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Comment by kochie | Hacker News Reader

Out of all the services I pay for the $50 a year I pay for Fastmail has to be the best value for money I get.

Fastmail really is a no nonsense email provider that just works and the R&D work they're doing is going to be worthwhile in the near future.

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Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself.

It truly is no-nonsense but the speed of the UI blew me away. Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air.

Its almost like I didn't realise that web email clients could be fast & that Gmail was "good enough".

Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.

You mentioned the fast UI, but I've found the actual sending+delivery to be very quick as well. I use Fastmail for a variety of alerts and support communications and it's just outstanding.

> Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself.

What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.

That literally de-googles, but I could see someone not being inclined to move from one tech giant to another.

Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.

I cannot overstate how a _really_ bad idea it is to register your most important asset, your email, on someone else's domain. I wish we techies would teach this to non computer literates, yet I see plenty software engineers doing this very rookie and dangerous mistake.

Get your own domain ASAP.

I agree for the browser version, not for the mobile app. It's a shame their Android application is basically just a web app. I often get a notification on my phone, tap on it and have to wait 10 seconds for the web app to do a full refresh and start actually retrieving the message.

It also makes the mobile application unusable offline.

Totally agree with everything you said, but I really appreciate that you can access ALL of the settings from the android app. It drove me up the wall that you can't manage filters and labels and stuff from the gmail app.

Wish they had https://www.claws-mail.org/ for iOS and Android. I remember K9 for Android used to be decent back in the day when Android was on the G1 and OG Droid, no idea if it’s even still around.

Outlook for iOS is surprisingly good.

This. It's actually one of the things that drove me away from ProtonMail and into the arms of FastMail (for emails that don't need quite that level of security, i.e. most).

For a browser wrapper app though, they've done much better than any other I've seen. It's just slightly slow on notifications, to load, and isn't usable offline.

> Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air.

Some of us still have SquirrelMail installed for the odd occasion. :)

Webmail for nuts! Is there any hope for SquirrelMail going forward? Last I checked it was a PHP4 application and hard to get running on PHP7.

> The latest stable version 1.4.23-svn is tested with PHP up to version 7.3 and replaces version 1.4.22 which can only run on PHP version 5.0-5.4.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail

FreeBSD's Ports has 7.4 and 8.0:

* https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/

There's always Roundcube.

I have heard very good things about Fastmail (mostly at hacker news).

However, I wish they had a Family plan.

We are 5, 300 euros per years is a lot of money (we pay for other services).

So far we use Office 365 for 100 euros (you get the occasional 50 euros per year offer) that covers up to 6 people.

100 vs 300 euros is a big difference for us.

If you want you can use the Google free offering as well. But you do get what you pay for.

I actually use Microsoft 365. I pay 100 euros per year for 6 people. It is very good. It is just that I wanted to see how good Fastmail is, as many people here love it, but the price for us is crazy high.

Fastmail is quite expensive for more-than-one-person use cases. You can look at Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox, Mailfence, etc. They offer cheaper plans and have been around for sometime.

You might like Migadu[0]. Its set up as more of a postmaster tool but does have webmail, and multiple accounts on a domain is a first-class feature. I found out about it from ddvault's recommendations[1].

[0]: https://www.migadu.com/

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...

Here my referral link if anybody wants to save $$ on fastmail https://ref.fm/u20441288

I never used it, but they promise a 10% discount

Fastmail is good enough that I'd suggest going for the 3 year subscription for $130. Unless you've got an investment available that will earn 16.3% annual returns over that time, $130 upfront beats 3 annual payments of $50.

In general, I find it a good idea to pay for all critical net services for more than a year out, and renew them before they get down to less than a year left.

That way if something goes wrong that causes me to neglect things for a while, things won't expire on me. I could lose my job, have my possessions wiped out in a disaster, become seriously ill or injured, all during a major economic downturn, and it is nice knowing that if I recover my domains will still be mine and my email will still work.

I like Fastmail, but as they are based in Australia, how do they address the A&A law[0] that requires companies to decrypt data when compelled by the government?

Edit: I found this response[1], which seems to boil down to: "we already were compelled by other laws, so nothing has fundamentally changed"

[0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/

[1]: https://fastmail.blog/privacy-security/advocating-for-privac...

Migadu has a similar offering (sans the R&D on the JMAP but contribute to https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alps) but a more reasonable (ie consumption-based) pricing [1] for people who own multiple domains. Just a happy customer.

[1] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/

Migadu dropped its free plan last year in the middle of the pandemic with just one month’s notice to customers. Businesses do need to make money, but this sudden decision with a month's notice during a perilous time was customer hostile. I can’t recommend it just for this reason.

Did they ever have a free plan? I guess not with custom domains. I also know they are a small Swiss company, so the pandemic may have put their existence on the line if they had a surge of free signups.

They did, with a limit of something like max 10 outgoing mails/day, and a signaturen on all outgoing mail.

Reminds me of EndJunk.com that I had almost all of my email through. They were just a catch-all forwarder. Went under one day with zero notice and I lost access to all those addresses. Some services let you recover an account if you remember the password, others make you confirm an email change at the old and new address. I lost those accounts. I’d have been happy to pay for the service instead of them going under.

Can you sell me on Fastmail?

I don’t particularly like nor dislike Gmail.

It’s a given that Google is abusing me and my data even though I’m a paying customer, but I find the integrared approach to GSuite insanely convenient and that’s possibly the main reason keeping me locked in.

What in Fastmail could persuade me to move out?

Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with Fastmail. Just a very happy customer.

In my experience so far, Fastmail has a ridiculously smooth and fast web-UI. The sidebar feature they have is instant and way faster than the equivalent version on Gmail/Outlook.

Plus, they follow open standards very well, so it works seamlessly with Thunderbird and iOS (for email, contacts AND calendar syncing). They even have a built-in Notes client which syncs with Notes app on iOS.

Also, they sync gmail/icloud/outlook etc. email/calendars/contacts [1] over seamlessly and extremely quickly. So, if you have multiple email accounts, configuring receiving/sorting/sending emails using the FM UI is a breeze.

It also has a very good collection of customisation options for rules, folders etc. which makes sorting your emails a very efficient and seamless process.

Finally, and probably most importantly, it has a beautiful dark mode, with dark email background. The contrast is just right.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the insane speed+smoothness of the web client again. It is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

[1] - Outlook Contacts/Calendar syncing doesn't work directly since MSFT doesn't support the required APIs (this is the warning FM shows you when you try).

Agreed. Renewed for third or fourth year this month, no complaints what so ever. Their interface is so simple, intuitive and fast that it makes every other client and service (especially Gmail) dreadful in comparison.

Same. It’s phenomenal. Every time I open my work email gmail), I’m reminded of how good Fastmail is. Also, I love the wildcard support.

What R&D exactly are you referring to? Just curious.

Fastmail is the creator of the JMAP protocol (now an IETF standard), [1] which is a much better successor to IMAP. IIRC, it also supports it on its servers.

[1]: https://jmap.io/

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