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?
Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000
1. Silently dropping email (no smtp transaction bounce, not in junk, no rules in place) for a specific single sender at a domain, where email from other senders at the same domain is accepted. Hundreds of people have posted about this online with no fix or acknowledgement from Microsoft.
2. Overly strict hardfail SPF policy by default for new customers who have no idea of SPF and should be using softfail. These customers often use third party systems to send out hundreds of account statements. These get blocked by other email hosts. The customers themselves have no idea and never correct their SPF, saying something like "it must be an issue on your side".
3. Blocking entire /24 IP ranges including good senders with good reputation, on the basis of only a single spammer in the range. This particularly affects those in datacenters, even if you are on a dedicated machine and your IP is good.
4. It may be that Office 365 does not track or measure domain reputation at all, which makes things like SPF or DKIM of little positive use, and introduces loads of spam false positive bounces.
This is for Outlook365 using a custom domain for my work.
We also couldn't use any of the nice sales tools that integrate with Google Apps (or any of the tools that make managing calendars easier, like https://claralabs.com/ or http://boomerangcalendar.com/). We're now on Google Apps and very happy.
And also these tools get access to all of your email, which is a privacy concern. And in the context of a company, that can mean industrial espionage. Personally I cannot understand how people can trust things like IFTTT, but whatever.
I mentioned in a separate comment, Sunrise substituted a generic email address for mine in an invite response, but with my name ("Brer Lapn <invite@sunrise.am>"), which when someone replied to the group began to propagate across multiple co-workers' Outlook as the autofill address for my name. I missed email from some people for a week before one of my coders noticed it and let me know, at which point I had to get colleagues to forward me any message with that address, contact the sender and ask them to remove it from their Outlook autofill settings, and repeat ad nauseum until correspondence started coming to me again.
I sent a bug report, they responded "we'll look into it" and never heard another word about it, so for all I know it is still happening. If we'd have integrated that into the company processes rather than just my using it to consolidate my calendars it would have been a serious problem.
I'd love to know more about deliverability issues - that's something we monitor closely, and we want to know if there are any silent blocks/drop rules anywhere that we can't monitor for!
I know that Sunrise isn't a Google-apps specific software, but after: * a co-worker sent me a screenshot of a meeting invite I had accepted via their app (along with a facetious question "You get a new assistant? Who's 'Sunrise' and is she cute?") that makes Sunrise branding too prominent for it to be appropriate for a professional environment, and * finding out that instead of masking a response with my email address it had sent it from a generic "invites@sunrise.am"-style email but showing up as my name "Brer Lapn <invites@sunrise.am>", and having to then contact over a dozen colleagues who had been emailing the black hole address at Sunrise--- I'd say these services are less suitable for business purposes than the standards that Fastmail uses (and publicizes). Fastmail has never screwed around with my emails or calendar invites, and unlike Gmail I can use multiple different clients without it filling my drafts folder with autosaves.
TL;DR, if I had a say I'd be running our company tools on Fastmail rather than Google Apps (although deliverability is definitely something I'd consider a showstopper, I've never had an issue with FM).
Why would you get cloud based document editing and storage from microsoft or google, and then not use the freely included and well integrated calendaring and email that either provide.