Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

A plug from a very satisfied customer: I pay $5/month for Fastmail. I've emailed support before and reached a human within hours. They helped me with my problem, because it was their job and I'm paying them to do it.

Email is too important to rely on a free service which has a history of shutting people out, at any time, for any reason.

View on HN

I prepay for the 3-year package and it comes out to $3/mo or something. I'm not going to stop using email, and Fastmail is fantastic so I'm not going to switch away, so it's worth prepaying.

Yep, Fastmail is great. Google cannot be trusted. With google you are the product, not the customer. The Fastmail service and features are better than gmail as well.

Still the problem with Fastmail is the same as with Google. Leaning on 3rd party service that you have no control of. There are so many things that could go wrong there, they can be hacked, go bankrupt, closed by authorities, insided. Everyone should have an appropriate personal disaster recovery plan that includes stuff like recovering from loss of service supplier.

This is a false equivalence.

Life on a crowded planet depends on third parties; choosing vendors well is a critical life skill.

Fastmail have a long-standing reputation for treating customers right; certainly not a reputation google shares.

Well, there's always a risk profile no matter what you do. But the risk profile with a company that's obsessed with AI and doesn't believe in having any customer support is much higher than one that you pay and has very good customer support.

Fastmail has been extremely responsive to any random minor issues that have cropped up for me or the several people I got to transition to their service over the last 7 years.

If you have your own domain it doesn't matter much. You can always move your domain to a better host.

Reasonably confident one of my support tickets even got answered by the CEO once. They're a shockingly human-focused company.

Yeah, likely - I've answered a few tickets here and there :)

That's really cool! I'm just now migrating my Gmail-led life (15 years) to Fastmail, and it has been great so far.

So happy to see this. I've started the transition of my 25-year-old .org domain from Gsuite legacy to you tonight :)

Just wanted to +1 this. I've been a happy customer of Fastmail since ~2013, never had a single issue, great service

> never had a single issue

Fastmail was blown offline by a couple of DDoS attacks recently. Both of them impacted my ability to access Fastmail, but I suppose you didn't happen to try to access your account during those attacks.

Fastmail is Australian. That is a nonstarter if you want any amount of privacy.

Ditto.

I'm a satisfied Fastmail paying user for years

Me 2

What do you do if Google buys Fastmail?

Switch to something else ASAP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com