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Comment by miralize | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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