Hacker News Reader

Comment by rawkode | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted JMAP to work, but FastMail can't innovate on a protocol level while providing a stale and boring product.

They need to motivate people to use FastMail to boost JMAP adoption and they've failed to do that for a decade.

They post their 12 days of Christmas blog every year and never a new feature to be found.

If you can't add shiny features to your service with a new shiny protocol that promises to break down silos, then it doesn't stand a chance.

What will replace IMAP will be what changes email forever, and we've not seen that yet in an open protocol.

We should revisit Google / Apache Wave

View on HN

As one of their customers, I really appreciate that they don't upend everything all the time with pointless features.

Constantly reinventing things and piling on pointless features is one of the things I dislike most about Google, their chat solution is especially egregious for this. It only causes frustration and increases the time investment required to be proficient with the products.

They don't need a new protocol to deliver a stable and sufficient product for their customers, I agree.

I'm suggesting that a new protocol needs hype for adoption and reinventing email needs new capabilities

They have added features though. They're just not invasive. They added masked emails, for example. And if I look at the settings right now, I notice they've added customization of what swipes do.

I too like the feeling that they're stable. I guess they're just tactful with their additions.

I don't mind new features, but I do very much mind when those new features change the UI, upend how things work or just add clutter.

Not invasive is a good way of putting it, I don't mind new features that are not invasive.

I switched a couple years ago because the masked emails and i was tired of histing anonaddy and i couldnt be happier myself. Easily the best mail provider i have used and i have used a bunch of them (including all the big guys, a provider using zimbra,protonmail, etc)

I don't get your point. Fastmail provide, foremost, an email service. Boring is good here. Exciting and shiny I don't need.

Then you are also fine with IMAP. No new protocol needed.

I'm happy with pop too.

Nope, IMAP can't provide the kind of smooth reliable experience that the Fastmail mobile app provides. Now they obviously could have done it in many different ways, but I know from experience with IMAP that it can't do it.

The amount of times IMAP has resulted in duplicate emails when moving mail between folders for me is enough that I eventually gave up on attempting any kind of organization back when I was last using it.

My anecdote is that that has never happened to me and all IMAP clients seem fairly stable to me. Do with that information what you will.

I sometimes feel like an edge case detector.

Anyway, It has been some years since I last used IMAP. I had issues with Outlook, Thunderbird and Nylas N1 while connecting to Gmail, Exchange and Office365. It was a fairly small mailbox getting about 20k mail a year and keeping about half of that. Usually moving about 5k mail around at a time (end of year).

It got so bad that I had to get familiar enough with the IMAP protocol to make my own client program to handle deduplication overnight. Shortly after that I decided to just give up on trying to keep thinks organized.

I am in Australia and this was before the NBN, so obviously it was always on shitty connections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com