Really one of my favourite tech companies.
Not an employee just a happy customer!
I tested a lot of providers, many of them do not have per-app passwords at all, and the ones that do tend to only allow one per service endpoint. (note: I didn't get a chance to test Zoho, it has them listed as available but I decided against the service for other reasons)
Finally jumped to Fastmail 6 months ago and all I can say is I should have done it sooner. Weaning off the big boys and returning to being the customer, not the product, as they say. Feels good.
I switched off of Gmail to Hey last year when the hype train was at full steam. Hey was... okay, but missing so many features that Gmail had. Most importantly to me was literally any calendar integration, and custom domain support.
Instead of going back to Gmail I found Fastmail after doing some research. It's just exactly what I want, a fast web based client that has the right features. And nothing else. Bravo to the company that makes it :)!
I won’t comment on privacy since they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech and has blanket surveillance laws. But at least it’s not Gmail, so it is safer to conduct business where Google could be competitor.
I’m not too bothered by it, it’s email and I’m more concerned about high quality product, availability, stability and them not selling my data or using it for ads.
If I wanted to send something truly private by email I’d just use GPG :-)
What do you mean by "new administration"? Do you mean if Australia has a change of government? (The term "administration" is used in presidential systems like the US, not parliamentary systems like Australia.)
Both major parties in Australia are big fans of surveillance so I don't think a change of government would make any significant difference to Australia's surveillance laws. The police and intelligence agencies start up a chorus of "we need this to stop terrorists and pedophiles" and both sides of politics reply "of course! of course! whatever you need!"
I don't think the legal situation for Fastmail in Australia is hugely different from that in other countries – look at national security letters in the US, bulk collection warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, etc. Yes, the Australian government can demand information but the same is true in many other countries. The most disturbingly unique thing about Australian laws is the government could – at least in theory – order a company to circumvent encryption or insert spyware into their product's code. Given Fastmail has all the data in cleartext, and it is server-based, I don't think Fastmail has to worry about such orders from the Australian government, they aren't relevant to Fastmail's product.
But if Australian law does become a big issue for their business, they could always relocate elsewhere.
If you live in the US, it's very easy for the US to get your data, and more irritating for the US to ask Australia for your data.
As an American storing data in Australia creates another problem. The US can't spy in the US on it's own citizens but another country can at the request of the US government and will report everything back to the US.
I would pick Russia or China first...
Or just use protonmail which is designed to offer some protection.
If you are planning to be a terrorist, having data in a Five Eyes country is a bad thing, because the CIA can probably get it easily. However, for your garden variety crime, no, the local police department can't easily get the CIA to get information from Australia for them.
So depending on your threat model, this may or may not be a big deal.
1. Get capacity in Switzerland
2. Move data there (big project ofc)
3. Start swizz business
4. Move customer billing to swizz company
5. Make Australian company bill swizz company enough to pay the wages and offices
6. You're now technically not part of spyware haven anymore. (employees could still be pressed for backdoors I guess, but it'd look a lot better on paper)
Loads of VPN companies do this kind of move, though they rent colo all over the place usually.
I did that backpacker year in Australia, believe me I understandthat people don't want to move. It's as close to paradise as I I can imagine a place on earth could be.
I realise its not as simple as projected here, but it must've crossed their minds, as a fastmail customer myself I would like to read about the thought process on the topic.
By that definition, which countries have freedom of speech? And why must America be the definition of freedom of speech?
Which countries do have freedom of speech?
Twitter can’t stop Trump from publishing his own website, nor shouting in a public square, nor just talking in front of the live camera he literally had in his own home but seemed unable to use.
Only thing I still miss is a web interface for managing tasks/to-do’s.
A todo feature is an interesting idea.
pasc@notpretenious.com
or
pasc@ihelpoldpeoplecrossthestreet.com
I had my Fastmail account incorrectly flagged by their scripts, account fully disabled, bouncing all my emails. It took 5 days for their support to investigate, admit their mistake, reinstate my account and issue an apology (in the form of 1year subscription). Still, 5 days of emails lost.
I triggered their spam algorithm by using the ‘redirect’ button in Apple mail to send an invoice to my administration tool, which keeps the original sender in the ‘from’ field.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt for now, since their offering is really good.
Were you on your own domain? In that situation I guess you could have changed DNS and piped it to Gmail temporarily.
Oh, and one other thing- they disabled my account silently, no notification, no email, call, sms, anything. Found out only when one of my friends called to ask why my address was bouncing emails. As my account was disabled, I could not even easily submit a support ticket as a customer (which requires to be logged in), had to use some contact form on their website.
EDIT: They do. https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored
(I bought two domains and did exactly what you're asking - after using the first for a day or so, having decided I liked the other one better I reached in and simply flipped the dropdown and chose the second one to by the default, clicked OK and it all just worked nicely)
When I look at my set message headers, it would appear that your primary @fastmail.com (or whichever of their domains you choose) is your actual primary, and that even your first domain is just an alias to the actual user account domain.
I've got around 10 domains there, each of which have up to 4 addresses. Emails arrive filtered into separate folders in the same account, so I get all that whilst only paying for a single account (they'll even host static sites for all those domains, though I currently use Netlify).
Always performant, excellent web UI for mail, contacts, calendar, and (optionally but included) DNS, and if they have occasional blips I have to say I've never noticed.
Far superior to GMail, which these days seems stale and slow (and possibly only gets away with it because it is ubiquitous enough to set the level of people's expectations).
edit: Bulk moving or deleting items in the web interface can take 20+ seconds! It's not that fast, honestly. But maybe there isn't anything better.
How many things are you moving for it to take that long?!
I accidentally marked everything in a folder as unread recently and that did take a while, but I did get a very helpful progress bar while it chugged away.
It would be good if they would blog about more about the company itself actually. I don’t remember them publishing much about that.
Thanks again for a fantastic product and service! I really think you should blog a bit more about the company and culture, that would probably be all the marketing you’d need :-)