Fastmail search is better than Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail search is better than Gmail

48 pointsprirun16 comments

I'm in the process of switching from Gmail (last 13 years) to Fastmail, and so far, am very happy with the transition. I'm using forwarding at Gmail and a vacation message to let people know I received their email but now have a new email address.

Today I checked out Fastmail searching vs Gmail. I've never liked Gmail search, because half the time it won't find what I want. I think this is because it can only search on whole words.

Fastmail also apparently indexes whole words, but it also allows a wildcard suffix (but not prefix) so it will find email containing "Fastmail" if I search for fast*, whereas Gmail won't. Yay!

It's kinda funny to me that Gmail, run by the world's largest search company, doesn't actually do full-text search. If I search for cuss and don't get any matches, it seems reasonable to search for cuss* next and *cuss* as a last resort, to find "discussion". I know it's not efficient to do that last one, but I just tested fgrep on a 1GB file and it took less than 4 seconds to search it. So Google spending 12 seconds on a mail search (I have 3GB of mail, and yes, I know they probably don't store it as a 3GB file) would be a lot nicer than me trying to manually hunt through email.

I'm guessing Gmail doesn't even index words but uses "interned" word numbers, so searching for partial words is not even a possibility.

Gmail will spend about a minute searching for the word "the" in my mail, so spending around 12 seconds doing the equivalent of fgrep doesn't seem too unreasonable.

I use Fastmail, and everything is great (for me) except one very annoying aspect with Contact sync.

I’m unable to sync only manually created contacts via carddav. If I sync contacts to my phone, I get every automatically created contact also showing in my contact list, which is basically anyone I’ve ever sent an email reply to.

Somehow Gmail handles this - I think they simply exclude the auto created group from being exported. I asked Fastmail support about this and there is nothing in the works to allow it.

I hope someone from Fastmail has a fix coming for this, or some other suggestion.

Fastmail supports ( https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&que... ) the Sieve mail filtering language ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language )

GMail does not.

About the only thing I liked about Yahoo mail was its built-in blocking feature, which apparently used Sieve without any tap dancing needed. All you had to do was pick an email address to block, block it, and that was it - you'd never get _anything_ from that sender again, and the sender wouldn't know that they'd been blocked, so they wouldn't be tempted to try another route.

But GMail? Duhhh, nope.

Have used Fastmail for many years, recommend it and consider a good reason to not use Gmail is increased privacy. Also Google searches are `tailored' so that they may be financially advantaged by your choice.

Anyone know Fastmail's privacy policy? Or security policy? Does it have 2FA? Support FIDO hardware tokens?

As much as I have a love/hate relationship with Google, they probably have some of the world's best security experts making sure Gmail is secure. Their entire reputation is at stake.

But I can't imagine a smaller email provider Fastmail has the a security team reading CVEs all day and running security audits line-by-line, which I'm sure Google has.

So maybe Fastmail for business email, but not personal email?

They support 2FA and hardware tokens

> I think this is because it can only search on whole words.

This is provably not true. Gmail supports stemming. If you search for [subject:does], you'll get plenty of emails with just "do" in the subject. Same with singulars/plurals.

It used to be supported in the early years, then it was dropped (either too expensive or a limitation of a new backend) and finally it was brought back after another backend rewrite 8-9 years ago.

If you really want wildcards, though, stemming won't cut it.

I haven't used GMail in years, but if it's the same search that runs google.com I'm not surprised it doesn't find anything. I've already talked at length on how Google Search has gotten progressively bad over the past 5 if not 10 years, and I still don't understand how they're failing at their core technology.

I use Fastmail and I'm generally pleased with their search as well. It hasn't failed me yet.

Is their core technology ads or search?

It's actually an interesting discussion. After thinking about it for a bit, it seems like Google is a search company fronting for it's own ad business. In the early days their core technology probably was search but at this point it's likely adtech. At this point it doesn't matter if their search is bad (it's probably better if it is bad, as more time is spent seeing ads) as long as they are the dominant/default search engine for the general public.

There are a lot of opportunities for a better search engines but very little incentive invest into making it so.

Both. They offer us search and we offer them ads. They have to both at a high enough technical level in order to succeed.

Also their web and Android clients are so smooth compared to GMail. I have set up forwarding from my GMail address years ago and never looked back.

I switched to fastmail, using my own custom domain name, and it's been great. I couldn't believe how much better their web client is.

I did this about 4 years ago. I use the aliases to have a separate address per website.

2 years ago they annoyed me by changing the ui and requiring an additional password entry to create a new alias. They also put the paid additional user above new alias.

Here's hoping they don't keep trying to fix things which are already perfect!

Switched to Fastmail recently, and it is a 1000x better at search and speed than any other platform I've ever tried. Their filtering, sending identifies, multiple domain support (and not charging extra for it!), spam detection is insanely good.

Gmail search has become abysmal in the last 4 or so years. I often can’t find stuff unless I look for it by date

On a related note - how is Protonmail's new full-text search? Saw it launched recently.

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