I went with Fastmail and am very happy.
Tons of aliases that are easy to use, the UX is actually _much better_ than Gmail.
Not exactly the same, but close enough for my use. I usually run 2-3 tabs 1.inbox, 2.lists, 3.someothercriteria
I recently discovered their alias feature. It’s super useful for all those subscription things.
I feel like it does too much magic with my inbox.
Much like social media, I don’t want some algorithm to selectively decide what messages I see and what I don’t. I want to be able to see All messages, in a chronological order.
Having concert tickets not arrive in my inbox that I need because some magic is happening due to the sender being a first time sender to me is just frustrating.
Unlike social media and opaque algos, you decide what goes to the feed, to the paper trail, who gets screened in and out, etc…
I’ve found it super useful, my email was a nightmare before.
It’s the complete opposite of what you’re describing.
On a funny note, I seem to recall a Dilbert strip with a spam filter that became sentient and started controlling the company by controlling the flow of email but I'm unable to find it at the moment ;)
After my experiment I paid for Hey, and have been really happy with it.
1. Unknown senders go to a bucket for categorization
2. Easily categorize which senders are "important"/"unimportant"/"ignore,spam"
But for me, I just want a reliable, dumb, boring email service without any "smart" features. I will decide what to do with every type of incoming emails myself. Fastmail gives me exactly that.
The magic of Hey is the user interface. The “opinionated” nature of their design choices.
To me, their workflows mostly made sense. For me it really really smooths out my email workflow into a logical set of steps.
Other people may not like that flow, and Hey wouldn’t be for them.
So I’d counter and say Hey is for 2 groups. 1. Those who don’t know how to set up complex rules 2. Those who don’t want to, and Hey’s flow works with their own.
I spend a lot of time organizing and managing email at work. I have multiple inboxes, hundreds of tags, filter rules etc.
When I tried HEY for my personal gmail, it just felt like a breath of fresh air. They were wrapping friendly UX around the realities of modern email. It wasn't "work" to manage my email.
I recognize their system is limited if you want to do that stuff - not sure I'd use HEY for work yet - but if you're inundated with email (as I was, having a gmail address dating back to beta), they do a great job of making it manageable without any effort on your part.
One tweak that's really helped me: when I filter things to "The Feed", I also use the filter to snooze them until 6pm, so I only get mailing list emails once at a day.
Hey was on the table for a bit, but no matter how much I read about their alternative workflow, I just don't understand how it would be an improvement over my typical method of archiving emails as I get through them. My email is essentially just a to-do list. Once I've dealt with something, into the archive it goes, and I don't think about it again unless it shows up in a search result when I'm looking for something later.
I've just never had a problem with it so I don't see a need to reinvent the wheel and learn a new method of using email.
Spam controls work really well too. I would like to de-google (already use ddg mostly), but tbh Google ain't that bad in the sense that although they have alot about me they don't seem to sell it as nakedly as FB.
I'll probably switch to Fastmail and get an address set up with my personal domain so I'm not tied to any service. But yeah, as a service I don't really have any issues with Gmail.
No folders, no tags, no rules. Just inbox and read status.
Ditched gmail for iCloud a few years ago. Simple, cheap, well integrated.
Perhaps I'm not a power user, or constant marketing emails have just made me numb to it all.
About once a month, I unsubscribe in bulk, and delete in bulk. Other than that, I scan my inbox once every day or two and read anything that seems relevant (maybe a handful of emails per week).
I seriously thought about quitting after the Basecamp fiasco, but ultimately realized my entire email workflow is now centered around HEY and it's greatly improved my quality of life. So I use it like I use any other online service from a company I don't particularly like. _shrug_
Gmail is much faster, I guess because it's native.
Not sure if you had the chance to hear the "other side" of the "fiasco" already. I found it here and it was interesting: https://samharris.org/podcasts/253-corporate-courage/
Hey itself is a bit lackluster though.
The author also talks about saving a lot of money every year. There are cheaper alternatives to Fastmail that support custom domains and have a focus on privacy. Mailbox.org and Runbox.com are a couple of them. There are more.
Besides the simple routing, I just like the Hey app interface across macOS/iOS/web. The Gmail app never played nice with sending from my custom domain, and I will never subject myself to Apple's buggy mail app again. So I'm curious if there are other mail apps Fastmail users like on iOS/macOS.
(No affiliation with Helm just a happy customer for more than a year and hoping they succeed.)
