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Comment by braveo | Hacker News Reader

I've been using FastMail for several years and have nothing but good things to say.

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.

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I remembered why I couldn't move away: I have other family members on that Google Apps domain. However, I just moved my personal domain there, and holy shit is everything faster. Google would just keep Thunderbird spinning and spinning and not sync deletions to my phone and vice-versa (I use K9), but Fastmail is just lightning fast.

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!

After using it for a few months I must say I am not very impressed with FastMail's antispam filter: I am receiving quite a bit of spam (tax/home alarm/life insurance/what-have-you spam) to an alias email. About a dozen a day (maybe it's not that much, but still a whole lot more than I am used to coming from Gmail). I always mark them as spam yet new ones, at a glance very similar to the marked ones, keep making it into the inbox.

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?

I've not really noticed a spam problem at all, but I do things like sign up using microsoft+trap@domain-name.com, but even then I haven't really noticed a lot of traffic through that account.

OTOH, I'm pretty anal about protecting my personal email accounts.

I use 33mail.com for that (with a custom domain), it's great.

If you let Fastmail control your DNS, you can use neat aliases like website@me.my.domain instead of me+website@my.domain. That gets around websites with "validation" that rejects addresses with "+" in them, and I think it's a bit more secure since the tagging is less obvious to spammers.

You don't need to let it control your DNS, you can just set wildcard MX.

didn't know that, thanks for the tip.

You need to train your personal spam filter [1]. To do this you will need to mark 200 messages as both spam and non-spam. Once the personal spam filter kicks in, it performs very well. In the control panel there should be a section which tells you how many spam/non-spam messages have been recorded. If you do not have enough recorded non-spam messages, you will need to start archiving legitimate messages so they can be seen as non-spam.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html

My challenge is that I don't get spam very often to begin with. It will be several more months until my personal filter kicks on.

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.

Couple of months ago I was asked to provide a non-Gmail-hosted email address for reliable confirmation (while booking a flight with China Airlines). After a bit of investigation I made the decision to jump onto FastMail’s cheapest personal plan.

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?

I personally never had any issue with Fastmail in about 2 years, it seems very reliable

Eh, I just signed up and am trying to add other domains and the DNS verification is failing, even though the fields have been there for days. Also, trying to verify DKIM unverifies the entire domain, so that seems pretty buggy.

Everything else has been working great, though.

zero downtime noticed in several years. They are public about their issues but I cannot remember ever being unable to access my mail

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

They publish detailed data here: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

And anecdotally it's been rock solid for me and my family, never slow.

What stops me currently is that free is less than $50, but, then again, I've been having issues with Gmail being shitty when using alternate domains for emails. Everything shows up as "stavros@somedomain.com via someotherdomain.com", does FastMail do that too?

I ended up using Mailgun to send email just to get rid of this stupidity.

Is it stupidity or transparency since they don't know for sure it's legit? Just be a good netizen and use SPF and DKIM for that.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1311182?hl=en

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236312/how-to-remove-via...

I did use both, they had a weird bug where if you used both, it would show you the "via", and only hide it if you didn't use both. I wrote this up when I discovered it, as it's very counter-intuitive:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-properly-configure-google-a...

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