I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails from a new domain in minutes.
One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties.
With Gmail you can only use `+` and `.`, which makes it easy to derive the base email. With Fastmail, my main email can be something like `ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be `iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`. I didn't realize how useful that would be until I started using it, but it's quickly morphed into a killer feature.
Also, there are automatic aliases when you use your own domain. Say, you have name@domain.com, then all *@name.domain.com are also working aliases, like spotify@name.domain.com. Really neat feature.
It may not be nearly as strong of a lock-in as a @gmail.com address, but I'd be curious to hear how many heavy alias users are paying Fastmail on a month-to-month basis.
If you are conversing with people it’s unlikely you are going to create an alias for each person specifically, that’ll come across as super shady TBH.
So it’s not a major issue for most people because most services support 30-50 aliases easily.
the mail handling is set at domain DNS level - one may choose to handle their custom domain with another provider at any time
it is zero lock-in,
I can read my custom domain email with them with minimal fuss, or I could handle it myself in any other manner if I choose so.
This is an amazing feature that I utilise all the time. I just however wish I could easily reply from that alias, as opposed to my primary one.
Yes, I know you can have a wildcard send-from address like *@account.yourdomain.com, but it will default to account@yourdomain.com and you have to manually select and replace the wildcard with the email you want to send from. As opposed to just auto-filling out the From field with the address that initially received the email.
One of the reasons I started building it was so I could transition off GMail to something else like Fastmail. I worried that I needed to get off GMail sooner rather than later because the GMail address was slowly spreading out across my online presence and I was getting concerned about the massive hassle that it would be if some Google automated process decided to close my account. But I never got around to it because I couldn’t decide on a mail provider and didn’t want to go through the hassle of changing over all those addresses. Instead I was able to slowly transition all my accounts, etc. over to Kopi addresses. Now that I’m running my mail through Kopi though, I’m not really worried about a Google account shutdown - though I should probably still get off GMail, just feels less urgent now.
Kopi works by acting as a “mail forwarder” in between the sender and whatever mail provider you want to use. Of course, you’re still locked in if you use a shared domain like kopi.cloud, kopimail.net, etc. - but you can bring your own domain if you want - you don’t have to be locked in to Kopi.
If you use your own domain, you are typically not locked in to your provider, unless .. I guess a couple of hours of work could be too much hassle to switch the provider, but there is no need to change your email addresses.
Might be better to generate random addresses for web account signups, so other users can reserve readable addresses for their main email. It would suck if all the good addresses were taken by a few people. I hope a trend like that wouldn't cause Fastmail to limit the feature.
- fastmail.us
- fastmail.to
...
- hailmail.net
- mailworks.org
...
dozens of domains. they must be spending a bundle just on renewing domains ... :-)
etc this makes filtering your email even simpler.
First (and most importantly), Fastmail aliases don't need to be linked to my domain. If the goal of this is to not have my identity/addresses tracked across services, it is important that I not have a single, unique identifier shared between those emails.
If I sign up for Walmart with `walmart@danshumway.com`, I haven't gained any privacy. If I sign up with `walmart@fastmail.com`, I've gained a great deal of privacy.
Second, another use for Fastmail aliases is filtering -- the fact that they're not catch-alls. If I use a catch-all, an abuser can still fill up my email box by sending to unfiltered catch-all addresses. However, most emails you send to `@danshumway.com` will bounce, because I explicitly don't have a catch-all set up.
I could add a bunch of custom filters into Gmail to auto-delete emails that didn't go into a specific address, but I'd basically be re-inventing the wheel for no benefit. With Fastmail, I can easily modify, remove, or add a new alias in less than a minute, and I can have my aliases split between as many custom domains as I want. This is all stuff that Gmail handles very poorly. Even setting up custom domains at all is annoying in Gmail if you're not paying for GSuite.
And of course, Fastmail aliases can also contain catch-alls and wildcard operators, which means you get the best of both worlds. You can set up a wildcard alias for your domain that forwards everything like you describe, and that only counts as one alias.
I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone.
So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in) that just sits there, likely hogging battery life, receiving emails and storing them so that I can read them / access them while in an airplane/foreign country/bad connection spot.
If they fix this I would be overjoyed.
Another reason is the lack of push notification (not sure if i'm using the right term) when using the built in gmail app for fastmail. It only gives me the option to poll every 15 minutes. The gmail app also doesn't support actions like snooze, swipe to archive etc on non-gmail accounts and I like having that in the fast mail app.
Fastmail's iOS app does support this functionality.
The reason we didn't ship it earlier was around push notifications and the way our accounts are sharded - if you had two different accounts on different backends, merging the pushes into a single badge count and keeping track of the per-device push credentials across the multiple backends was buggy, so it would have provided a sub-standard experience for everybody.
> Fastmail won’t be making changes to our technology or policies in response to this bill. Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption.
Source: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...
I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.
[0] https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7381738...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/law...
You can basically sum that up as "we weren't able to protect your privacy in the first place, so you don't have to worry about this bill compromising it".
The quote also misses that Australia has silent and warrantless access to data and that Fastmail's servers are in the US, so subject to America's three-letter agencies as well.
> I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.
The competition isn't American megacorps, it's small European companies like ProtonMail (Switzerland, as far as I can see usually requires a court order and Swiss law requires notifying the subject) or Mailbox.org (Germany, only allows disclosure with a warrant or imminent danger to life). Even if your email is left unencrypted, these countries have much stronger data protection and privacy laws.
That's one beautiful quote
The thing is - email isn't just sitting in your mailbox to only be viewed by you. The recipient has a copy which could leak it (or via hax). Copies of email can be saved by both incoming and outgoing systems.
If you need security & privacy - email is not the technology you want to use whatsoever.
I totally understand why they do that. It's just not for me.
Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even cross providers (on https://beta.protonmail.com composing an e-mail to Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> will enable encryption). But they don't support all usual e-mail features like IMAP and SMTP (there are bridges but...).
All of which can be seamlessly connected to the same single account - you can then use rules to distribute the incoming emails as you see fit.
Switched from Gmail some five years ago, I have been happy with the choice every since!
Both with custom domains and aliases on PM for throaway stuff
They're both very good - the upside with PM is privacy while the downside is compatability. Fastmail I just assume my email is archived and read.
No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate.
And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.
Apart from that I find their webmail to be faster and superior to Gmail. They also provide file storage with WebDAV access which I find useful for apps (like notes applications etc) which support it for syncing between devices.
There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major complaints.
Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.
XMPP pre-Conversations.im was pretty bad anyway but Fastmail could review their stance given some other mail providers re-enabling modern XMPP: https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conver...
Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices
2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.
Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.
I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any good yet. I paid for TouchDown (https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html) but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor search, sluggish.
I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(
My philosophy about this can be summed up as: If it's important enough you'll call me (... and you'll call me again if I don't pick up the first time)... and I'll take your urgency VERY seriously. If you invest effort into communicating with me, then I'll reciprocate. If you're just firing off email... nah.
But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, and I cannot figure out how to make it accept me@mydomain.com.
There is a help page on setting up identities, but it doesn't work for me. :-( Other than than I'm 100% happy with fastmail.
me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com
Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched.
As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail, but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.
So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.
I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom back in 2004. Such a long time ago.
I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super easily.
Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top (somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service!
This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested sounding nice.
To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift more troublesome.
2. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com
3. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com
That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.
One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.
Great service. I use all features to their potential And appreciate the work and thought you and your team give.
Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the option for slow connections while traveling abroad.
I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions.
Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail.
The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail address.
[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html
A hearty thank you to all the Fastmail devs who read this; thank you for your good work!
Now that I think about it, I have kind of rolled my eye when they announced that their new "snooze" feature was only available to their latest plans or big legacy account [1]. Not a move I was expecting for Fastmail.
I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to separate into its own special zone).
But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for me.
Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in" you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result, I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said that I had to use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standar... [2] https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/
I contacted their support and made a feature request for auto-logout. Their answer was basically: Just lock your phones screen.
Not good!
