I don't know why we ever thought free email was a good idea. Of course Google doesn't care about a free email user. They're just another useless eater out of billions. And yet so many of us (me included, until switching) basically built our whole online existences around gmail.
Email is important. Important things are worth paying for. You have status and recourse if anything goes wrong. Gmail works until it suddenly doesn't and you are reduced to desperate moves like begging for relief on HN. Move away before that happens, and vote with your wallet for fair service for a fair price.
I pay $180/year for Google Workspace and Google still doesn’t care about me.
I'm looking for a good alternative to the office suite, Microsoft has better customer service but not by much and it's not always easy to use cross platform(I wind up using Win, Mac, and Linux weekly and play with FreeBSD occasionally
In point of fact I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable.
[1] Which seems great, btw. I'm actually looking at moving my vanity domain to them as I'm sick of chasing standards trying to host it myself. This is absolutely not a ding at Fastmail.
My point is just that there's no free lunch. Everything breaks, but on balance I'd trust Big Tech to get it right more than little companies like Fastmail or your domain registrar.
"I feel like" is, precisely, the anecdata fallacy at work! You feel that way because you see so many more reports of problems with the big providers. The truth, obviously, is that account management problems like this are present everywhere[1], but the email (or domain) market is dominated by a small handful of players. So you think the tiny ones are better than they are.
[1] Pointing out the pervasive complaints about domain registrars was supposed to drive this home. It's weird you think that somehow doesn't count. All bureaucracies mess up, it's not like email is a special kind of failure.
I think this misses the point. With Fastmail, if they mess up, I can still talk to a human. With Gmail there is no customer support to begin with so you're screwed whenever something goes wrong.
It's so nice to have my Gmail only for Android and other Google services. It was a big relief.
https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/Au...
google is good at spam filtering so those accounts became the accounts I give out to people publicly.
Why?
You go to your register and point your domain to another email provider, and you’re back in business.
All your previous emails are lost, aren't they? Even you have local backup of them somehow, they are not equivalent to emails saved to your server?
I've done that in the past, don't recommend it unless you have a real need and know what you're doing. It wasn't hard, but just extra work that I wasn't sure was worth it.
tl;dr: Fastmail custom spam filtering needs some time to actually do anything. Now no more 2 spam emails a year get through the filter.
(I know I can set up manual filters. I prefer it to be done for me automatically.)
ok, we are different
How does Fastmail determine which ones are spam?
I used to love that automated categories and had 4 categories. One day I suddenly felt that that was too many and reduced it to two, "Primary" and "Updates" (similar to mail.live.com's "focused" and "other") and found it actually easier to manage my emails. Of course that is still two not one, but just want to say that you might also realize that you don't need so many categories.