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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I made the jump to Fastmail.com and couldn't be happier. The UI is very snappy (much faster than Gmail's), the actual notifications and delivery is faster, and it's a better experience overall, for me.

Plus, Google doesn't get to see my mail any more. Ditto for Firefox vs Chrome.

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I'm a fan of moving away from Google where possible as well, but Fastmail would cost me $500/year with 10 accounts. My G Suite account is one of the original, so I can have up to 200 accounts for free. Granted, it's only 15GB of storage, but even after about 10 years, I only have about 1GB in my inbox, so I'm ok with the lower amount of space.

Fastmail give you free aliases.

The problem with aliases is still that they route to one account, and if it's compromised, there's no separation.

FastMail aliases are great. I've used some for sites I'm more likely to want to cut off access to me, for instance. Whereas address+site@gmail.com gives you sortability, a true alias gives you the easy ability to just shut a site out of access to you.

Another issue I had was that my main email address was already in Google and Microsoft's systems for a couple reasons, and it wouldn't let me set it properly when changing my email address everywhere. So I have google@ and microsoft@ aliases just to work around their account management quirks.

Wow, what do you do with 10 accounts? Isn't checking all of them a hassle?

I have multiple domains and aliases, and Fastmail is much better at those than Google Apps ever was (I also have the free plan but you can never change your initial domain), so I'm much happier.

I have six. Some of my clients ask me to manage their AdWords for them. Plus, I occasionally need to log in to my wife's Gmail account. (To confirm logins when paying bills, for example. Anything personal, she's smart enough to keep on her own domain.)

So you don't really have six, you just have five of other people's logins?

Several accounts are for separating services - AWS has it's own account, for example, so does Dropbox. I use a different email address for forums and such.

A few for friends and family as well. --Friends I can tell to pay for themselves if I need to, but family, not so much.

Edit: As for checking them, most don't get many emails, and every good email app can handle multiple accounts easily, so I get notifications on my phone.

Fastmail allows you to do things like stavrosk@dropbox.yourdomain.com, and then you can filter emails by that domain name. Lets you easily block out spam without having completely different email addresses.

Interesting that you bring up the UI, switching to Fastmail's UI made me start checking/managing my personal email like a responsible adult again.

I could never get over the way using GMail felt like fighting with a sluggish toy version of email compared to desktop outlook (and I'm not really a fan of outlook, either). I just assumed that GMail's interface was the best a webapp could offer: it was the best I'd seen so far and had a no-longer-deserved "who could beat gmail at webmail?" bug in my mind.

I'm kinda surprised fastmail hasn't made larger inroads among the kind of techies that will occasionally bemoan giving their lives over to google.

I am really surprised at how fast its UI loads and operates. It feels like a native app in a web where everything else feels like a slug. Major props to Fastmail for this. Hell, even Thunderbird feels slower.

Did you consider protonmail? If so, why fastmail?

This discussion last month includes many anecdotes regarding various email providers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15029186

I can only speak for my own decision-making process, but I like to pay for my email so that I have greater confidence that the provider will still be in business 10 years from now, and more confidence that my data is my own.

Really like Fastmail.

How does paying ensure the data is your own?

You're the customer, not their product.

But the data is still not in your control. Right?

Paying means that the provider doesn't have to mine your email for keywords in order to display targeted ads (yeah, I know Google theoretically stopped doing this recently). So perhaps "your own" in the sense that another entity isn't accessing it.

> So perhaps "your own" in the sense that another entity isn't accessing it.

Do they have a spam filter? If yes, how do they filter emails without accessing it?

Protonmail has paid plans.

It does every time you send an email to someone with a gmail address ;-)

I also agree that Fastmail is great.

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