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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to point out here that Fastmail is a great alternative to Gmail, one I like much better and regret not switching to it sooner. If you have your own domain, migration is as easy as importing your email and changing a few MX records, and it costs $3/mo for the largish package if you prepay.

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The thing that's missing here is the email _client_ story. I really like Google's Inbox and there's no amount of money I can pay anyone else for a similar experience.

Honest question: do you think you really like it or are you really used to it?

When Google made the move to Inbox, I switched because I wanted to be using their newest interface. Over time I came to absolutely hate it and that drove me away from Gmail.

My wife still uses it so I occasionally find myself in the Inbox app on our tablet. Just a few days ago, actually, I read something in her inbox and for the life of me I could not figure out to mark it as unread from the inbox list. Maybe I was just missing something obvious, but it was very frustrating to not have such a simple action easily available.

I'm someone who definitely dislikes it but I'm too used to it. The automatic categorization is so useful that I feel like I can't be without it.

I really like how Inbox encourages getting to "inbox zero" (and maintaining it). It makes it very easy to archive things, snoozing emails for later is great, and reminders allow to add some short todos to the inbox where they are less likely to be missed.

I find it surprising that my search seems more comprehensive and faster in mutt than by the king-of-search's very own.

Yeah, I use notmuch in emacs for my mail, and searching is way better than in gmail.

Gmail's interface is very limiting, actually. It's pretty good for a web app, and probably better than Outlook/Exchange, but when the competition is so poor it's easy to seem good.

> do you think you really like it or are you really used to it?

Chiming in with a "both" - I tried switching away from Inbox for a bit but I love me them bundles. I don't want to switch between a bunch of folders, I just want mail in those folders to appear grouped in my inbox

Edit: and Snooze. I don't think I'll ever like using a client that can't snooze an email anymore

Yes I really like Inbox.

It works really well as a 'TODO' list for email, plus with niceties for travel and what not.

I thought the same, until I actually made the switch. Mileage varies of course, but in my case it turns out I don't miss any features at all. Ever since email clients started to look more like todo apps I've hunted for the perfect client, but turns out I didn't need much more than a simple client and some flags. It also helps that FastMail makes email aliases super easy, so I have many different emails going to the same inbox, allowing for super fast and easy filtering.

Oh god yes. I have a few aliases and gmail was terrible with them. Fastmail is perfect.

I have lots of aliases. Anytime I sign up to anything, create an account on a site or otherwise hand out an email address it'll most likely be an alias. My pattern is basically <top-level domain>@<catch-all inbox>.<mydomain> and this lets me ban an alias quickly if I find it's being misused (i.e. sold or leaked to a third party.) No need to deal with dodgy unsubscribe methods that probably doesn't work any way, that alias is just dead now.

FastMail does this incredibly easy since you can set up an inbox to allow any alias, so you don't have to create them up front. I just type it in and whenever an email comes in it'll be routed properly. Gmail has this too I believe, but only with the + syntax (e.g. myalias+account@gmail.com) but unfortunately too many places have broken email validation routines that doesn't know how to deal with + signs.

Not only that, but Fastmail has native support for this. You can do alias@user.yourdomain.com or user@alias.yourdomain.com and it will be routed to user@yourdomain.com. Domain-wide, no-fuss spam protection.

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