Now I'm having second thoughts, if this is how they treat paying customers.
There's a lack of critical commentary about FastMail in general. In my case, it's because I don't want to come off as being overly negative/contrarian, and I'm pretty terrible about leaving reviews for products and services, despite the fact that I rely heavily on reviews and making purchasing decisions.
I was a subscriber to FastMail for years and recently (last month) switched away. One of the main selling points you hear about FastMail is that, unlike the stories you hear about people getting locked out of Gmail and other Google services with no support line, then ostensibly support is part of the package you get from FastMail since you're actually a paying customer. Over ~4 years with FastMail, I filed two tickets, and I walked away both times feeling gross after nasty encounters with FastMail employees. (Honestly, quietly closing the tickets would have been better than the responses they left.) So I made a decision to walk away permanently by not renewing.
FastMail comes off as really well regarded in HN-like communities, but I can only help feeling like it's from those who set up an account years ago, had no problem sending and receiving mail, and have only ever coasted like that since, without ever interacting with the support that everyone feels warm and fuzzy about paying for but never using. The other thing is that there's a dearth of competition for FastMail, especially in the age of webmail, so they don't have to be good, all they have to do is exist.
I'm on Runbox now, which has a less sexy interface if you're using webmail rather than IMAP, but it turns out to be slightly cheaper for my use case, and I can attest that, based on my experience during migration from FastMail, at least the Runbox staff don't come off as jerks.
Yeah, that's my main actual service negative. The FM support staff are condescending, because they're the experts in email and you're just an ignorant customer.
I actually appreciate that they always give honest, straight, no BS answers and while FM is certainly not perfect, the support I got through the years is a large part of why I recently moved off my grandfathered plan to multiple (business/personal separation) more expensive plans.
There wasn't much the support people could do, and I could see why someone might think I was just someone who didn't know what they were doing, but they didn't come off as unprofessional or anything to me.
That sucks you had that experience, but it does not seem to be the norm.
- Their spam filtering is atrocious.
- In the next 5 years I expect my family to expand and part of what drove me to FastMail was their family plan. That no longer exists.
I have never heard of Runbox before your post and after a quick glance at their website, I am intrigued. What other services did you consider?
As recently as 3 years ago you could still sign up for 1 user. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885538
> If you create a new Apps account going through the App Engine Admin Console you'll still be able to create a Standard Apps account for free but you'll only be able to get 1 user per account rather than the 10 you get today.
But per the referenced Google Groups discussion that has been shutdown sometime before January 2015.
> You'll now have to pay for a Google Apps account, there's no more freebie "1 user per account" provision.
I am pissed off that they want to renege on our agreement.
One concrete negative point for me: the current plans have a fixed price per user and are not very flexible if the users have very different use levels. (My father is a very light user, whereas I am heavy user.) Some of the legacy plans - family and business were more flexible in his regard, but they are not offered to new signups.
It receives mail and sends mail.
There is anyway absolutely no other competitor in the game b/c FM and GM are the only web mail services offering a reasonable 2FA solution. I checked 'em all and would have preferred a different provider as their servers are located in NYC.
My motivation was to avoid having too much of my stuff depending on and catering to the Google Datenkrake.
It looks to me like it's how they treat non-paying customers. Paying customers are their revenue source. I've heard good things from all of them that show up here.
It allows integration with IMAP-enabled third-party email clients (like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook) through an application now in closed beta only for paying ProtonMail users. You can learn more about it here: https://protonmail.com/bridge/
cheers