Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masnick | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc...

In terms of additional features:

- Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)

- Way faster loading time, snapper interface

- Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4...)

- Some different interface features that I really like (your mileage may vary), like always showing starred messages on top for specific folders

There's lots more in terms of customizability and different weird configurations they allow you to do. They've done a pretty good job of hiding the complexity for non-power users, but it's still really accessible if you're willing to read through lots of preference screens.

There are some features FastMail does not have that Gmail does. The two big ones for me are undo send and composing in a new window (although you can just open the whole FastMail interface in a new tab and it only takes a second to load; opening Gmail in a new tab could take 10+ seconds in my experience). I use the FastMail web interface full time and am just as efficient, if not more, than I am with Gmail. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same, so there wasn't even a learning curve.

Under the hood it's all Cyrus IMAPd server with a ton of customisations (seriously, it's a lot - it's kind of getting out of hand - I need to tidy some up and push them back upstream)

The code we run in production is all available to anyone who wants to play with it, though the usual caveats about "it's not particularly well tested for any configurations other than exactly the one we run" apply.

https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/branches/fastmail

brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git log --oneline cmu/master..HEAD | wc -l 632

brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git diff cmu/master HEAD | diffstat | tail -n 1 149 files changed, 39060 insertions(+), 4314 deletions(-)

FastMail removed their Guest account tier a couple of months ago. [1] Existing accounts (I have one of those) were grandfathered in, though.

[1] http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-servi...

Undo send?

In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

It's about 10 seconds, and it's saved me when I realize I forgot to attach stuff more than once.

Gmail has it as an option (labs last I used gmail), that is the best way I think to do it.

I don't ever find a need to undo an email though.

I believe it was only for like 20-30 seconds as well that it offered undo.

  | Gmail has it as an option

Supposedly Gmail added this as an option because their infrastructure was setup in such a way that the delay was already there. They just made hooks so that you could cancel it before it was sent.

Any chance you could hunt down a reference for this? I regularly test email servers from my Gmail account (amongst others) and I've found that their outgoing messages hit my mail servers almost instantly.

What would make it a bad idea? Just delay sending it for a user-specified amount of time (I think Gmail does 5s, 10s, and 30s), then have the UI for undo-ing the send disappear after the time elapses

Does Fastmail.FM have the equivalent of the "Archive" action in Gmail? Mail.app on OS X and on iPhone seem to play well with Archive and it's not something that I really want to give up.

YES! And Mail.app on OS X actually works better with FastMail's Archive than it ever did with Gmail's (in my experience).

Here's a screenshot from Mail.app: https://files.app.net/1/79773/aTOWGMJ-rQ2Js_Edg-CWLi5FsLEVYq...

I either never knew that existed when I tried Mail.app with Gmail or it didn't work. In any case, it works perfectly with FastMail's "Archive" folder.

No, and it's really annoying. I have an "Archive" mailbox in my Fastmail account, and Mail on both OS X and iOS recognize it as special (they give it the same "archive" icon as a GMail account), but don't override the 'delete' function. I haven't found a Radar for it, but I imagine that many of same have been closed as "works as designed".

Surely "Delete" is more "Move to Trash"?

In our web interface, there are two buttons - one moves to Trash, the other to the Archive folder.

I don't use webmail; I was referring to the way that iOS recoginizes GMail's "All Mail" and overrides the delete function.

Yes, it has Archive.

Yes, there is an archive button. There is a difference, mail in Fastmail is in traditional IMAP folders and don't use tags as folders, I assume that you just tell the mail client not to download the archive folder.

Mail.app's "Archive" isn't the same as Gmail's. In Gmail, it just removes it from the current mailbox but leaves it in All Mail. Mail.app actually moves it to a specially-named IMAP folder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com