Fastmail – 20 Years Old | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail – 20 Years Old

fastmail.blog

233 pointsvinw139 comments

I've been using Fastmail for a little while (I'm still migrating from Gmail), and I love their service.

I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails from a new domain in minutes.

One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties.

With Gmail you can only use `+` and `.`, which makes it easy to derive the base email. With Fastmail, my main email can be something like `ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be `iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`. I didn't realize how useful that would be until I started using it, but it's quickly morphed into a killer feature.

I migrated about one year ago and this is a feature I really love. Every service has unique address and goes to separate folder via rules.

Also, there are automatic aliases when you use your own domain. Say, you have name@domain.com, then all *@name.domain.com are also working aliases, like spotify@name.domain.com. Really neat feature.

That feature is basically the killer feature for me. I sign up for each service with a custom email and password, and save both in pass or any other pwd manager. It makes it super easy to see which service leaked your email when you get unrelated spam. I wonder whether such an occasion would be grounds for a court case against said company under GDPR.

Don't all mail service providers that allow a custom domain allow for creating a catch all email?

It's not exactly a catchall; it's per user, and you can also set up rules to route to different folders based on receiving address. If there are 2 users 'joe' and 'bob' on the domain 'foo.com', joe can use any '* @joe.foo.com' address and bob can use any '* @bob.foo.com' address. Fastmail pricing is per user.

Side note: Both joe and bob would have trouble proving in court that their addresses were sold, not guessed.

what if each local part was something long & random?

Individually, it doesn't seem convincing, but if you find multiple instances (individuals), in their own different styles, and all the addresses are in the same mailing list... I think it can have significant weight. Alternative would be what? Someone framing the service provider? Or joe and bob and maybe others staging it? Possible, but frankly, not very likely. I think the service provider would have at least have some explaining to do.

plus you can even choose other domains for these new emails:

- fastmail.us

- fastmail.to

...

- hailmail.net

- mailworks.org

...

dozens of domains. they must be spending a bundle just on renewing domains ... :-)

etc this makes filtering your email even simpler.

even better, you can set up catch-alls for your domains, and they support seamless outbound use of it. so if you get an email at literally_anything@example.com, replies are sent from the same address. I have it set up and it is great. every company gets a new username, and I have informed multiple companies that they've had a breach of some sort based on spam.

As nice as your information was, they probably already knew. In fact, they likely sold it in the first place.

No no, you don't need aliases for that. You can set up a catch-all at something like service@spam.yourdomain.com and have as many of those as you like, no 500 limit.

You're missing two important points.

First (and most importantly), Fastmail aliases don't need to be linked to my domain. If the goal of this is to not have my identity/addresses tracked across services, it is important that I not have a single, unique identifier shared between those emails.

If I sign up for Walmart with `walmart@danshumway.com`, I haven't gained any privacy. If I sign up with `walmart@fastmail.com`, I've gained a great deal of privacy.

Second, another use for Fastmail aliases is filtering -- the fact that they're not catch-alls. If I use a catch-all, an abuser can still fill up my email box by sending to unfiltered catch-all addresses. However, most emails you send to `@danshumway.com` will bounce, because I explicitly don't have a catch-all set up.

I could add a bunch of custom filters into Gmail to auto-delete emails that didn't go into a specific address, but I'd basically be re-inventing the wheel for no benefit. With Fastmail, I can easily modify, remove, or add a new alias in less than a minute, and I can have my aliases split between as many custom domains as I want. This is all stuff that Gmail handles very poorly. Even setting up custom domains at all is annoying in Gmail if you're not paying for GSuite.

And of course, Fastmail aliases can also contain catch-alls and wildcard operators, which means you get the best of both worlds. You can set up a wildcard alias for your domain that forwards everything like you describe, and that only counts as one alias.

> If I sign up for Walmart with `walmart@danshumway.com`, I haven't gained any privacy. If I sign up with `walmart@fastmail.com`, I've gained a great deal of privacy.

Depends on your thread model imo. Is it obvious to a human that "@danshumway.com" points to you? Yeah. Has anyone at walmart done the work to teach the computer about this? Probably not.

I suspect you're correct right now, but people used to say the same thing about Gmail `+` addresses, and I believe some marketers have gotten smart enough to strip those.

Putting together a regex expression to strip out the domain and check to see if it's unique across a shared database of email addresses would be really easy, so I wouldn't count on this being ignored forever.

I'm a pretty boring person, so aside from general paranoia around keeping infrastructure secret I'm not particularly concerned with anyone finding out what accounts I have online. But, depending on your situation, it might also be prudent to include database leaks in that threat model as well, which are likely going to be searched through by actual humans.

to be clear "+" addresses aren't a Gmail thing. they work on all mail servers. they're part of the spec for how you define an email address. Any server that doesn't support them is, by definition, broken.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html

> they work on all mail servers.

Wrong AFAIK. Unless certain mail providers have been patched recently without me noticing.

> they're part of the spec for how you define an email address. Any server that doesn't support them is, by definition, broken.

Might very well be true, I haven't checked. In that case I guess a number of people get their mail from broken mail servers so they have to deal with it anyway.

The problem with aliases is that it's effectively a way to ensure vendor lock-in even for people with custom email domains. If one of the reasons to use a custom email domain is to preserve flexibility in choosing an email provider, good luck switching providers when you have hundreds of aliases set up in the hands of hundreds if not thousands of third-parties and your strategy for managing your inbox depends on these aliases continuing to function.

It may not be nearly as strong of a lock-in as a @gmail.com address, but I'd be curious to hear how many heavy alias users are paying Fastmail on a month-to-month basis.

Fastmail makes it very easy (unlike many others) to send emails from any *@yourdomain.com email as a sender. But if you only need to receive email, then almost any paid email service I know supports such catch-all addresses, even gmail/gsuite, there's no lock in.

It’s not an issue if your email is primarily for newsletters, bills and other one way updates (where you are not frequently conversing back). You’ll rarely have to create an actual functioning alias in those cases because a catch-all would do reasonably well.

If you are conversing with people it’s unlikely you are going to create an alias for each person specifically, that’ll come across as super shady TBH.

So it’s not a major issue for most people because most services support 30-50 aliases easily.

not sure I follow,

the mail handling is set at domain DNS level - one may choose to handle their custom domain with another provider at any time

it is zero lock-in,

I can read my custom domain email with them with minimal fuss, or I could handle it myself in any other manner if I choose so.

+1 to migrated from Gmail. Will never look back. Fastmail rocks!

> One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties.

This is an amazing feature that I utilise all the time. I just however wish I could easily reply from that alias, as opposed to my primary one.

Yes, I know you can have a wildcard send-from address like *@account.yourdomain.com, but it will default to account@yourdomain.com and you have to manually select and replace the wildcard with the email you want to send from. As opposed to just auto-filling out the From field with the address that initially received the email.

You can do this if you configure those addresses under Settings, Sending Identities (used to be called Personalities IIRC). It slightly annoying the first time, but once done, any hitting reply to a mail sent to one of those addresses will already have the appropriate From header set.

Fastmail support are slow but excellent. I asked about an obscure IMAP oddity that I was seeing in Mutt. They escalated to an expert who said it was doing things the old way and cited relevant RFCs about how to do things the new way. I managed to patch Mutt default behaviour in handling IMAP the correct way - all thanks to FM support.

An issue that required you to patch a popular email client? What kind of change did it need?

I run a paid service called Kopi that lets you do a similar thing, but it lets you avoid being locked in to your mail provider.

One of the reasons I started building it was so I could transition off GMail to something else like Fastmail. I worried that I needed to get off GMail sooner rather than later because the GMail address was slowly spreading out across my online presence and I was getting concerned about the massive hassle that it would be if some Google automated process decided to close my account. But I never got around to it because I couldn’t decide on a mail provider and didn’t want to go through the hassle of changing over all those addresses. Instead I was able to slowly transition all my accounts, etc. over to Kopi addresses. Now that I’m running my mail through Kopi though, I’m not really worried about a Google account shutdown - though I should probably still get off GMail, just feels less urgent now.

Kopi works by acting as a “mail forwarder” in between the sender and whatever mail provider you want to use. Of course, you’re still locked in if you use a shared domain like kopi.cloud, kopimail.net, etc. - but you can bring your own domain if you want - you don’t have to be locked in to Kopi.

https://kopi.cloud

So, instead of being locked in to Google you are locked in to Kopi. I guess forwarding is useful, if the domain holder's lock in terms are better, as you can pretty much match them with any mail service provider.

If you use your own domain, you are typically not locked in to your provider, unless .. I guess a couple of hours of work could be too much hassle to switch the provider, but there is no need to change your email addresses.

> something like `ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be `iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`

Might be better to generate random addresses for web account signups, so other users can reserve readable addresses for their main email. It would suck if all the good addresses were taken by a few people. I hope a trend like that wouldn't cause Fastmail to limit the feature.

Fastmail is fantastic, no complaints at all.... besides the mobile app.

I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone.

So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in) that just sits there, likely hogging battery life, receiving emails and storing them so that I can read them / access them while in an airplane/foreign country/bad connection spot.

If they fix this I would be overjoyed.

I would love a native Fastmail app instead of their current one, which seems like just a wrapper around their website. Not only is there no offline access, but it misses out on so many native interactions (on iOS at least) that make it feel super janky.

Just wondering: why don't you use your phone's native email app and IMAP?

Android 10 (at least on my Pixel 2) doesn't have a native email app (other than Gmail), though of course there are lots of options.

last time i checked, gmail supports generic IMAP accounts as well.

But then you're using gmail.

we were talking about the android app, not the web service.

said android app supports generic IMAP accounts and doesnt need to be paired to a google account to work with them.

But the smallest sync interval is 15 minutes and it won't sync sub folders until you open them.

It's not usable for real work, and I'm pretty sure that's how Google likes it.

Fairemail let's you specify different reply from addresses (if allowed on the server). I use this with mailfence.

Yeah, I've just got Gmail as a 'native' app. Which sort of defeats the purpose of switching to Fastmail for me hah.

My use case might not be too common, but I use fastmail with multiple aliases and the official app is the only way for me to send emails with these different aliases.

Another reason is the lack of push notification (not sure if i'm using the right term) when using the built in gmail app for fastmail. It only gives me the option to poll every 15 minutes. The gmail app also doesn't support actions like snooze, swipe to archive etc on non-gmail accounts and I like having that in the fast mail app.

> My use case might not be too common, but I use fastmail > with multiple aliases and the official app is the only > way for me to send emails with these different aliases.

I'm doing exactly this from Android with Aquamail.

Do you have to configure the individual alias in the app? If so I can see it getting really tedious to keep it in sync with the aliases inside fastmail.

Yes indeed you do have to create the aliases you want to send from.

My reason: they recently rolled out message snoozing on the server side (this is normally achieved by client apps), however the native Mail app doesn't support this.

Fastmail's iOS app does support this functionality.

The native iOS mail app is push notification enabled from FastMail; there’s no reason to not just use it.

This. Only thing I’d like is offline notes in it. Literally in the middle of the supermarket and I can’t get to my shopping list

You have to use the FastMail app if you want to send from an email alias. That's the only reason I have for not using the native iOS mail app. Please let me know if you have a workaround!

You should just be able to add the other aliases in the settings for that account. I haven't personally used it but the option is there.

I don't see that option in the iOS Mail settings. Can you point me to it?

Edit: here it is: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone-aliases.html I'm going to give it a try now. Thanks!

Have been using it for years, it works great!

You can send email from your alias with the Mail app, I do it every day. You need to set it up manually (not use the certificate from fastmail). After you set up the email address, go to Settings -> Password and accounts -> Tap your account -> Tap you email -> tap the "Email" field and then you can add your aliases tapping the button "Add Another Email"

I'm pretty sure you can add e-mail aliases even after using the certificate from Fastmail.

(Disclaimer: this is undoubtedly true on macOS; I haven't done this sort of thing on iOS in ages.)

FWIW fastmail’s web UI is entirely built on top of JMAP. (If you’re curious you can add &debug=true to the URL in your browser to turn off compression and see all the JMAP queries the web UI makes in the inspector). So any 3rd party email clients can support all this stuff on top of JMAP in a standards complaint way if they want to. Anyone who works on native mobile email clients, please add support for aliases and snooze and all these great features via jmap!

The mobile app is just a native shell around a browser serving up the mobile website -- why can't they have an array of account credentials and allow switching accounts? It's the little things like this that have me annoyed that I'm not just paying cash but also in terms of time and efficiency because of the features Fastmail lacks.

We do have that and have had for quite a few months now. Multiple account support in the app works nicely.

The reason we didn't ship it earlier was around push notifications and the way our accounts are sharded - if you had two different accounts on different backends, merging the pushes into a single badge count and keeping track of the per-device push credentials across the multiple backends was buggy, so it would have provided a sub-standard experience for everybody.

Hi! Thanks for the great service/product. Is there any possible roadmap for offline mail access on mobile in the future? I really can't be the only one that needs to access my email at various times without cell reception/wifi.

Okay, thank you for adding that feature but does everyone at FM know about it? I contacted support asking when the mobile app would add support for multiple FM accounts (like Gmail has) and was told "No time soon -- it's not even on the roadmap."

I wonder if they interpreted your question to be "will it support NON-FM accounts", to which the "no time soon" answer is correct. That would only be viable if said other accounts also supported JMAP, and nobody else has that yet. I can go look at the ticket if you can give me the ticket number.

I've used fastmail for 19 years now. Way back in 2000 I was travelig India for 6 months. At that time I was reading email on my university through a telnet connection with the pine client. Quite a hardcore experience! So I decided to get with the program and get a webmail. Hotmail was the hottest those days, but I never liked it. So I picked up a computer magazine on the street in Delhi and came across a review of web based email providers. Guess what. The ranked fastmail as #1! Above all the others. Never looked back since then :)

I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought they would have moved their operations by now.

Agreed! I'm still very surprised they haven't made any attempt to insulate themselves from Australia's anti-privacy laws.

This is the singular reason I have chosen their primary competitors over them. In this day & age you need to be aware of these details.

Which primary competitors would those be? Asking for a friend...

ProtonMail is the most promising.

I've been using ProtonMail and ProtonVPN for over a year, paid subscription. Both web and mobile client is ok, not great. On desktop I use Outlook (Windows) and Thunderbird (Linux). I like the domain @pm.me.

Overall happy with the service. Customer support has answered questions competently.

Protonmail has a huge gap between promises and what's delivered. Their IMAP bridge is slow and buggy, their mobile app hasn't been meaningfully updated in a year, and even as a paying user they put upsell ads in the sidebar, above your own folders.

If PM is not a honeypot, they are incompetent.

Protonmail probably the most hyped, but personally I switched to Tutanota. I like their commitment to open source - you can build their webmail client yourself. They support full text search (unlike Protonmail) and also 4-5x cheaper than Protonmail/Fastmail, if you're fine with their cheapest 1GB storage plan.

All these other companies are trying to sell you on the notion of email privacy and security.

The thing is - email isn't just sitting in your mailbox to only be viewed by you. The recipient has a copy which could leak it (or via hax). Copies of email can be saved by both incoming and outgoing systems.

If you need security & privacy - email is not the technology you want to use whatsoever.

Yeah, I just recently shutdown my account. Moved over to mailfence. I already miss fastmail's functionality, and that fea.st domain was pretty fun. Still... Australia.

Why would they move? The A&A bill doesn't affect them:

> Fastmail won’t be making changes to our technology or policies in response to this bill. Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption.

Source: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...

I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.

[0] https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7381738...

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/law...

> I'm just some boob on the internet

That's one beautiful quote

> The A&A bill doesn't affect them

You can basically sum that up as "we weren't able to protect your privacy in the first place, so you don't have to worry about this bill compromising it".

The quote also misses that Australia has silent and warrantless access to data and that Fastmail's servers are in the US, so subject to America's three-letter agencies as well.

> I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.

The competition isn't American megacorps, it's small European companies like ProtonMail (Switzerland, as far as I can see usually requires a court order and Swiss law requires notifying the subject) or Mailbox.org (Germany, only allows disclosure with a warrant or imminent danger to life). Even if your email is left unencrypted, these countries have much stronger data protection and privacy laws.

A lot of people probably don’t know that Fastmail was started by Jeremy Howard, one of the creators of https://www.fast.ai which is by far the best way to learn deep learning IMHO :)

Thanks! I haven't been involved involved with Fastmail for the last 10 years, so I can take no credit for how amazing they've been throughout that time - but I'm thrilled to see that they're still doing well. I'm still a very happy Fastmail user :)

So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.

Thanks Jeremy! Glad to hear you're still enjoying the service.

I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom back in 2004. Such a long time ago.

I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this is game over.

To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift more troublesome.

1. Start now. But don't use @fastmail.com as your email address. Get a personal domain and email address (i.e. me@efiecho.com), and forward it to fastmail.

2. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com

3. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com

That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.

I just left gmail for Fastmail this past month, and I have to say I've been really pleased with it. Their web interface has less frills but somehow feels a lot easier to get organized than gmails bloat of features. I use the Mail app on my phone for mobile support, and all the syncing is really seamless.

I'm a customer since 2011. I love all the features they added during these years (new UI, 2-step auth, mobile App, etc.) and the fact they actively develop their product is reassuring. The two or three times I contacted the customer support the assistance was excellent, once I even got a response from one of the founders.

Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the option for slow connections while traveling abroad.

I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions.

Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail.

The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail address.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html

Fun seeing Fastmail on the front page of HN the day after I started trying it out. I setup a free trial with a domain I manage through Route53, had some hickups setting the correct DNS records and reached out to their support. They were quick to respond and provided awesome, detailed technical support/hand-holding and ultimately got me up and running. The experience convinced me the love I keep reading about on here is real -- highly recommend em!

If you decide to use Fastmail officially, here is the referal link you can grab to get 10% off for the 1st year: https://ref.fm/u12211285

While Fastmail will not save us from the slow, declining viability of self-hosted individual and small business mail servers, their positive effect on the e-mail ecosystem is wonderful. My decision to use their service (even though it is quite pricey, and a cheaper host would do the job for my meager needs) is because of that societally beneficial work.

A hearty thank you to all the Fastmail devs who read this; thank you for your good work!

Awesome. You get what you pay for. And with FastMail you get an awesome email experience. Worth paying money for something we all depend on everyday.

Yay very cool! Been using them for 5+ years now and I love it. Happy to pay. Their web interface has stayed very fast and well organized I think. Love the fact that you get a huge list of domains to choose for your email(s)! imap.cc is one of my favorites. ^_^

I love Fastmail for email, but moving all my contacts there was also awesome. I can now easily sync a subset of my contacts to my work phone without having to log in to my personal Google or Apple accounts. Feels like as soon as you add a Google connection somewhere you never know what else will be synced.

It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage, which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)

Anyone have opinions comparing Fastmail with Protonmail? I know they're not going for the exact same market, but in the more generic market of "email services for people who don't want to use Gmail" I'd be interested in someone's comparison.

Fastmail is a direct competitor to Gmail. That is Fastmail is Gmail but different. Fastmail is opposed to E2E e-mail encryption as this makes some of their features impossible (e.g. full text e-mail search).

Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even cross providers (on https://beta.protonmail.com composing an e-mail to Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> will enable encryption). But they don't support all usual e-mail features like IMAP and SMTP (there are bridges but...).

Wow I'm a fulltime user of protonmail for the past 12 months, but hadn't heard about the beta version. Thanks for linking that.

That's really surprising as the beta link is on the login page: https://mail.protonmail.com/login :)

Holy. I just missed it completely for the last 12 months then :(.

Fastmail is probably the more 'open' of the two; in the sense that you can use any mail client to access your emails without a need for a bridge or anything.

Proton does not offer SMTP or IMAP (except through a special tool which can't be used on mobile devices) so as far as I am concerned they're not a real "email" provider at all.

I totally understand why they do that. It's just not for me.

Fastmail lets you receive emails for the domains you own. Not forward, but actually be delivered there. Plus you can create other free addresses with domains such as fastmail.us etc.

All of which can be seamlessly connected to the same single account - you can then use rules to distribute the incoming emails as you see fit.

Switched from Gmail some five years ago, I have been happy with the choice every since!

I use both - protonmail for personal email and fastmail for corporate/business

Both with custom domains and aliases on PM for throaway stuff

They're both very good - the upside with PM is privacy while the downside is compatability. Fastmail I just assume my email is archived and read.

Been with Fastmail for a half year now and loving it.

I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super easily.

Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top (somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service!

>Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service

This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested sounding nice.

I go to gmail once a while because my gmail spam doesn't forward to fastmail (there's some important emails that still go to gmail so I have to check) and I see a lot more useful emails at the top than with Fastmail where I completely forget about certain emails because they're buried down. This is partially my fault, but it'd be beneficial to add this as a opt-in feature.

I wanted to give a genuine praise for Fastmail in this post but upon looking up my signup year at Fastmail service (2014), I have noticed that they have increased the yearly price of my old (not available anymore) Family plan from $25 to $30. I guess it was not sustainable but I would have liked an notification about it ...

Now that I think about it, I have kind of rolled my eye when they announced that their new "snooze" feature was only available to their latest plans or big legacy account [1]. Not a move I was expecting for Fastmail.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html

In a very slow migration process off as many Google properties as possible, including Gmail- and Fastmail is where I've landed for email. Will be using it with a custom domain to permanently avoid any kind of "lock in".

I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to separate into its own special zone).

But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for me.

Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in" you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result, I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said that I had to use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.

If only they could implement labels in the same way that ProtonMail and Gmail have! I want incoming emails to show in my inbox while being tagged with a certain label or category; this ins't possible in FastMail, only the ability to move the message to another folder entirely which raises the chance of missing messages altogether.

Happy Fastmail user for 3.5 years so far. I particularly like (and am happy to support with my subscription fee) that they have active engineering staff building new technology and contributing it back -- in particular, their JMAP protocol work, which is an open standard [1], and behind the scenes their work to improve and contribute back to the Cyrus mail server [2]. Thanks and keep it up!

[1] https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standar... [2] https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/

I don't think the Fastmail UI tells me but I believe I joined Fastmail in 2002 and have been using them since then. (Before that I was using Spamcop's hosted mail.)

There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major complaints.

Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.

> Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.

XMPP pre-Conversations.im was pretty bad anyway but Fastmail could review their stance given some other mail providers re-enabling modern XMPP: https://mailbox.org/en/post/daniel-gultsch-creator-of-conver...

This will show you when you were first invoiced:

Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices

2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.

Thanks for detailing where to find this. Looks like 2002 (August) as well.

Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.

Yay 2002 Club! (December for me.)

I'd heard good things so recommended them to a quite non-technical client, and was impressed by how much simpler life got afterwards!

Still no complaints. Thanks Fastmail.

Everyone who is happy with Fastmail, what is your "mobile strategy"? As a Fastmail customer, I find Web app wonderful but mobile app on Android severely lacking UX. Switched to Aquamail for client over IMAP but search is unusable/slow. Suggestions/success stories?

I'll admit that it's not much of a strategy, but I don't read email on my phone. (I'm not being snarky or sarcastic, btw. Of course, if you actually really need to be responding to email in real time then I'm afraid I cannot help.)

My philosophy about this can be summed up as: If it's important enough you'll call me (... and you'll call me again if I don't pick up the first time)... and I'll take your urgency VERY seriously. If you invest effort into communicating with me, then I'll reciprocate. If you're just firing off email... nah.

I've been using BlueMail for a while, but search is poor and it's quite slow. I imagine my frustrations will be similar to yours with Aquamail.

I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any good yet. I paid for TouchDown (https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html) but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor search, sluggish.

I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(

I've been using Edison on Android for a while now. It is pretty clean and basic. I had been using BlueMail before and agree with your complaints. Edison seems to have solved most of my problems, it's a good basic client without much nonsense.

I've been using fastmail for a few years now and their reliability has been great, prices reasonable, and their web client is fast and convenient.

But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, and I cannot figure out how to make it accept me@mydomain.com.

There is a help page on setting up identities, but it doesn't work for me. :-( Other than than I'm 100% happy with fastmail.

Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?

My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg

me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com

Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched.

As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail, but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.

You can set up aliases in your Fastmail account to forward mail for these addresses elsewhere: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target

I use my own domain with fastmail. Set it up ages ago. Had to upgrade my plan to make it work, but worth it. Love fastmail

I just switched to Fastmail from GSuite this year and also have no complaints.

I personally would like to see more efforts going into open source self-host alternatives, and cloud providers enabling one-click distributed mail server deployments that enable all the functionality you'd expect from like Gmail. Such as virtual folders (labels), better mobile apps, and reliable email service. Too much effort lately has been going into cloud hosted solutions, when I know many users would gladly pay $5+ per month for quality self-hosted email service.

The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts.

One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.

For some reason every once in a while Fastmail decides to interpret the shortcut for paste, Ctrl + V, as 'Send Mail' which has led to some curious exchanges (particularly early-on before i clicked what was happening (if not why)).

Congratulation! And thanks for a stellar service!

Their Android app has no option to logout automatically after a set amount of time. You're logged in indefinitely. I consider that a security risk. Everyone who manages to unlock my phone can completely take over my digital identity.

I contacted their support and made a feature request for auto-logout. Their answer was basically: Just lock your phones screen.

Not good!

Sincere question - why is JavaScript required to sign up for Fastmail? Is it for browser fingerprinting? If so, what data is collected, how is it used and how long is it retained? No specific mention of it in the privacy policy. If I sign up in a virtual machine, can I later use Fastmail without running scripts?

You can use IMAP to access Fastmail without running Javascript (or I guess your own JMAP client if you wanted to write one - there isn't one that doesn't use Javascript yet) - but no, you can't use our interface without running Javascript - the client is written entirely in Javascript.

That's too bad, looks like I'll have to stick with GSuite Gmail to have browser-based, non-Javascript access to my email.

I use Gmail. Don't love it, don't hate it. What's the pitch for switching to Fastmail?

Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds. The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the FastMail web UI.)

No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate.

And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.

Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.)

When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address at FastMail and the vast majority of stuff moved with me... instantly. FastMail also has tools to import your mail archive using IMAP for what's already in your Gmail account.

Now that all of my mail uses my own domain name, if I ever needed to leave FastMail, it'd be painless... none of my mail is going to a FastMail address to begin with.

My strong recommendation is that people do this even if they intend to stick with Gmail for the time being, just to give themselves the future option.

Good idea, thanks for sharing. So I set up an MX record (on Route 53) to point to Fastmail and also set up DKIM by adding several CNAME records for fm1._domainkey.mydomain.com. FM confirmed pretty quick that those changes were made. The last bit is SPF config. I added a TXT record as per the instructions, but I keep rechecking with FM and it's not verified. Emails from FM currently show up as being sent "via messagingengine.com". Any ideas - do I just need to wait?

Scratch that, seems to be working now. Not showing up as "via messagingengine.com" anymore in spite of the fact that it still hasn't verified SPF. Looking forward to cleaning up my email by switching to FM!

On day zero, you can also tell GMail to start forwarding all mail to Fastmail.

This is also viable, though I chose to never forward from Gmail to FastMail. In my case, my plan started long before I picked a replacement provider anyways. Second, forwarding breeds complacency: I wanted to make sure my emails never were seen by a Google server, so I didn't want to not notice that an email was sent at my Gmail, not my own address. (I still occasionally check my Gmail account for stragglers.)

One thing is the general desire to separate your email from Google.

Apart from that I find their webmail to be faster and superior to Gmail. They also provide file storage with WebDAV access which I find useful for apps (like notes applications etc) which support it for syncing between devices.

Usually that it is not owned by Google

Fastmail has a much nicer web interface, with many more features. It offers multiple email aliases and custom domain addresses. You can store files and images and so transfer them between computers. You can even set up simple websites. And, they aren't scanning your mail.

Congratulations!!!

@brongondwana

Great service. I use all features to their potential And appreciate the work and thought you and your team give.

Thanks! Pleased to hear you've enjoying it.

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