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Comment by ivm | Hacker News Reader

What amazes me in Fastmail is how fast their web UI both on desktop and mobile. Especially compared to Gmail but it's also more responsive than Slack or Trello.

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I've always imagined that the reason that FastMail's web UI is so fast and responsive is because their developers are based in Australia, but their main server presence is in New York. They're optimizing for speed when communicating with a server halfway across the globe, and that benefits everyone.

Nailed it. I work on FastMail's web UI and we really care about latency mitigation; we know if we can make it fast with 300ms round trip times, it will be insanely fast for customers with shorter ping times.

Bravo! This and the comments above have convinced me. I'm subscribing with my next paycheck :)

The fact that I can seemingly load and scroll to the end of a 5,000 email list with no discernable loading, is pretty stunning. It's not like an endless scrolling app where it has to load the next x items or anything, you can scroll pretty much instantly to the bottom.

It does look crazy fast. I'd love to try it, but not worth the cost for personal use.

As someone who switched away from all Google products, including Gmail, I can definitely say it's worth the cost to me. In fact, I'd pay more than the current rate, now that I've had a chance to really use the service. It is fluid and fast in every browser I've thrown at it, including the work-required IE10.

In my opinion, the only thing they could do better is to provide an API for their file storage module, and I believe that is in the works.

You get what you pay for, and while Gmail is a good web client it is far from the best. Fastmail beats it hands down as far as I'm concerned.

I've already (mostly) moved away from google, at least for email. This isn't Google vs. Fastmail to me, this is Fastmail vs. Zoho. (Which I already have a free account with for my domain)

After loosing a bunch of important emails undelivered to my free Gmail account I actually want to pay for the service.

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