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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Been considering Fastmail for personal use so I’m keen to hear others opinions. Proton seems good too but worried I can’t use the apps I want to use.

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I switched from Gmail to FastMail about 4 years ago and have been very happy with it. At the time, FastMail had no problem importing a decade's worth of emails from Gmail, and I still have the deprecated Gmail address forward to my FastMail account.

I'm on their ~$50/year Standard Plan so that I can use it with my own domain names. I point my domains to FastMail's nameservers, and it automatically configures all email-related DNS settings. It can be setup to accept mail to arbitrary addresses, so I now use service.tld@my.tld when I create accounts on other websites, which can help with filtering or seeing who is leaking my info. Any other type of DNS record can be manually added, so I can still generally point my domains to my GitHub pages.

I can recall only one outage since I've been using the service. I use their web client and Android app (which is just a thin wrapper around the web client). They are not glamorous, but they are functional and feel snappy.

One thing to be aware of is that FastMail is based in Australia, which I believe has some backwards laws with respect to Internet privacy.

As a kiwi… shakes fist at Australians

Not too worried. I only use email for signing up and all that. Not really a friend/family communication took anymore. Just want to get away from google.

I like the idea on the domain catch all because some sites won’t accept + anymore.

I've been using Fastmail for several months now having migrated away from Gmail. I've found it to be very reliable, extremely fast, and just as importantly-it just does what it says on the tin. No gimmicks, ads, or hassle.

The one problem I've faced is my Fastmail email address ending up in the spam folder of friends and family and having to explain to them how to prevent that. I think that may be a leftover from the days when Fastmail offered free accounts. A bit annoying, but definitely not a deal breaker for me.

Do you use your own domain or one of the Fastmail domains?

Not OP but I do both. I pay for a fastmail account and have <myname>@<one of their domains> which all my _personal_ things go to and then I have my business emails all route via their Aliases and certificate pointing.

There have been some instances where both the fastmail domain and my business domain ended up in Spam for the receiver but that is less than a handful of times and I used Fastmail via Nodemailer as a proof of concept for a newsletter service so (ab)used the service without any issue.

I also really like their masked email feature, it's so useful to click and create a throwaway email address to use for different sites and services.

Sounds good. I already have a domain to use just been on the fence about what service to use. Will pull the trigger on Fastmail. Thanks.

I use both, but also pipe in gmail to ensure I don't miss any emails during what inevitably ends up being a long transition process.

I've used both. If you don't care that Fastmail is Australian and that your emails don't sit encrypted at rest, they come with more features.

ie:

Mobile client that does contacts/calendar/notes/drive

Mobile setup was really easy on iOS with a policy

Drive lets you host a static website or photo gallery

Custom domain catchall

Proton needs a bridge to use any client but theirs. DMARC/SPF/DKIM was a pretty easy setup for both. Proton is missing mobile clients for their new apps (drive/calendar). Its nice they give you another GB of storage a year, a VPN, and a bunch of the nolog/encryption niceties.

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