FastMail acquires Pobox and Listbox | Hacker News Reader

FastMail acquires Pobox and Listbox

blog.fastmail.com

76 pointsdgurv21 comments

Congrats to everyone! Thanks for keeping pay for email alive. If you're not the one paying, you're the product!

I do pay for my personal account to FastMail, but I still predominantly use Gmail. In fact, I pay for FastMail just to keep the address. For some side projects, it gets really expensive for me and for that I use Mail-in-a-Box [0], which I still pay for, but much less if I have to use the business tiers of FastMail, which still don't give me as much flexibility.

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

> For some side projects, it gets really expensive for me

I'm curious what's making it expensive.

For what it's worth, I'm on the Enhanced $40/year plan and I use it for personal email as well as side projects.

I just setup a new virtual domain, a new profile, and a rule to move all mail addressed to that domain to a folder for that project.

Does that approach work well for you? I had been considering it, but I couldn't find anything concrete saying that would work. I never did put the time into doing the trial to find out.

I do this and it works fine though there are some limits to be aware of (see "Quotas for other services" https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html).

I have the same FastMail plan, but I want to create mailboxes for different users. In this case, FastMail is definitely cost-prohibitive for me.

I love the idea of mailinabox but I don't think it's particularly written / held together. Also I don't like the idea of PHP running on my mail server...

Well, true, but still has less stuff than Sovereign [0] and that's why I like it better. But I agree that they should probably split it into two (or more!) containers.

[0] https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

Hey John! I agree. My email address's been the same since 1996 thanks to pobox.

I remember a pobox faq back then to the effect of "how do I know you'll still be around?" IIRC it asked, rhetorically, how do you know your bank will still be around?

Well guess what? New Brunswick Savings Bank got swallowed up by bigger and bigger players since then. But pobox has stayed the same. It's been so reliably the same I haven't even bothered to get a vanity domain.

I did once use FastMail too but their circa-2007 web interface was too clunky and I dropped them for that one that reads your emails...

I’ve only been using FastMail for a few months now but my experience has been quite positive. Its speed lives up to its name and I’ve never had trouble with it working. It even works better with Apple Mail than iCloud does, which is crazy.

The prices seem a little steep but they’re manageable.

It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts.

What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts.

Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps?

Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has over 200K customers and 3 million hosted mailboxes, all paid. For just $2/month/mailbox, they give you an SLA-backed 100% uptime guarantee and 24x7x365 live (phone, chat or email) support. They also do hosted Exchange with Active Directory support, assisted migrations and Outlook setup. At first glance, FastMail is missing a lot of the business oriented stuff for bigger companies.

Well, yeah, on paper it's $2/month/mailbox, but there's a $10 a month minimum, so it's really at least $120 a year.

Fastmail is really $40 a year for their "Enhanced" plan and you can pay it in 5-year chunks at $160 so you just don't have to worry about it.

I've used both (and used to work for Rackspace) and I use Fastmail. YMMV.

He asked why businesses aren't choosing FastMail for corporate use even though people love it for personal use. I don't think the $10/month minimum for 5 seats is an issue there.

Exactly!

I'm interested in hearing from businesses their review of FastMail. It goes without saying that nearly all love FastMail for personal use.

Trouble is, I can hardly finding any reviews of people using the service for business use.

Curious to know if it's as good for business use as personal.

I'll add that in my experience, Rackspace support has been exceptional.

This is exactly what I'm trying to find: We use Office 365 as Google just doesn't have the quality of features or integrations or control that MS does.

I've been looking for a different alternative but can't find any business reviews of FastMail and this is too critical to a business to just experiment with. Wish there was a detailed breakdown in features and functionality compared to the other options.

Here is a simple usecase: I would like to use fastmail for their mail offer on my own domain, but not for their calendar and contacts. I need something to keep my google calendar and contacts in sync with icloud calendar and contacts, with bonus points if it keeps that in sync too with outlook calendars and contact. (By keeping in contact I mean 2 way sync)

I haven't seen such a product yet. What I would like is to have this mix of fastmail + the calendar and contacts gmail accounts on ,y desktop computer, and another mix of fastmail plus the icloud contacts and calendar accounts on my ipad and have both synchronize their data. Fastmail makes sense because it's better, but the contacts/calendar offering not so. Icloud has great sync features (push etc) for apple hardware, gmail for android, and it's a pain when you don't move fully to an ecosystem or another.

The closest thing I've seen is Nuevasync to add Exchange Activesync to regular gmail accounts, but I'd prefer leaving icloud sync in its own way on the ipad.

Can't you use Google calendar/contacts with an Apple device? So use FastMail for mail (works great with any mail client, or they have an app for iOS/Android), and google for calendar and contacts. That's what I do for Windows Phone and Android, because I just have the lite FastMail account -- only web based calendar and contacts.

I totally can, but no, it's not the same. As mentioned above it's a pain if you don't fully move to one system or another. I want to use ios devices with icloud data syncing - and have something else sync google data to icloud.

FYI, FastMail does push email on iOS: http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available...

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