I should just bite the price bullet and move to them. I've moved everything else off Google (even search), it's about time I move my email too.
You can configure gmail to forward everything to a different email account, that's what I did when I moved. I have filters in SmarterMail that filter the incoming mail from gmail accordingly.
The browser notification, their UI, their mobile app, Thunderbird and K9, everything is just super fast. Totally worth whatever price, I'm going to pre-sign-up for three years right now. Thank you!
Admittedly this is partially my fault since the alias is very-common-firstname@one-of-the-many-domains-offered-by-fastmail.com.
Since you've been with them for awhile now, what is your experience in regards to spam?
And this seems like a big downside initially, until you realize this means FastMail isn't aggregating data about your mail for other users' benefit. FastMail only sends spam samples that you confirm are spam, by both marking as spam, and then permanently deleting.
OTOH, I'm pretty anal about protecting my personal email accounts.
Guess what, had to give up after 10 minutes or so—their sign-up form kept reporting server error!
Rationally I do realize that whatever it was it’s unlikely to affect their existing customers… Still, anyone can comment on FastMail’s actual uptime?
And anecdotally it's been rock solid for me and my family, never slow.
Everything else has been working great, though.
I ended up using Mailgun to send email just to get rid of this stupidity.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via...
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-a...
+ You pay for the service, they are not mining your data.
+ When you have an issue, it is easy to talk to real humans. I had some feature requests, my case was transferred to one of their tech-people in no time. One of my feature requests was rolled out on their beta version in a couple of days.
+ They have a standards-conforming IMAP. So, it works much better with isync/mu4e/mutt/etc.
+ Fastmail is fast.
+ They are a big contributor to the open source Cyrus project. So a lot of their development ends up being available for everyone.
+ They support push notifications in Mail.app in iOS. (Not IMAP IDLE, real push notifications.)
+ subdomain addressing besides plus addresses. E.g. if my e-mail address is me@foobar.xyz I can give out me@quux.foobar.xyz without first creating a virtual host quux.foobar.xyz. It makes it easy to create custom addresses that are a bit less obvious than plus addressing.
- The spam filter is not as good as Google's, even after training it for you personally. I regularly (usually once or twice a week) get spam or malware mails in my inbox.
- The mobile app is acceptable, but not as the Google Mail app. It's basically their webmail in a web frame.
That said, even with that, it's much better than everything else on the overall UX.
The reason I use Fastmail is they sell you email instead of doing sketchy stuff with your data. As a side effect, this also means they have actual customer service! I've contacted them a handful of times and each time received a real response by a person who understood what they were talking about.
Their web client is as good as it gets except for gmail, and under active development: stuff slowly but seemingly constantly improves. eg they recently added "add Rule from Message" functionality. It remains very responsive with 6G of email.
They also apparently slightly increased prices (with larger data allocations) while I've been a customer and they silently grandfathered me into the old pricing.
Also, one upside of running a domain for your email is you can use [sitename]@kartickv.com for every site. This not only makes routing email very easy, but allows you to both tell who sold your contact info and block that address.