Memos: stick private notes on your email | Hacker News Reader

Memos: stick private notes on your email

fastmail.com

102 pointsnopcode65 comments

Without commenting on whether it's a good feature or not, this morning I had the pop-up ad for this new feature displayed in my Fastmail web page. However, it was positioned on the screen so that the "Got It" link at the bottom was obscured, and the pop-up captured all clicks. I could move the mouse all over the place, things highlighted and unhighlighted, but the only thing actually clickable (Got It) was off the screen. And the ad said something about paying my utility bill online, which I don't have setup, so I thought I had some kind of virus locking up my email account.

I really didn't appreciate this at all, and that's being diplomatic about it.

I was momentarily confused as well. Not a feature I ever thought about before, and will probably never use.

I'd rather have them implement something simplier like having an anniversary field for contacts and that show up in my calendar so I know when to mail anniversary cards.

You made me check but there is a "birthday" field on the contact form and I can display a "Birthdays" calendar with events for the birthdays of my contacts.

For other types of anniversaries (like close friends' and relatives' wedding anniversaries) I sometimes create dummy contacts.

I just create an all-day calendar event and manually change the date each year.

Can you not just make it a yearly repeating event?

Fastmail has a birthday field that shows up in the calendar. I know because I use it :)

In regards to some of the other replies:

While birthdays are technically anniversaries; I've never met anyone who calls a birthday, an anniversary.

Birthdays ≠ Anniversaries. Just like Squares ≠ Rectangles. (All birthdays are anniversaries, but not all anniversaries are birthdays; just like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.)

I'd rather use the birthday field for birthdays. So when I say (and I imagine 99.999% of other Americans say) "anniversary" we mean everything other than birthdays (most commonly: wedding anniversaries).

Birthdays are called anniversaries (anniversaire) in French.

it's kind of ironic they would push a pop-over promotion for something they could have just sent as an email

Similar experience. Thankfully, the link was not obscured in my case. However, I did not appreciate that it blocked every click even after quite a bit of time had passed.

In my case, this happened just as I had opened a utility bill. First instinct: fastmail scanned my inbox and I had made a mistake paying for a 5 year subscription extension earlier this year.

For years, I used Fastmail alongside four other email accounts with local mail clients like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and eM Client. The experience was always just okay, but recently, tasks like opening messages, switching to folders with lots of items, or searching became frustratingly slow. Additionally, these mail clients consume more resources than I’m comfortable with, and their background processes ballooning to around 2GB on older devices with just 8GB of RAM was simply too much.

The most responsive and lightweight email experience I’ve found is, surprisingly, the Fastmail web app. However, I hesitated for a long time because using a webmail interface felt like a step backward, and I dislike more vendor lock-in. (For context, I already use my own domain through Fastmail.)

But eventually, I couldn’t stand the slowdowns anymore and made the switch. I used Fastmail's IMAP importer to fetch all messages from my other accounts, added their SMTP credentials to Fastmail for composing new emails, and enabled Fastmail's Labels feature in the settings.

Everything is better now. Processing new messages and achieving inbox zero is much faster, labels are more flexible, search is nearly instant, and the resource usage of this additional Firefox tab is significantly lower than running a native email client.

New features like Memos seem useful, but I’m still somewhat wary of the increased vendor lock-in. For example, I hesitate to use their 1Password integration with Masked Emails because I’m not sure how much of a hassle it would be if Fastmail ever turns evil, and I need to jump ship and point my domain to another email host.

That's a bummer to hear. I was thinking of signing up for a FastMail account to primarily be used via Apple Mail.

Is fastmail getting OKRified? :(

I churned when they stopped accepting cryptocurrency payments a few years back and the UX was still great at that point.

(I OKRification that as a form or cause of enshittification)

Is Fastmail hitting the point where they feel compelled to add new features on top of a perfectly good email client, bogging it down and slowly turning a snappy, clean experience into a morass because they couldn't just let it be good and functional?

I hope not. I hope they are keeping it simple and clean.

Part of the implied deal I get for paying for a service is they don't feel the need to enshittify it. Here's hoping this will be a useful value-add.

Looks like a simple and non intrusive and potentially useful feature. Your concern seems unnecessary (for now). They may not be perfect, but they seem to be better than most SaaS companies as far as my experience with them goes. Their web app works, hasnt enshitified or gotten slow, they aren't shoving AI into their stuff afaik. Theyre alright imo for now.

Aside from not having quite as robust an anti-spam approach as gmail (at least at the start), fastmail has been faster and easier to use than gmail was for me, and that's extremely high praise. Even something as obscure as setting a custom color theme for the web UI is fast and painless. I thought getting off gmail would be difficult but it's been a breeze. (not an ad, though it sounds like one)

I have noticed more downtime in the last few months than the previous few years combined. I think they recently did a server migration so hopefully it's not an indication of anything more serious changing in their culture.

The rollout popup was extremely intrusive in my experience.

As a FastMail customer, I like simple and clean, but also support them testing innovative features. Products should test the user cohorts to try to better meet users where they are, this effort is continuous and always in tension.

Nice, they reasonably kludged it into an IMAP folder:

> If you also use another email app to access your Fastmail account, such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird, you’ll still have access to your memos. You’ll find them in the Memos folder, as a reply to the message your memo is attached to.

Apple also does this with their "Notes" app and IMAP servers. (You have to turn on "Notes" for that service in the "Internet Accounts" settings panel.)

It looks like I still have some notes in Fastmail from testing it out back in 2016. I thought IMAP as sync/storage was an interesting idea at the time, but didn't get around to using it. At one point I was considering it as a backing store for recipes.

> Apple also does this with their "Notes" app and IMAP servers. (You have to turn on "Notes" for that service in the "Internet Accounts" settings panel.)

Yeah, I've used this in the past to let family mark domains / addresses for email whitelisting. Needed some finagling because the notes are quoted-printable HTML but easy enough to feed the info into rspamd via redis keys.

This feature in Apple's software is there so it would be compatible with Exchange ActiveSync (a requirement by some organizations that have installed the latter placed on using the former).

I know Notes can store in IMAP, but is there a way of associating it with an email? I can't see anything.

Not that I know of. That isn't part of my use cases, but I see now that the fastmail feature is doing something like that.

I am a Fastmail user. I wish they would break out their Calendar from their Email app so that I could easily switch between them when composing emails and needing to reference my calendar (when mobile, using the app). I assume this is a pretty common use case - has anyone found a workflow for this?

I keep a two tabs, one with my email and the other with my calendar. You can also access your calendar in a side bar from within the email view. Are either of those useful to you?

I’m not sure if I understand what your issue is, but it seems like it’s possible to do this.

Sorry, I do most of my emails from my phone or iPad using their app rather than the website.

I know on iOS I can swipe down on the message I’m writing while writing an email (this hides the keyboard), then hit the calendar icon at the bottom of the screen. From the calendar view, if I hit the email icon I’m brought back to the draft I was just writing.

I have no idea if the same convention will work on Android, though.

If you add your fastmail account to iOS it’ll populate the inbuilt calendar and mail apps. Then you’ve got separate apps for each in addition to the fastmail app. Use whichever ones you please.

The calendar is available in the sidebar (on desktop) which I tend to use quite often. On mobile if you swipe down it should hide the keyboard and you can switch to the calendar while keeping your draft open on the email tab.

I generally agree that the workflow could be improved though.

It's a pet peeve of mine that most email clients want to put the calendar and email list view in places where, by default, you can see one at a time. (I think Outlook started it but I could be wrong)

If I am scheduling something I have a lot on my mind including the contents of the calendar and the email, possibly other emails, other things on the computer and other things that are just in my head. Seeing the calendar and the email simultaneously is the foundation for this. There are work-arounds but these are flawed in their own way. I hate opening multiple email windows in Outlook because if I do it seems Outlook is going to keep opening them forever every time I open Outlook.

Myself I use eM client as a front end for Fastmail.

I think you're right in that the trend started with Outlook, but at least for a while Microsoft offered an opt-out in the form of Outlook Express, which was just a mail client.

My preference is that email and calendar are two entirely separate apps, because I have my calendar open for about half of the emails I compose, and the remainder of my calendar usage has nothing to do with email at all. This is one of the reasons I've stuck with Apple Mail + Calendar through the years.

Oh that’s an interesting problem i never realized could happen.

What about using the calendar app of your os (or another?) to be able to switch?

Great feature! Would love to see this in Outlook (only option at work), gmail and others. Is this proprietary or some kind of extension of the email spec? Cheers

PS I'm a long-time user of FastMail for personal. Highly recommended!

Same! I adore their masked emails and email aliases, and that it integrates into 1pass during signup. Really great UX for email

[..]You’ll find them in the Memos folder, as a reply to the message your memo is attached to.[..]

Seems they are just normal mails in a special location. Shouldn't be that hard for other clients to implement this.

The implementation is indeed simple: the problem is standardization.

i love fastmail web ux but i hate that the fastmail app is useless without internet. no browsing of cached mails.

Use something like imail, thunderbird, etc? Those should all work offline for browsing cached content

The biggest issue with apple's Mail.app is they don't support vanity domains the way Fastmail does. You can add them individually but the Fastmail app lets you create one right from within the compose box - you just type whatever you want into the From: field.

Those of us that check email in Emacs have long had this feature. Org mode has capture functions that can take an email and make a note out of it, or a todo item, schedule it, or do whatever. It's amazingly powerful, and doesn't rely on some web-based software.

Fastmail user. I wish they would do a faster way to filter and move messages to folders/tags. I wish their unsubscribe would work in more cases and actually work the same as “block” feature.

Offline mobile app would be very nice!

Notes with attachments and inlining of images would be super helpful. I think their Notes product have a huge potential.

Hey did this and I thought it was a good idea. Glad this is getting picked up on by other email services.

This was one of my favorite features of Google Inbox (RIP). Does anyone know of a good browser extension that can reproduce this feature for GMail? Preferably one that just works with localstorage rather than forcing you to put your notes in some third-party service...

It'd be more clever to store the notes as replies to your own address, connected to the email; and have the extension see them and render them differently (the extension can store the notes mails with a particular keyword/GMail label). Alternatively they can be draft replies, so you can edit the notes, but that might pollute your Drafts folder.

An advantage of the "reply-to-self" is that the notes would be stored in GMail itself and are viewable on all your devices, including ones without this hypothetical extension.

I guess the extension can also emulate an editing feature by deleting the old version of the "note" email and creating a new one..

Simple Gmail Notes works well. Glad to see FM adopting this feature - so useful for summarizing tasks.

I love Fastmail (and am a paid user) … but don’t understand what problem this feature is solving.

Some use cases are described in the blog post.

I have wanted a feature like this before and worked around it by replying to the email but sending the reply only to me.

It's just another way of managing notes and tasks. Attaching notes and tasks directly to the mail, can result in shorter workflows. I mean, information should be where it's used, and mails are a very central point of some peoples' life.

an immediate one for me is to track notes from phone calls to support. My current process is to reply to the email with my notes from the call.

I appreciate that the data is still available via IMAP. But, it feels fastmail is slowly drifting towards the inevitable enshittification. Maybe that is a bit harsh but still. Some things that have been bothering me in recent months:

- It is not possible to prepay anymore. I used to have at least a year's worth of credit to make sure the account doesn't lapse if I get incapacitated on renewal time

- If a paid account stops, the email address eventually becomes up for grabs for someone else

- The monthly calendar view does not scroll smoothly anymore. Instead it now jumps to full days or months and it makes scrolling through it a badly jagged experience. It used to be so smooth and the best calendar view of any service, ever. Now, it's just as annoying as everything else.

- The calendar view now greys out the month that isn't current. Again making scrolling through the year a worse experience.

I'm sure there are justifications for all changes. But for me things like this make me go from "Fastmail is awesome!" to "Meh, it's email and it's alright". Saying that as someone who has been a paying user for many years.

Use your own domain so your address ownership is separate from your mail ownership. I keep everything with different companies: webhost, mail, domain registrar, etc.

Heads up protonmail! This would give an edge. Also please allow seeing the note with each message of a thread.

Hey does this as well, it's a cool feature

https://www.hey.com/features/inbox-notes/

"private", but the Australian government can access freely.

oh no.

As opposed to an American service like Gmail? Does the PRISM program ring any bells?

As opposed to numerous other alternatives from EU/Switzerland maybe?

There are multiple ways to define "private". Some of those can not be satisfied by any email service, but most don't, as email, by design, is not built for those use cases[0]. -- [0] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...

I use email drafts for this.

In GMail, I just forward the email to myself. That way it stays in the thread in the exact position and doesn't clutter my Drafts folder.

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