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Comment by pawelduda | Hacker News Reader

I recommend Fastmail. I've been paying customer for 5+ years, parked custom domain and set up forwarding on Gmail. 0 problems except maybe 2 short downtimes that I can think of

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Same, migrated away from GMail about 5 years ago, had the same account since around 2004 when it was still invite-only. I got scared after a friend's experience getting their Google account locked after setting up AdSense for a side project.

Chose Fastmail over Proton just due to the convenience of search, I appreciate that Proton is more privacy conscious with the full encryption but I can only manage my emails if I can search them, I'm not well organised but can remember the right keywords to find anything in the tens of thousands emails I have from all these years.

Proton's full encryption is only if you email to another Proton user. Other email providers would not be able to decrypt the message for the user to read. While readers of this board might not need the distinction to be made, the vast majority of the population definitely does though. I have had multiple conversations with people that did not consider their Proton mail sent to a Gmail user wasn't fully encrypted.

Encryption is hard to get right on multiple levels. The biggest hurdle however will always be end users.

Seconded, not because of the AI stuff, but because they're much better than Gmail. The UI loads instantly, is much more responsive, featureful, things just make sense, support is really quick and knowledgeable when you email them, just fantastic all around.

Yeah, one of the reasons was how laggy and stuttery Gmail's Android app was. Fastmail has been super smooth experience compared to it.

I considered fastmail. Their integration with android contacts is terrible,you have to maintain contacts separately. I can do that,but it doesn't work for non technical users of my family.

This is actually Google's fault, of course. Vendor lock-in. The experience on iOS is similarly frustrating.

How's that possible? It seems like Whatsapp integrates seamlessly with my contacts

I don’t have any complains with contact management on iOS with Fastmail. Apple’s CardDAV and CalDAV implementations are way better than they used to be. What issues are you seeing?

  > The experience on iOS is similarly frustrating.

I agree with "frustrating," but it is solvable without 3rd-party software.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279941-Se...

You can either use their "Device profile" or do it manually.

You need https://www.davx5.com/

It'll do bi-directional sync between Android contacts/calendar and Fastmail (or any other CardDav/CalDav server)

Also available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/

Another happy davx5 user here, it is so good I donated.

  Android does not support CalDAV or CardDAV, which are used to sync calendars and contacts. However, a workaround is installing a CalDAV or CardDAV sync adapter.

  We have tested and recommend DAVx⁵, which is approximately $5. Once you have added your account in DAVx⁵, you can set up calendars or contacts in the app of your choice, and the changes will sync with Fastmail.

Ditto. I started migrating 3 years ago, and now almost nothing reaches my Gmail any more. Weaning off Google is hard, but this felt like the most significant step.

Same here. Also no "TRY OUR AI NOW" button, no Copilot popups, no feeding all emails into LLM training, no ads (!!!) in the inbox(!!!). Just great value.

I was a free user ~20 years ago and still use them today! It's exactly what I need out of email, with everything included in the one price tier. I tried ProtonMail and some others like iCloud but found no equivalent.

Any tips for getting family members to use your new email? I've also been on Fastmail for ~5 years, but can't get anyone I know personally to use the new email!

Auto-reply from the old email that says, "This email address will stop working in {n} days. Please update your address book with <new email address>" Ideally only reply to those in your address book so spammers do not get the new address so easily.

Also CC your new email address from the old one in an email to everyone you care about with "I have updated my email address to <new email address>" so it's easier for them to add it.

I recommend purelymail.com (not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer).

I've been a customer for 4-5 years, ever since I saw a hn post about them, and I have zero complaints.

It's dirt cheap ($10 per year for unlimited amount of users).

They allow wildcard addresses and I've set up my own "trash mail" so I can register an account at e.g. LinkedIn with linkedin@my-domain.com.

I've set up 4 different domains and 3 accounts and all of this for $10 a year.

Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I think it's super cool to offer such a great service for a fair price.

How has your experience been with spam filtering?

I think they're using SpamAssassin so don't expect world leading spam filtering.

But, they allow you to write your own sieve scripts so you can really customize the experience a lot.

Don't think of them as another proton mail, they're much more a DIY mail provider.

How's their spam filtering?

This is the big one for me. I've tried moving away from gmail several times and everyone elses spam filtering has been utterly awful in comparison.

I use fast mail and still have my legacy Gmail.

I don't get spam on either. Gmail account is from year one, fastmail account predates that (~27 years old), so they both receive plenty.

For me, it is working excellent, I almost never check the spam directory for false positives, and it happens maybe once a month for me to receive a spam message in my inbox. I think it is comparable to Gmail, maybe a bit better.

I switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings. I spend a tremendous amount of time going back and forth with people manually inputting when I am free. I’d pay more for this integration!

I also use ChatGPT (copy and paste) to rewrite long emails for clarity. I’d love if it had pre-written drafts that I could approve or edit and send…

> I switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings.

Good news. You have options, basically everywhere.

Feels like everyone else relying on US tech giants is having AI forced down their gullets.

I love Fastmail otherwise though. I don’t want to switch away, and I don’t want them to force it down anyone’s throat. I just want an option to integrate or a feature I could turn on (even a paid premium tier). My response to another person explains what the problem is - I think it is a pretty common issue.

> I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

I get 3-5 email requests a day for meetings. Those meetings are at various locations (so options like Calendly which are more focused on people doing meetings from a single location don’t work). I need to reply with times that I am available. Often they get back to me and say they aren’t available at those times so how about these times. We iterate until we find a time that works.

All of this is manual right now. I’ve spoken to a lot of colleagues in my industry who have the same pain points. A lot of time is wasted on this.

Something intelligent could take into account where I am going to be right before the time I offer and make sure there is enough time for transit in between. It could warn me if I have a few meetings back to back and might need a break.

I love Fastmail and don’t regret ditching the Gmail backend at all, but I do wish I could have something intelligent like this integrated.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but isn't this just... a shared calendar? You have a work calendar which is public and other people can open to view your availability, and propose meeting times. And vice-versa you can see their calendar.

Modulo your problem with travel times (but calendars have location info, so hacking something where the travel time between two consecutive locations is accounted for should not be too difficult). So I don't quite understand where "AI" fits into this.

im sure you could get procmail to do this, have fastmail forward to a self-hosted mail server with procmail and then have it go nuts. You can send mail from your own server using fastmail's servers with an API key.

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