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Comment by danielhep | Hacker News Reader

I love fastmail, I switched from Proton a couple years ago after deciding the trade offs to have encrypted email were not worth it, since even if I fully trust Proton, most emails come from or go to AWS, Outlook, or Gmail anyway. I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox, and they don’t add unnecessary features or bloat. I thought I would use my OS’s mail apps but the fastmail app and website are so good I just use that.

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The Fastmail desktop app is literally a wrapped version of their website but with the added feature of... get this... no back button (or equivalent shortcut).

My 30 years of muscle memory using webmail is made useless by this "app" because some web developer somewhere wants to cosplay as a desktop app developer now.

It's not an oversight either. It's an intentional choice to not have a go-back-to-previous-page keyboard shortcut. A customer support person said they would add it as a "feature request". Gee, thanks.

It might be worth learning their hotkeys because they're pretty efficient in many cases (potentially included cases where you want the back button). They work in the browser and the app:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753534-Key...

Not saying your complaint is invalid at all.

Thanks, yes they are all perfectly reasonable.

It's just a weird choice to make. It's like they are forgoing the back hotkey to make it seem more like a "native" app. But it clearly isn't, and I can't think of any good reason to consciously omit it. Or... since they are likely using a framework (Tauri maybe? I haven't checked) to go out of their way to disable something that is already baked-in.

<shrug>

fair. I use the webapp on desktop

I'm using Fastmail for more than 9 years. Especially since they added offline support to their app, there's nothing left why I would even remotely consider leaving them.

What about the fact it’s a US-based product so you’re under forced Five Eyes data collection?

Fastmail is not a US product, it is Australian. Australia is part of 5 Eyes though.

Almost every email is going to or coming from US servers anyway. Better to treat email as insecure and use something else for more secure communication.

Correct. I mean if you send from ProtonMail to GMail (which will be 90% of private conversations) you're an open book anyway. And if you want to be sure then there's PGP et al.

Good point, thank you (and the other commenters)!

And how does Protonmail help when Switzerland has signed the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the US? If they need anything, they’ll get it.

What were the tradeoffs with Proton?

As a Proton user - the main trade-off for me is that you are forced to use their apps on mobile, and those apps are pretty barebones and (on iOS at least) have none of the bells and whistles of a modern iOS app, such as Home Screen widgets.

Since I use my own domain for email, I am considering moving over to another provider once my subscription term is up. I really miss widgets.

For me it was search. The proton apps are the only way to access email on mobile, and on them and on their webapp the search barely functioned, even with full text search downloaded. The only way to reliably search my email was with Proton Mail Bridge on desktop, but for some reason it continuously was using CPU on my laptop and of course didn’t work on mobile. If they made a server version that I could put in a docker container on my server it would probably solve most of my problems with Proton, because then I could access it from the Mail app on my phone over IMAP.

for me there were two:

no caldav support so I couldn't get my next appointment as a widget on my phone. Similarly, your contacts in proton are trapped there and cannot sync with any other system (such as your phone...)

limited quantity of aliases compared to fastmail. this is actually a really sticky feature with fm from what I've been seeing. I would have to rename a bunch of accounts or switch to using a catchall to transfer out.

When I cancelled Proton the subscription ended immediately instead of running out the clock on the time I had paid for. Left a really bad taste in my mouth.

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