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Comment by sesquipedalian2 | Hacker News Reader

I closed my GSuite account and migrated to Fastmail when the free tier shutdown was first announced. I’m glad I did. Fastmail does several things better than GSuite/GMail. It has a very nice UI. I was expecting a UI downgrade, but was pleasantly surprised.

Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy.

The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t have switched on my own. But I should have migrated even before Google’s changes were announced. The competition has surpassed Google’s offering.

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100% agreed. I switched from Google to Fastmail about 8 years ago and it has been wonderful.

In that that time:

* I have not had to worry that I’ll inadvertently trigger an account ban and lose my email account/all my email with no recourse.

* UI updates have been gradual, subdued and useful.

* Support requests have been answered promptly and have been extremely helpful, including one case where the web UI wasn’t loading through the corporate proxy, we determined it was the proxy (not their service) and an engineer STILL helped me with a fix after the ticket was closed.

* No significant (if any) price changes.

* No significant outages (that I can remember).

what prevents account bans?

Nothing _prevents_ it, but

1. Fastmail doesn't have the same reputation as Google of banning accounts with little to no recourse (presumably because their customers pay, thus significantly increasing the cost for spammers to abuse their platform).

2. Even if Fastmail bans me or the company goes under, I still will own the underlying domain and can move somewhere else.

Is 2. not true for GSuite regardless? It's one of the reasons I find the risk profile acceptable despite Google's ability to ban me.

I believe GSuite supports either @gmail.com or custom domains, so it can be true for it.

Edit: my bad, this is apparently untrue.

G Suite doesn't support Gmail, but I think one of the bigger problems is that other aspects of your online profile (YouTube, Play Store) are tightly coupled to your Google account.

Your account can be banned, but unlike Google you can get in contact with a human being and get an explanation or sorted the issue out if it's a mistake. With Google you never known when an algorithm will ban your account, and if/when that happens, there's absolutely NO way to get it back, your account is gone for good.

> I ... migrated to Fastmail...

Never heard about Fastmail, but I was even more intrigued to learn they developed the JMAP standard, https://jmap.io/.

Fastmail ditched their family plan and cranked up costs a couple of years ago as well.

It's pretty steep if you want a handful of mailboxes for close family on a vanity domain, especially when these days personal e-mail is just a glorified password recovery channel

> These days personal e-mail is just a glorified password recovery channel

I disagree, most of the Mom & Pop businesses I deal with are all in on email to communicate because they don't want to deal with fancy ticket systems.

I finally made the switch last month and I have to agree - it's totally worth it and I should have done it sooner. As an added bonus Google no longer gets to snoop my email to figure out what ads to serve me.

Agreed about Fastmail. Very happy with switching over.

I also tried ProtonMail before switching to Fastmail. I liked some of the security advantages of PM, but being forced to use their client due to E2E was too difficult in the long run. I missed seamless calendar integrations, managing multiple emails from one UI, etc. Also Fastmail is slightly cheaper.

I've also completely switched over to Apple native Mail/Calendar clients. Both apps I used to despise, but all alternatives I tried have failed to match feature parity (or have serious data privacy concerns).

You use Apple Calendar as a client for calendars actually hosted on Fastmail, via iCal?

I do. Works great.

I like the UI other than no popup for new message

I'm considering that same switch. What things do you find Fastmail does better? Is there anything at all you miss?

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