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Comment by alaithea | Hacker News Reader

I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail (http://www.fastmail.fm) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)

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I've only been a customer of FastMail since August, but I strongly echo alaithea's recommendation.

I use the web interface for preview and POP to Eudora for the real thing. Pretty much total satisfaction. You also get space for a static web site and file sharing. Pay enough (but not much) and you can use your own domains.

I'm using fastmail for 5 years now. It's good, but not that great. My two problems are:

1. Spam false positives. I get order confirmations or mail list subscriptions sent to spam folder occasionally.

2. Search is really bad. by default it only searches subjects, and I think only in the current folder.

Thinking about moving to gmail, provided those guys sort out privacy issues.

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

1. Just add addresses to your address book to whitelist. Also make sure you use Report Spam/Report non-spam on enough emails (200 of each) to activate your personal bayes db (see the Options -> Spam/Virus Protection near the bottom to see how many of each you've already learned)

2. At the moment, you do have to explicitly add body: to a term to do a body search. The first time might be slow as it indexes your email, after that it should be faster.

http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhance...

I'm making orders from all kinds of online stores, there is no way I will add them all to the address book. Especially so because I don't know their address before they send me something, and I don't care about it after their first order confirmation/tracking number email.

I'm using Fastmail to host email on my own domain (you can redirect MX records to them or just use their DNS servers). I read email mostly in Thunderbird via IMAP.

At the end of the day your own domain is what you really want - you can host it on Fastmail or Google, and if any of them screw up you can move on to other hosting provider or to your own server.

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

For people that are concerned about lock in, I highly recommend this as well. Get your own domain, and then you're not tied to any one service. We have 10,000's of domains hosted at FastMail.

I've used FastMail for about 8 years now. It's an extremely solid service. They just do one thing and that's email. No spam issues.

What about the SPAM filter?

I find it to work pretty well, as long as I keep it trained by moving stuff that gets past it into the Junk folder. You can fine-tune lots of its settings (change thresholds, etc.) in the control panel.

I must be getting old or sth, but I can't find a screenshot or a test login on the site.

I'm not sure they have any. Their marketing and communication tend to be pretty minimalist. I happen to like it that way.

You can always get a free guest account to try it out. Or if you ask nicely enough, one of us who have accounts might be able to post a screenshot. ;)

Please do, I'm curious.

Here's my junk mail folder: http://i.imgur.com/2IwpW.png

Here's an interview with the founder, which includes a screenshot of a message view.

http://www.emailserviceguide.com/2009/10/interview-with-jere...

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

Hmmm yes, we don't really have any screenshots do we, we should probably fix that!

Hopefully even without a screenshot, we can convince people it's worth trying us out (there is the free Guest account, minimal storage, but you can at least look around the interface, and then upgrade if you like it)

Quick links to the two biggest things people want to know, features and reliability.

http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html

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