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This seems pretty easy to prove or disprove based on the comment history of said accounts. The few I've checked out seem perfectly legitimate.

Unless FastMail are paying people to spend all day maintaining perfectly normal HN accounts for the odd occasions that a discussion about email comes up... dons tinfoil hat

This has been going on for over a year now. A lot of astroturfing coupled with misinformation criticizing predominantly US-based incumbents. I think there are a few mods with a political agenda who are pushing this. Often the advertised replacement is an inferior product that doesn't even provide better privacy or securty than Google or whatever is being criticized. Interesting time to live in.

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but it's true that there are rather weird voting patterns in this thread. I self-host my email so I don't really have a horse in that race but I don't quite understand why all mentions of protonmail are downvoted while everything about Fastmail is at the top. Is there some context I'm missing?