to rely on Fastmail for important accounts anymore! Had an issue where I needed help from customer support to regain access, and they kept dragging me along and never resolved the issue. Glad I had a backup account, otherwise I'd have been in real trouble without email access for weeks. I canceled and left Fastmail for that reason.
- brongondwana 1mo ago
  Sorry to hear you had that experience. There are a lot of delays and cross-checks built into our process for re-enabling access to your account, because it would be catastrophic to let the wrong person into an account because they claimed to be that person and to have "lost their password". So a "don't give access" failure is generally less costly than a "give access incorrectly" failure. It sure sucks to be on the wrong side of one of those failures though. If you ever do give us another try, I hope it goes much more smoothly for you.
dogcow 1mo ago
I was a long-time Fastmail customer for probably about 10 years. I had all my family members using it, but just finished migrating everyone away. They changed their pricing plans several years back, but kept me on the grandfathered pricing, which was very reasonable. Then earlier this year, they more than doubled my annual price, at which point I felt it was no longer worth it. At a certain point, e-mail is e-mail. For those who just want simple IMAP e-mail hosting, I can recommend mxroute.com and purelymail.com - I've used both, and both work well, and are very reasonably priced. The owner of mxroute.com can be a bit abrasive to uh, put it politely, but to his credit he is very dedicated and responsive. The community surrounding purelymail.com is also responsive and helpful. I'd encourage everyone to take it a step further and self-host your own IMAP server. Doing this is very simple; use a script like getmail[1] to pull your new messages from your e-mail host and deliver them to your local IMAP server. If you have a VPN set up on your phone and laptops, you can access your e-mail everywhere. Been doing this for years, and it has been wonderful knowing that I have full sovereignty over my entire e-mail history. [1] https://getmail6.org/ https://getmail6.org/
bigbuppo 1mo ago
I love Fastmail. They're built on top of open source software, Cyrus IMAP, and they've more or less become the steward of that project.

311 points by neogodless 1mo ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments

totallygeeky 1mo ago

Fastmail is fantastic, I've been a very happy customer for at least a couple years now. Masked emails have been so nice for throwaway/sketchy sites. It's done everything I could ask, would highly recommend for anyone looking to make the switch from elsewhere.

steve_adams_86 1mo ago

Fastmail is the service I've paid for longer than any other, without any pauses, and with the most satisfaction of any subscription. Like the author says, email isn't exciting, it isn't a fun or interesting subscription, but it works perfectly for me and offers excellent value for what I pay. It's so gratifyingly functional and boring.

ColdStream 1mo ago
Same, been about 10 years now and it is the definition of 'It just works'. I do like that they are up front with how the data is handled and what that can mean for privacy. They are just working within the system but being transparent with it.
raffraffraff 1mo ago
Private Email (a Namecheap product) makes me wish I didn't move that account off Gmail. I'll take a look at Fastmail.

beart 1mo ago

Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most. For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.

Vinnl 1mo ago
> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most. That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
- denkmoon 1mo ago
  A few hours pf effort to liberate your email from Google. Well worth imo.
  - Vinnl 1mo ago
    Well, at least the emails that I don't send at least one Gmail user... (Don't get me wrong, I still want to do it, but it's still daunting.)
- georgemcbay 1mo ago
  > That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately. You don't have to do it all in one go. It isn't like you have to move everything all at once like you're moving to a new apartment. I started moving away from gmail years ago. It took probably like 5-10 minutes to set up email under my own DNS control and to set a forwarding address on gmail that pointed to that email. I didn't even bother to do an initial bulk move of things over to the new email, I just switched things over individually as needed in a sort of on-demand fashion. 30-60 seconds here and there moving over individual accounts one at a time and only when it became obvious that I was moving over something worth keeping up on. Spread out like that it felt like almost no effort at all.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    This is the way! Every time google did something to piss me off I moved an account or two in anger. It felt good. It felt so good that when I searched my gmail and only found google-related hits in my password manager, I was slightly disappointed lol
  - dietr1ch 1mo ago

CJefferson 1mo ago

My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.

threecheese 1mo ago
Same; I was a sucker for GitHub SSO as well. I have no idea how to unwind it all, but (like Google SSO) it certainly had its benefits while I was using it. I remember there was an “open” SSO provider - OpenID maybe - back in the 2000s when a federated identity made interacting with blogs and such much easier. It’s the same with GitHub today, with various 3rd parties who need access to your code. They don’t have a “give me an git+ssh url” and so you almost need GitHub.
ColdStream 1mo ago
Hmmm, that is an interesting pickle. Some are probably fairly easy to swap over but it is so dependent on each service. Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
jacquesm 1mo ago
Make a new account then?
laweijfmvo 1mo ago
i’m not sure i’ll ever delete my google accounts, but my goal was to stop using them. if someday an email comes in, it’ll still get auto forwarded, and if i need to login, i’ll have access to it.
- kenhwang 1mo ago
  I don't even bother with forwarding mail from Gmail, it's just a black hole for marketing emails that I'd only occasionally glance at when I'm looking for a discount code.
- thisislife2 1mo ago

asgraham 1mo ago

But can I still give all my emails to OpenAI?? (semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)

nmjenkins 1mo ago
Sure, if you really want to, you connect whatever AI you like: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ – but there's no LLM built in to Fastmail itself; it's a personal choice.

HeadOfProbing 1mo ago

Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?

thebitguru 1mo ago
I wish they would improve their iOS app. It does leave a bit to be desired.
- kiwijamo 1mo ago
  FYI Fastmail works really well with the iOS native Mail/Calendar app if you wanted to try that out. iOS is pretty much the only platform I don't use the Fastmail app on.
Klonoar 1mo ago
Is it still a Webview?
- HeadOfProbing 1mo ago
  Some of it feels like so.
i1856511 1mo ago
I know that this is at least somewhat on their radar. Scrolling used to not be 60 FPS either, now it is.

etothet 1mo ago

I'm in the process of migrating away from my custom domain on Google (I'm grandfathered in from back when they offered it for free). So far getting all my old email, contacts, and calendar info FastMail has been seamless. All that's left is to repoint the DNS. Like another comment, I too have a couple of services connected to "Sign in w/ Google". Until I actually delete my Google org, those will still remain active. Since I'm not paying, I feel OK about this.

dfee 1mo ago
keep going – i was in your shoes 24mo ago.

GiorgioG 1mo ago

I moved to Fastmail from gmail a few years ago. I'm thrilled to not have Google searching my primary email address any longer. I still use gmail for SSO for a lot of things from my 'gmail.com' account.

0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
You may already know this, but in case anyone else doesn't, you can create a Google account using a non-Google email address, so your SSO doesn't have to depend on a Gmail address if you don't want

anonthrownaway 1mo ago

I recently switched over 6 gmail accounts (both personal and business) from gmail to fastmail. I have been suddenly bombarded with a mountain of spam that the goog must have been catching. It doesn't seem like my constant flagging is doing anything. I ended up building a convoluted mess of filters that will probably cause me to misflag something important one day. :-/ Also, I really miss the auto categorization into primary, promotions, social and updates. This is a killer feature! I'm happy to be rid of the goog's convoluted management console, but wondering why fastmail's spam filters aren't up to snuff...

thibaut_barrere 1mo ago
I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
tomaskafka 1mo ago
Thank you for this report - I tried leaving gmail 2 years ago and returned quickly exactly because of this. Sad to hear the situation remains unchanged. Meanwhile, on my other account, I have hacked together a basic email classification with n8n and cheap LLM model, and it works awesomely and costs peanuts. I wonder why services who want to be google's competitors don't do this?
WarmWash 1mo ago
Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with. It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
kiwijamo 1mo ago
Interestingly, I have found it the other way around for me. While my main inbox is at Fastmail, I also have a historical Gmail account. My Fastmail inbox gets a few spam messages week. My Gmail account on the other hand gets hundreds a month (if not weekly) that slip past the google filters. This is mainly why I stopped forwarding emails from Gmail to Fastmail as >95% of the spam was sent via Gmail, and I suspect Fastmail doesn't try to filter those. Anyway, a helpful tip for you is that the Fastmail spam filter is configurable. You may want to look at making it more aggressive. Go to Fastmail > Settings > Filters & Rules > Filters > Spam protection > Advanced settings. Here you can either just select the 'Aggressive' preset or even customise your own thresholds for flagging a message as spam. Here you can also check how many messages are have been learnt by the filters. If you're forwarding emails from Gmail I'd also suggest turning that off or setting up a rule to dump the Gmail forwarded messages into a separate folder. I suspect you'll find most of the spam has been passed on by Gmail.

bix6 1mo ago

Anyone have thoughts on proton vs fastmail?

nsagent 1mo ago
I'm in the process of leaving Proton and moving to Fastmail. I'm now paying for Mullvad and Fastmail, but haven't had a chance to port over a bunch of Simplelogin aliases I have over to Fastmail yet (my fault for not using a custom domain for those, which I've now rectified with Fastmail). Despite having Proton since 2018, I've really gotten fed up with their service quality — they seem to half-ass most of their services and it's a real pita to use their ecosystem. People have been complaining for ages and nothing changes, so I've decided to take my business elsewhere. Hopefully I don't get flamed for my decision; that's another annoying aspect about Proton. There's a vocal portion of the userbase that are zealots and really take you to task when they feel you are criticizing Proton in any way.
- bix6 1mo ago
  I’ve liked their VPN so I’m considering my email there but people seem to have a really strong preference for fast mail so I’m curious why. Are you leaving just because general annoyance or improved feature set or what? It’s a lot of work to migrate so I don’t want to be back here in 2 years swapping again.
  - nsagent 1mo ago
    I moved because I found the Proton service to be poor. That includes reaching out to support for issues with my email and not really getting a good resolution. What's worse is that I ported all my emails over to Proton, which meant my data usage was above the free tier, so I was essentially hostage to keep paying (even though my actual usage is on Proton is much below the free tier). While they do label the emails you import, it's useless because it gets intermingled if they are part of the same thread (for example, all my bills that switched over were tagged as imported even when I got a new bill; this was an issue for even direct email threads with other people). Furthermore, it's nearly impossible to bulk delete anything, you have to use their web interface (which is very limiting). If you try to delete using something like Thunderbird, the emails stay in All Mail, so it's not really deleted (thus keeps using your disk space, preventing you from moving to the free tier). It took me nearly a week to devise a way to properly delete the imported emails without accidentally deleting real emails. Using the web interface is SLOW. It was painful doing the deletes that way because Proton struggled to keep up with the deletes, it was glitching like crazy. Needless to say, that was a shitty shitty experience, and I'm positive that's part of their approach to lock users into their platform.

martin1975 1mo ago

I got the same capabilities from mxroute.com, another worthwhile alternative - hosted in the USA. Plus they offer a no subscription, 10GB one time fee (I think $150 at the time I got it) account...unlimited domains/subdomains, etc -everything managed thru directadmin. Replaced my Google Workspace email w/this and never looked back. I still use Google for authentication and Google Drive.

john01dav 1mo ago
The sustainability of this is dubious to me because you're taking a one time fee for service forever, and eventually someone (possibly a future owner) is going to want to get more money out of you over this. Also, there are recurring costs to host this that continue forever, even with no further income from you.
- rationalist 1mo ago
  Maybe they're betting on new people always signing up and paying, but not using it much. Still a risky endeavor.
  - jmm5 1mo ago
    They heavily limit the number of lifetime subscriptions they sell to avoid it becoming a sustainability issue. That product isn't available right now, for example.
AnonC 1mo ago
The issue with mxroute is that it's run by one person, AFAIK. Of course, you can always move with a custom domain, but I'd rather have a team of people involved to manage risks better. Migadu (which I'm not a customer of) provides almost the same, but with a team and for a subscription. The lowest tier as of this comment is $19 a year.

frereubu 1mo ago

I'm a happy user of Fastmail, but I would prefer a properly EU-hosted service. (Fastmail now have data storage in the EU, but much of their infrastructure is in the US and data still passes through there - something that they're open about, but I'd prefer not to happen). The last time I looked at mailbox.org the offer wasn't nearly as good as Fastmail in terms of storage, catch-all email addresses etc, but I took another look recently and it seems to be better. Does anyone here have first-hand experience of mailbox.org?

kay_o 1mo ago
I use mailboxorg its acceptable. The webmail has io.ox in the URL so I assume it is hosted ox (www.ox.io of softwares) which is SIGNIFICANTLY worse performance and usability wise compared to the Fastmail webmail -- I don`t use SMTP/IMAP so I do not know what that is like. Routinely on restricted networks that only allow HTTP/HTTPS so it is a webmail only experience opinionated in mine.
- frereubu 1mo ago
  Thanks.
jorvi 1mo ago
As Fastmail themselves have pointed out many times, e-mail is inherently a multi-party activity with both parties holding a copy of the e-mails. Aside from the microscopic amount of people GPGing their e-mail and sending it over good servers, your e-mail is as private as the other party treats it. Which isn't very much. And you can't do anything about that. You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
- 0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
  The bigger issue isn't a privacy one, it's a security one. For many people, if you can get access to their email box, you can account-reset your way into any other account they own. So if an authoritarian state compromises your account (because they control the servers), there goes your everything

paxys 1mo ago

> Going and updating my accounts with a new address was easier than I was expecting Is this really true? Out of the probably many hundreds of online accounts I use I can think of very few that actually let you change the underlying email (which in almost ever case is the username) without having to create a brand new account.

rationalist 1mo ago
When I made the switch from @Gmail to my own email domains hosted by Fastmail, I never had any problem changing the email on my 100+ accounts with various services. That was about five years ago, I imagine it might have been more difficult in the past, say 10+ years ago.
anonthrownaway 1mo ago
The majority of mine are changeable, but the process is typically convoluted. The two that I have run into so far that I can't change are OpenRouter and Ecobee.
kiwijamo 1mo ago
Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule? I haven't really seen this sort of thing in the wild to be honest. Maybe one or two over 20+ years? I think the norm is using a username or an internal identification number (such as an UUID). It is rare the email address is actually used as the primary key to identify an account.
- Marsymars 1mo ago
  > Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule? Philips Hue. I've run into others, but that one sticks out because it's the only account I still have using my old email, since creating a new account would also involve re-pairing all of my Hue products.
- LeapingLennie 1mo ago
  https://www.coles.com.au/ https://www.coles.com.au/ (the 2nd largest supermarket chain in Australia) and https://makerworld.com/ https://makerworld.com/ are two I've come across.

dbgobrrr 1mo ago

Good move! I was there before, and the worst part was... I was using a @gmail.com address. Bad mistake on my part. So actually tracking what I used the address with, that was my real pain. Now everything is on my custom domain, so if I need to move on from my current provider, it will be painless. In the process I did manage to delete a whole bunch of accounts I didn't use anymore. Incidentally, I also moved to fastmail, and it is just boringly fantastic. It works. It has features I actually need and enjoy (masked emails!) and I recommend it to anyone who asks.

AustinDev 1mo ago
>I was using a @gmail.com address. Bad mistake on my part. So actually tracking what I used the address with, that was my real pain. This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI. I recently had a do a migration that I had been putting off for years and it was relatively painless.
- disposedtrolley 1mo ago
  > This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI. How did you solve this with AI?
  - jkestner 1mo ago
    They said “mostly”. AI solves 90% and then you solve the other 90%.
    - skydhash 1mo ago
      Lol. On almost every post someone comes in to say that $problem was easily solved by AI. Usually out of the whole context of the thread. Snake oil level comments.
    - RadiozRadioz 29d ago
      What is the 90%?
  - 26d ago

frou_dh 1mo ago

I like Fastmail but I'm starting to feel that the subscription cost is a bit overpriced for the way I use it (just IMAP email - not using the app, calendars, contacts, file hosting, ...). I've researched and found some other independent paid email providers that are significantly cheaper, although I suspect most of having a low bus factor with just 1 or 2 people operating them.

premier_cru 1mo ago
i have been using posteo.de for the last decade with no problems at all. Exactly the feature set you use. I only recently started to use their Caldav stuff which works. I recommend them.
- AnonC 1mo ago
  Same here. I don't want a custom domain for certain things, and Posteo (posteo.de) was good. Posteo increased the mailbox storage to 4 GB recently and the default number of free aliases too. I'm satisfied that it's run by a team and not by one person (the low bus factor mentioned above). At EUR 1 per month, it's way cheaper than Fastmail for multiple mailboxes across family members and provides a lot more value, IMO.
turpentine 1mo ago
It's likely that regular Fastmail users are subsidising their AI costs. I've talked to several people who were a bit shocked when Fastmail decided to complicate their offering with the current hyped trash.
- chrismorgan 1mo ago
  Are you thinking of some other company? The most Fastmail has done in LLM directions is offering an MCP API: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/ https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/.

IndySun 1mo ago

FastMail has an admirable bug bounty. Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited? https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/ https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/

ivankra 1mo ago
I stopped reading their privacy policy at "Fastmail is an Australian company" - Australia is a five eyes jurisdiction. That said, I'm a happy customer of almost a decade with them, but my email correspondence is pretty boring and not politically sensitive.
- IndySun 1mo ago
  Interesting. Should any email provider based in any of the 5 Eyes (or even 14) be avoided? But I feel, particularly for everyday folk, we have reached the point at which avoiding some level of surveillance is now virtually impossible.
  - ivankra 1mo ago
    Sadly true. Even if your provider takes privacy seriously, chances are the other side is using US big tech who'd happily give away their copy of your data to any sufficiently credentialed authority.
    - IndySun 27d ago
      Just to follow up. Is it your contention (basically) that any interaction with any of the Five Eyes country is suspect? I realise this puts (guesses off top of head) 95% of all internet traffic, theoretically including such 'privacy focussed' open source projects emanating from the five eyes/95%, as suspect too. Are we all incapable of being apart from that 95% (assuming you're in that 95%)?

stevenhubertron 1mo ago

I have used Fastmail for 5+ years, no real complaints other then some real emails get caught up in spam folder.

muhammadusman 1mo ago

I moved to using Fastmail as my primary over 7 years ago and I still use it as my main email address but I had hoped I could get rid of my gmail but instead it became a catch-all junk inbox similar to OP's gmail. The main issue is that so many websites use Login in with Google as a way to sign-in that I just had to keep my gmail logged in most of the time. So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.

bpbp-mango 1mo ago

fastmail really needs inbox categorization on the level of gmail

havaloc 1mo ago
I would move back to Fastmail if they offered it. Yes, I could muck about with MCP but give me AI light features, such as categorization and perhaps AI conditional rules.

Scene_Cast2 1mo ago

I made the move some time ago. There are some unpolished parts here and there, but I'm glad I made the move. Somewhat unrelated criticism of Gmail - during the migration, I found out that there is no way to search for starred archived emails in Gmail. They don't show up in Starred, nor in any search with is:starred. Their star status also doesn't carry over when migrating.

0xbadcafebee 1mo ago

Subdomain addressing really is a killer feature. Since developers are braindead and can't implement a valid email address parser to save their lives, 'foo+bar@mydomain.com', 'foo-bar@mydomain.com', and 'foo.bar@mydomain.com' often get rejected as "invalid email addresses". But 'foo@bar.mydomain.com' always works fine. Fastmail's Gmail integration to injest mails and calendars works fantastically. I've only had the calendar integration fail once, and was easily able to reconnect it. And iirc, you can even send mail through Gmail from Fastmail, so you can use Fastmail as an interface for both systems. Up until recently my biggest gripe was the lack of offline mail, but finally both the web app and mobile app have offline now. The UI is still a teeny bit clunky (the whole email view reloads itself, even in the mobile app, for no reason), but I barely notice it. It's very stable, fast, reliable, and simple. I even use the 'file storage' feature as a replacement for GDrive sharing the occasional file. One thing you don't realize when you leave Gmail is just how much crap you've signed up to over the years. I haven't used my Gmail for several years now but it still gets mail. (I'm keeping the account active so nobody else takes it and uses it for a weird attack)

mindwok 1mo ago

I did this for my business' email about a year ago. A few weeks ago, I moved everything. Fastmail is awesome, but perhaps more important is how bad Gmail's web interface is. Fastmail is way more responsive and fluid and feels almost native.

Asterism 1mo ago

I've used fastmail since 2014. No complaints!

NoboruWataya 1mo ago

I have been very happy with mailbox.org. I recently signed up for early access to Thundermail, which is the new email service being rolled out by the Thunderbird team. I have no particular need to change except that I like the idea of supporting Thunderbird. So I will be keeping an eye on it. If you use a custom domain and email clients rather than webmail, moving around becomes a lot easier. Another tip is to use a service like addy.io where you can create a new alias for every service, to help protect against spam.

snapplebobapple 1mo ago

Did this a half decade ago and hacent looked back.

olivierestsage 1mo ago

I’ve used Fastmail for about 20 years. The worst thing that happened was that because of an outage in 2006, I couldn’t log in to download my homework in time for my teacher to believe I wasn’t faking. The best thing was that I deleted all of my emails in the 2020s due to an IMAP mistake and a human got in contact with me and fixed it. I think that speaks for itself. Definitely not canceling that subscription anytime soon

stavros 29d ago
Every time I've sent them an email to ask something, I got a response from a knowledgeable human that solved my problem immediately. They're worth the money.

danpalmer 1mo ago

I have a blog post that I've been meaning to write about why I moved from Fastmail to Gmail. I love Fastmail as a product, but I realised it wasn't what I wanted anymore from my email. I think there's a tension between explicit and implicit organisation. If you want a really good email client, Fastmail is great, but while I did care about that at one point in my life, what I want now is really just the big box at the top of the email telling me about my package arriving today or showing my boarding pass. Fastmail is excellent for explicit organisation, but its implicit organisation isn't great. Gmail is the other way around. I don't like the Gmail UI or any of the organisation features, but I also don't really need to use them.

righthand 1mo ago
If you want to be tagged and tracked in that way then there is no better platform than Google services for sure.
dfee 1mo ago
but, you're going to pay either way (assuming you have a custom domain).
shelled 1mo ago
This is basically what my take has been after chasing everything else for way too long. Though I've not moved back and Gmail honestly isn't something I can now move back to (and no tracking/etc are not the reason). I just wrote a too long comment and I realise now most of that you've said in your short comment. Email for me is just a communication tool that the world still uses. Nothing else.
Gareth321 1mo ago
I think the next paradigm shift in software is going to be LLM-inferred user intent. Serving just what you really want, when you want it. Currently all inside whatever interface the LLM provider offers, but soon whatever interface the LLM decides is appropriate. People won't use apps anymore. Your LLM will tell you which emails you need to address, and will automatically triage the rest (and action those which can be actioned autonomously). You won't navigate to Facebook. You'll ask your LLMs what your friends are up to. You won't navigate to TikTok. You'll ask the LLM for some funny videos (or whatever you're in the mood for). We won't need to structure data hierarchically anymore. Just dump it somewhere, an LLM vectorises it, and it's super easy to retrieve later in whichever domain one needs it. The internet is about to undergo radical transformation.

ggm 1mo ago

A shout out to the fastmail management who acquired pobox.com and kept the domain going, leveraging the fastmail infra. I was really pleased my decades long investment in @short.name paid off, and I have been able to keep a short @pobox.com instance, which I undoubtedly would lose in the migration into @fastmail.com Aside from the vanity aspect, the distinction between a real mail provider and a stable forwarding service is a useful one. Thank you Bron (and others) for keeping things going.

brongondwana 1mo ago
On behalf of all of us here, you're welcome!

alexmuro 1mo ago

I generally am very satisfied with fastmail but I do have a hard time getting it to learn what is spam, maybe I'm missing something.

paulbgd 1mo ago

One underrated thing is how easy it is to get credentials for sending emails. If you self host a lot of stuff it's quick to get going.

zacwest 1mo ago

The real downside to subdomain addressing is that very few other providers support it. I think Migadu is the only one I could find. If you do end up needing to leave Fastmail, you might have to configure each and every subdomain as a unique email domain somewhere else. I would avoid it if you're starting fresh.

deleted 1mo ago

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zazuke 1mo ago

Only thing missing is a Screener, which once you have it, you cant live without. No need for burner adresses, as nobod lands in your inbox unapproves. I added it to my TUI, nvim and markdown first email client, neomd.

Hard_Space 1mo ago

Switched to FastMail two years ago. Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!

xfz 1mo ago

The pricing page is dishonest. It says prominently £4.50/month but that's for an annual subscription (£54 for 12 months is in smaller text below). If you want a monthly price you have to tab across to get the true figure of £5.40. The higher price wouldn't put me off - it's still very low - but the deception erodes trust from the very start.

k4runa 1mo ago

Fastmail is great because every time I get a new startup idea I can set up emails for each domain name I buy and it all goes to the same inbox.

tomcam 1mo ago
If you reply to an email, does it use the “primary“ domain name or does it use the same domain it was sent to?
- grsmvg 1mo ago
  Primary domain name. You pay for the inbox, not the domain.
  - scronkfinkle 1mo ago
    Maybe I am misunderstanding but I don't think this is true. Indeed you pay for the inbox, but it's not the primary domain. You can reply from any of the email addresses you created (which doesn't cost extra) and it automatically sets the FROM to be the email it was received on
    - dboreham 1mo ago
      This is indeed how it works.
      - grsmvg 26d ago
        I meant the opposite of what I wrote! I read it wrong
- mijowi 1mo ago
  If you have Fastmail configured to send from that domain as well, it will automatically reply from the same address the email was sent to. You can pick which address to send from, of those you have set up.

mock-possum 1mo ago

I made this exact move a month or so ago when google threw some money Musk’s way - and I gotta say, the transition was almost imperceptible. An hour, maybe, of configuring and testing, spaced out over a couple days, and boom, it’s like I was never on gmail.

egorfine 1mo ago

I'm using Fastmail for about 15 years and this is one of the services I'm extremely happy with. Definitely recommend!

shelled 1mo ago

Having started down this path of non-big-corp hosted email and my own personal domain (which is definitely not self-hosting, though I'd never want that inflicted upon me) almost a decade ago, I won't say it's been a rabbit hole. But there have been some learnings over the years — realisations, rather. The biggest: I went overboard with everything around moving my email away from Gmail. Almost like what I did with seedboxes over the years, until I realised I didn't need most of what a seedbox offers, and that I didn't need a seedbox in the first place. Whenever this discussion comes up here, or say on Reddit, the focus immediately moves to privacy, anonymity, tracking. Those are valid points, no doubt. What takes a back seat, I suspect, are aspects like reliability and some sort of accountable customer support — and no, a smaller company doesn't need an army of support agents, just a few people and an intention to help and solve problems, delays being okay. Many utterly irresponsible hosted email providers get a pass just because they posture with an activist flag. The whole virtue signalling in this sub-industry muddles things. Some are worse. Some deny you basic email access in the name of things like e2ee. Now e2ee is a fine idea, but enforcing it unilaterally — and yet not really enforcing it, because let's face it, you can't until you "move" your ecosystem, the way Signal has been "moving" it. Locked to the app, locked to the web app, yet your emails flow to other systems and addresses that aren't e2ee (as they should!). You just can't use IMAP, among other things. This has become such a toxic topic on certain forums that I start wondering if maybe I'm the one holding it wrong. Another observation: bundling things that aren't email. This is another contentious topic. I wish there were more mainstream, custom-domain-hosted email providers that just did email, nothing else. I first started using disposable email designed to route to my domain via my mail host (a German one). It was as convoluted as it gets, and still is. Then came Apple's HME, with limitations I wouldn't wish on an enemy. Finally settled on SimpleLogin. Not the best, but what I like is that it gets out of the way — I can receive emails on those addresses and send from them easily. It's also a separate service, not hooked to my mail host, and I wouldn't want that now. What would I do if I had to go back to when I was starting? 1. I wouldn't look for a "private" email provider — just get my own domain (which I did) and sign up with a better-priced, responsible, email-only provider (preferably something larger). 2. Never use the free email that comes with the mail host account. 3. Let go of privacy and tracking on email. It's almost painful to say, but I'm tired of that part. And if Gmail hadn't done idiotic things like forcing "folders" on my account with no way to change or delete them (Important, and whatnot), I might have just stayed with them. At least my emails would have been delivered — unlike with my current host, which doesn't do "emailing" up to standard. For heaven's sake, just let my email through, and let senders get through to me as long as their ID is verified and they're not on any spam list. Hell, I am thinking of moving a domain of mine to Zoho. A company I'd have never imagined thinking of in the same breath and it has not become "better" somehow. But here we go, a decade later. This is just a rant I guess. But I am really exhausted and yes switch mail providers even with your own domain is daunting! The apprehension of downtime, fear of losing emails, something breaking etc are just too much. But at least there's a possibility. tl;dr: If I do it over and Gmail stayed what it was back then, I'd just go back to them, just with "my own domain." Not that Google got better; just shows how disillusioned I am with the personal-domain-hosting hype. My own domain, nothing else. Not the rest of what I've done chasing for "this kind of" mail hosting.

gib444 1mo ago

Long time Fastmail customer here. They need to stop their recent trend of breaking their UI, especially in backwards-incompatible ways. They recently recently removed app-based font size from the backend (but just for mobile), and released an updated Android app which only uses the system-level font scaling, which broke it for people who hadn't upgraded yet. Plus the app-based functionality was useful. Not sure why couldn't just add a new "Use system font-scaling" Then there was the debacle of removing horizontal separators in the list view. After backlash, they added an option.

jim180 1mo ago

Shameless plug - I’ve made an app for Apple platforma, that gives easier access to masked mail (from menu bar on macOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670

Uptrenda 1mo ago

The last tine I tried to switch from Gmail it was a complete failure and the main reason was spam. I get --a lot of it-- and I've even had trolls sign me up for spam lists before. I think conceivably the biggest reason to use Gmail is now gone because LLMs could classify spam almost perfectly. If I were to try switch again I'd look for a mail service that specifically mentioned using LLMs for spam. If they say they're using one of the "open source" spam prevention solutions I can almost guarantee you its not going to do shit. They aren't good enough to catch all the permutations of serious spammers (who probably test on those tools before sending anyway.) Edit: it also occurs to me that you could simply download all your mail locally and pipe it through a local model. That could actually work really well, tbh. If you hosted that on a server you would have the advantages of online access with gmail-grade spam filtering at any standard host.

sabot90260 1mo ago

Subdomain addressing for auto-sorting is clever. Beats writing filter rules one by one.

ArtemKhymenko 1mo ago

a bit overpriced, overall

Arsen-V 1mo ago

[flagged]

jimnotgym 1mo ago

I have been fairly happy with ProtonMail, except for a while back their Android app became unusable, often not sending mail! I started using web mail in a mobile browser, and whilst i have struggled with it for probably 3 years now it is annoying. Tbf using it with outlook on my desktop is annoying too. The bridge often logs out on restart. I was thinking about Fastmail as an alternative

GaryBluto 1mo ago

Considering moving to Fastmail myself. I usually use mailbox.org but they've been having far too many outages recently (some declared on their status page, some not). Problem is I use numerous E-Mail aliases for different services and it seems intimidating to transfer them all. Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?

theshrike79 1mo ago
I degoogled myself from Gmail/Calendar ... five years ago now? Zero issues with Fastmail that might've affected my life in any way. I can kinda-sorta remember a few outages, but they were night time in my TZ so I found out about them after the fact. Also I _love_ how they're not doing the Proton route and trying to become an everything-service. They do mail, calendar and contact sync, that's about it. No VPNs or cloud storage or AI offerings.
commandersaki 1mo ago
Most providers from my understanding don't handle aliases well. I have a catchall *@domain.tld and Fastmail when it receives an email on an alias, responds correctly with the proper alias. Also when I compose, it let's me write in a custom alias for the From sender. Other providers and email clients seem to want you to create an identity for each alias which is a huge burden.
jabroni_salad 1mo ago
It's only anecdotal but for every site that rejects my personal domain they accept a fastmail.com alias just fine.

LeBit 1mo ago

I’ve been with FastMail for probably over 25 years. The only downside is that search is not as effective as Gmail. Other than that, they have everything I would want an email provider to provide. On the last renewal I checked the competition. ProtonMail is nice but they are expensive and the end to end encryption comes at the price of breaking basic email standards. Will I keep using fastmail? If they keep their prices reasonable, I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue with them for another 25 years.

brongondwana 1mo ago
I'd be interested in knowing what kind of searches aren't working for you. Rebuilding our search infrastructure is on the roadmap (from the current Xapian to something which is easier to duplicate as tags into the client's local search database as well so online and offline searches don't have as many differences).

letmetweakit 1mo ago

Left gmail 5 years ago for Fastmail, haven't looked back. Their support is super fast and effective, had to use it once. Gmail support is nonexistent.

fossilwater 1mo ago

I really wanted to move all of my "important stuff" to Fastmail but I found the emails I was sending kept getting caught in spam mail of the receivers, especially to Outlook emails. This is using the default fastmail.com domain I know it's not Fastmail's fault but it's a big dealbreaker for me since a lot of professional emails are on Gmail / Outlook. I had this same issue with Proton, missed some opportunities because they didn't even see my mail.

sylware 1mo ago

Is fastmail blocking self-hosted SMTP servers without DNS like gmail.com? (email addresses with IP literals are stronger than SPF). Is fastmail gated with 'whatwg cartel' web engines like gmail.com?

Godsend69 1mo ago
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memset 1mo ago

Thank you for the write up! Question: do you notice that you’re getting spam from unrelated companies after signing up for an alias? (Like, you sign up for a grocery store loyalty program and somehow end up getting pharmacy spam?)

whazor 1mo ago

Fastmail search sucks But now I use the MCP and that seems to resolve all my search problems. Now I let an agent search. Their MCP can still be improved though

balderdash 1mo ago

I moved over to Fastmail a maybe five years ago and it was pretty painless. The actual mechanics I did in an hour or so while half watching a movie. The hardest bit, which you just have to do slowly over the course of 2-6 months is update your new email in services and accounts (banks, insurance, airlines, etc) but with a password manager, you just do it as you use them and it’s pretty easy. The best thing for me was that I’ve had my Gmail for 20+ years, so thinning out the list of companies that have my email is nice - now my Gmail is mostly marketing emails from companies I don’t care about. I go into it occasionally to see if there is anything I need and then just delete in bulk.

phyzome 1mo ago
If you use your own domain name for email, you only have to do the slow thing once. When I switched my mail hosting from GMail to Fastmail, all my email addresses stayed the same.

aranaur 1mo ago

When I had more time on my hands, I jumped from CPanel email to Outlook (when they offered free custom domain mail) to Zoho before landing on FastMail. It's been about a decade now and, other than adding the occasional custom domain and the rare service outage, I have made very few configuration changes. Worth every penny. I have zero regrets.

internet_points 1mo ago

Been a paid customer for over 13 years now. I'm very happy with them, have never considered switching to anything else.

buildbuildbuild 1mo ago

Absolutely love Fastmail. I badly wish that they added a few key enterprise features: mandatory 2FA, SSO, provisioning, and more robust audit logs. If you’re reading we would pay for this! Fastmail makes SOC-2 a bit tedious for us to maintain.

xcupapps 1mo ago

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absoluteunit1 1mo ago

Have been using Fastmail for the last 2 years for my startup. Can't speak for other use cases but highly recommend for solo devs and small teams. Great support, great pricing and never had an issue with their services

jabroni_salad 1mo ago

the subdomain addressing is interesting but not really portable. Personally I only use it for things that I would be okay using a 10minutemail for, and I use plus addressing for anything that would be more permanent.

nunez 1mo ago

Another happy Fastmail user and G-Suite refugee here. I've been using it for several years now and couldn't be happier. It just works, and I greatly appreciate that they don't try to foist "value" onto me like Google does CONSTANTLY with Gemini. Gemini is happy to write emails for you, yet Gmail _still_ doesn't support push email on iOS. Like, what are we even doing here? Fastmail, instead, is like: "Here's a detailed and well-written document on how to set up Fastmail with your Apple Mail, and just in case you need it, and you probably won't, we have the webapp." It's very reminiscent of what Google _used_ to be like back in ye olden days. If someone knows of a good equivalent for Drive, I'm all ears. I'm RAVAGING to get off that platform.

thoughtpeddler 1mo ago

These discussions always gloss over the reliability of delivery (i.e. is your email making it to the intended inbox or getting squashed into spam, or even shot down before making it to the recipient), especially when custom domains are used (which I suspect is often the case with Fastmail). As much as I want openness, independence, portability, etc of my personal digital stack, sometimes "just getting the work done" takes precedence, and email is one of those areas if not THE area where that matters most online.

lurght 1mo ago

Fastmail is quite good, I recently moved an older and recently privately conscious relative to it from Gmail and they've been very pleased and like having their own domain. The initial pain of moving everything over to your own domain in particular, is greatly trumped by the long term enjoyment of having it and knowing moving provider again if I need to wont be nearly as painful.

dataflow 1mo ago
Same story here as your first paragraph. But I can't bring myself to make the switch. Not just because of the pain or changing addresses but also because (among other reasons) payment introduces failure modes that I don't find acceptable. E.g., there should be no payment necessary for me to receive mail at my main address. Physical mail doesn't work that way; it's ridiculous for email to. Email is supposed to be better than physical mail, not worse. Even more so if I'm paying for it.

forty 1mo ago

I have been using fastmail for a few years (not coming from gmail) and the service is good indeed (I don't need much tbh). I'm considering switching at some point anyway as I'm trying to move the last parts of my digital life back to Europe, but I have not found an alternative I liked so far

Winkelmesser 29d ago
I've been using Mailbox.org for almost a year now and am very happy. They not only host email for you but also online conferencing, simple office suite and storage drive.
- forty 29d ago
  They are in my list with mailo and mailfence. Mailbox have the benefit of allowing monthly subscription so I can easily try them

b-j-n 1mo ago

Do not recommend to rely on Fastmail for important accounts anymore! Had an issue where I needed help from customer support to regain access, and they kept dragging me along and never resolved the issue. Glad I had a backup account, otherwise I'd have been in real trouble without email access for weeks. I canceled and left Fastmail for that reason.

brongondwana 1mo ago
Sorry to hear you had that experience. There are a lot of delays and cross-checks built into our process for re-enabling access to your account, because it would be catastrophic to let the wrong person into an account because they claimed to be that person and to have "lost their password". So a "don't give access" failure is generally less costly than a "give access incorrectly" failure. It sure sucks to be on the wrong side of one of those failures though. If you ever do give us another try, I hope it goes much more smoothly for you.

dogcow 1mo ago

I was a long-time Fastmail customer for probably about 10 years. I had all my family members using it, but just finished migrating everyone away. They changed their pricing plans several years back, but kept me on the grandfathered pricing, which was very reasonable. Then earlier this year, they more than doubled my annual price, at which point I felt it was no longer worth it. At a certain point, e-mail is e-mail. For those who just want simple IMAP e-mail hosting, I can recommend mxroute.com and purelymail.com - I've used both, and both work well, and are very reasonably priced. The owner of mxroute.com can be a bit abrasive to uh, put it politely, but to his credit he is very dedicated and responsive. The community surrounding purelymail.com is also responsive and helpful. I'd encourage everyone to take it a step further and self-host your own IMAP server. Doing this is very simple; use a script like getmail[1] to pull your new messages from your e-mail host and deliver them to your local IMAP server. If you have a VPN set up on your phone and laptops, you can access your e-mail everywhere. Been doing this for years, and it has been wonderful knowing that I have full sovereignty over my entire e-mail history. [1] https://getmail6.org/ https://getmail6.org/

bigbuppo 1mo ago

I love Fastmail. They're built on top of open source software, Cyrus IMAP, and they've more or less become the steward of that project.