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Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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

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.

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