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Comment by eatwater123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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 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.

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!

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