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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

This question comes up a couple times every month. FastMail always comes up as a recommendation, so if you search comments for FastMail, you’ll find every past thread (and relatively few false positives):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

Example from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

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It has definitely come up before but since Google just announced that the legacy free plans will convert to a paid service, there will probably be renewed interest.

How does FastMail handle tags? I tried Zoho but it's pretty terrible compared to how Gmail works. What I'd like is:

1) To be able to assign tags based on rules

2) To be able to view those tags in IMAP clients (Gmail exposes labels as IMAP folders)

3) To be able to Archive mail so they are no longer in the Inbox, but so the tag remains (in Gmail, 'Inbox' is just a tag that is removed when you Archive mail)

Zoho fails because:

1) Tags aren't anywhere near a first class citizen. You need to hover over an icon to see what tags are assigned to an email.

2) There's no way to search Archived mail (yes really) and it's not available over IMAP

If you switch to labels mode, Fastmail handles them just like Gmail.

I love Zoho for what they offer for $12/year. I agree that UI is better on Gmail, which is why I redirect all email to my GMail Dashboard.

FastMail doesn't have tags. What it does have? Let me copy/paste my comment from another thread:

They have subdomain addressing, which is kind of like plus addressing, but better (not all places let you sign up with plus addressing).

I've got my own domain, for example: mydomain.com. So my fastmail email address is depingus@mydomain.com. But with subdomain addressing, I can sign up for services with unique email addresses that look like:

social.hackernews@depingus.mydomain.com

I don't have to set up this alias ahead of time. Fastmail will automatically route incoming messages arriving to this email address to my "social" folder. If I start getting junk to that address I can easily blacklist it.

It wasn't easy switching out my email address EVERYWHERE. And there are places that won't even let me change it. But in the end, it was so worth it. I don't even miss Google Inbox anymore!

You don't even need the subdomain addressing, a one catchall domain is enough (with you own domain).

Eg: I want to register on HN - I would just register with hackernews@mydomain or hn.com.accounts@mydomain or whatever on the mailbox address side - it would be delivered to my main catchall mailbox anyway.

When I set mine up, I went by their docs. It was pretty clear that the username becomes the catchall subdomain; whateveryoulike@username.domain.tld

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

Sure, but it's needed if you have multiple users|mailboxes on the domain and you don't want to manually create the rules to forward mails for another users for each alias you|they had used.

Because I'm the only user on the domain I don't need the subdomain addressing.

Fastmail now has labels.

https://fastmail.blog/productivity/fastmail-labels/

That's awesome! I didn't know!

You don't have to have the alias set up ahead of time, but you do need DNS set up for every subdomain you want, which means you can't just do it for every signup/account

The catchall subdomain is your username. You do have to setup your DNS a certain way. But its a one time thing.

whateveryoulike@username.domain.tld

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

Using Gmail labels for IMAP is not really ideal if you assign multiple labels, because if you end up syncing to another provider all those virtual "subfolders" has duplicate messages. You're much better off using your email client's built in labels and just syncing the 'All Mail' folder.

It handles them exactly as you describe.

They didn't have them when I first joined a few years ago but, when they added them, they did it the right way.

Coupled with the fact that you can use anything you want before the @, it makes for a very powerful way of organizing your mails.

> This question comes up a couple times every month.

Thank you! I used HN search before posting but didn't find anything helpful when searching for "google workspace", so I appreciate the links.

I really like Fastmail's Android app too. It's probably only a wrapper around a browser, but it works so nice.

My gripe is that it doesn't work offline, so you can't expect to sync emails once and read them later.

Every service has their haters and lovers. While people in G-suite threads swear that moving to fast mail or MS is the best options, in Microsoft threads people complain about clunky MS interface. It is always full circle! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30141192

I'm a happy Fastmail customer for e-mail but they don't do everything Workspace does. Microsoft is a more direct alternative with all the Office apps etc and personally I like the web Outlook interface way better than GMail.

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