My experience with FastMail as a Gmail replacement | Hacker News Reader

My experience with FastMail as a Gmail replacement

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I'd pay twice the fastmail pricing package if they cut all ties with the the USA, including moving their servers.

I already switched from dropbox to Jottacloud - a Norwegian company with their servers in Norway.

Edit: looks like there are several good alternatives at this site:

http://www.internationalman.com/78-global-perspectives/945-n...

http://www.SwissMail.org/ Based in Switzerland.

http://www.neomailbox.net/ Based in Switzerland.

https://secure.runbox.com/ Based in Norway, which has strong privacy laws. Runbox is generally considered a cheap and quality option.

https://www.jumpshipservices.co/ Parent company is incorporated in Hong Kong with servers located in Switzerland.

Yeah, I don't get all the hype about Fastmail. To me, every US hosted solution is like uploading your content to the US. As mentioned by countless blog posts, I don't have anything to hide, but I should have the right to privacy.

Until I find a proper email solution within Europe, I don't see any reason to switch from Gmail.

There's Runbox (http://www.runbox.com/ - servers hosted in Norway), but their web mail client is terrible, both on mobile and desktop. If you use IMAP/POP I'm sure you'll be alright, though.

For me my primary motivation to move away from Gmail was to leave Google's umbrella (ads/being-a-product-not-a-customer/worse usability as time went on), not to escape the USA/NSA (I moved before the NSA stuff came to light).

I'm the same way, although I went with Hushmail. I still use Google for search but I no longer have a Google account.

I just took a look at Jottacloud. Unfortunately, they don't offer a Linux client which is a deal breaker for me.

There's also https://www.wuala.com/en/learn/technology which has a linux client

Jottacloud looked interesting, and I signed up. But then they pulled the stunt that really aggravates me, which is:

Easy signup, only needing email and password. But then on first login, require personal information to continue, and will not allow to skip.

I always feel scammed when software does this to me.

I think the point should be to find a dependable email provider in the same country you live in. That way, your data is subject to the same jurisdictian you are and can only be used against you with a court order.

Also, look for a service with good support. You don't want Google shutting down your account for no reason with no person to talk to for getting your data back.

I am German. Thus I use a German paid mail provider with good customer service track record.

Which Mail provider are you currently using?

I am also German and currently checking out solutions for moving my mail, calender, etc. off of outlook. A major requirement for me is to manage different E-Mail addresses and send via different SMTP servers.

1&1 Hosted Exchange looks quite nice, but 9,99€ isn't that cheap, and there is no tryout unfortunately and afaik does Exchange lack an alias-Feature (+ send via another SMTP, so it gets send without "on behalf of...").

I am using domainfactory for email and a raspberry pi and owncloud for calendar and contacts.

My experience is that I've been using fastmail for 15 years, and have no need to switch away.

It's interesting that the comments in the article made me login to the web interface for the first time in a long time. As I tend to just use IMAP between 3 computers and a few iOS devices. It works very well.

Back when I chose fastmail, the ability to set rules server side was a big deal, and I still use this, but haven't needed to change them in some time. I have all my notification emails (amazon, linkedin etc) go into a notifications folder so they don't clog up my inbox.

Also I can make mailing list subscriptions go into subfolders too. All very handy.

Another nice feature: If I have an email to 20 people, and one of the email addresses is wrong, when I hit Send in Mail.app, I get an error saying which email is wrong, and the email doesn't get sent. So I can correct it an retry. This is much better, where the first mail works, but bounces on some people, and then others in the group reply to the bad email.

I heard on Security Now (twit.tv) that they (among other companies) were asked if they ever provided master keys to US law enforcement, and they refused to reply.

To clarify on that:

As far as I read it they refused to reply to the question about them having handed out masterkeys. They did not reply that they refused to hand out masterkeys.

This sort of denial is hard to read as anything else than that they have already handed over the keys and aren't allowed to talk about it.

It has caused me serious concerns about if I should bother doing a full trial with fastmail, which otherwise seemed like an excellent (although somewhat pricey) replacement for gmail.

You can say it has definitely validated my concerns about fastmail using a US-based hosting provider. If I was fastmail I would be extremely busy looking for a reliable hosting partner elsewhere.

People looking to jump ship from Google are doing it for one of two reasons: 1. Enough with the Google or 2. Enough with the US spying on everything you do.

Stuck with a US datacenter they wont be able to grab near the amount of customers the market is more or less throwing at them right now.

Please see my response to the GP.

Maybe they refused to answer because it's the only option they have if they don't want to lie to their users. Note that US law enforcement actively forbids the company to disclose spying.

Please see my response to the GP and stop the speculation.

You should add clarification to your answer that you work with / own Fastmail.

Thanks. I've editing my original comment.

The speculation is only due to lack of information.

However, even if you indeed handed the keys to the US government, you will be bound by them not to disclose it, so there's no much point answering either "yes" or "no" as long as you or any of your company assets are in the reach of US government.

The same line of thought applies to any company connected with the US in any way, not just to Opera/FastMail.

Anyways, thanks for the update.

Lack of transparency leads to speculation.

As levosmetalo mentioned, we're forced to speculate when it comes to NSA spying, since companies apparently can be forced to not disclose anything. Which is why I think FastMail should see this as a great opportunity to move all servers to Norway. That would stop the speculation.

Which is why they should break all ties to the US completely. Shouldn't be too hard for an Australian/Norwegian company.

We did not refuse to reply. We have contacted the author to find out who he contacted within the company, because it was the first time we have heard about it!

Edit: I work for Opera Software/FastMail.FM

More importantly, can you answer the question ?

There's literally no way for you to prove a negative -- that you aren't collaborating with the NSA. Sorry.

I've been a happy customer for several years now. I've had zero problems with them, but I also don't use the web interface for anything other than managing my accounts (one feature is you can easily setup and manage family members accounts).

I don't think that moving outside the US would make any practical difference. Any mail sent to their servers from my regular correspondents would pass through NSA monitored sites as they left the US and I pull everything off using IMAP over SSL anyway so there isn't anything stored there for them to seize.

Your email correspondence, unless encrypted with pgp, really should be considered no different than sending a postcard in the mail. It can be intercepted and copied at any number of points along the way.

Any mail sent to their servers from my regular correspondents would pass through NSA monitored sites as they left the US

Sure, but a lot of HN readers and potential FastMail customers live in places where traffic to/from FastMail's servers wouldn't be intercepted by the NSA (if the servers were in Norway). So while moving servers to Norway wouldn't make a difference to you, it would for a lot of other people.

Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it, and you're better off assuming that you are monitored instead of depending on a server location.

To me the most compelling argument would be seizure laws. If you are one of those people who use the mail server as a data store then it would be worthwhile to have it in a place that would resist attempts to grab the hardware.

I've been a Fastmail user for ages now. As I abhor and abjure web applications, my personal calculus is different than that of someone seeking to flee the UI changes that Google is implementing. Their IMAP service is rock solid and very, very few spam emails get through their filters. That's all I want, and Fastmail's ability to provide is why I'll continue to send them my money.

I'm out on the edge of the email usage distribution, however, so I try not to generalize my experiences and biases too much.

Con: No labels. Saved searches go some of the way, but not as convenient. Folder-based storage feels old. Whatever the UI terminology (labels, playlists, tags), its clear that the trend is to embrace the non-physicality of information and allow it to "live" in many "places" simultaneously.

"Most of FastMail.fm's pages have an outdated look to them - only the Minimal theme looks modern. Apple's success should be enough to convince everyone that design matters."

Ironically, Apple could take this advice too; it's not like their webmail design is anything special (in my opinion). Looks too much like a desktop app when it should look more like a web app and feels slow to boot.

Re. Fastmail: I'm trying them for 6 months. I'm happy enough so far and think I'll stick with them. Still holding out for push support for iPhone and more secure on-server email storage though... Both of which are offered by Rackspace, which seems to have a good reputation as well, so I'm tempted to switch.

I asked FastMail support about their US data center a few weeks ago, suggesting they offer an alternative. This was their reply:

"We DO plan to set up a non-US data centre, and are making progress towards this. However it is expensive and time-consuming, and we're not ready to offer this as an extra yet. We will definitely make it known when such an option becomes available."

Cool. I hope they do make it an extra-cost option, because +1 for price discrimination.

I'm in the process of moving my gmail account to fastmail. Trying to move 250k mail (7 gb) from one provider to another is painful. I'm using the imapcopy.pl script which works by reading one mail from the source account and then uploading it to the target. Apparently it's a pretty expensive process as I'm getting my access throttled both by gmail and fastmail. Gmail even shuts of imap access entirely if you hammer their servers hard enough. Well if they didn't want me to flood them, they should have made it possible to download your mail archive in a single tarball...

So far, after running imapcopy.pl for almost a whole week, only 100k mails have been successfully copied.

Did you try their "Migrate IMAP Mailbox" which grabs directly from your GMail? It pulled across 3GB in about 30 minutes and worked well.

Thanks for the tip. I've tried that option but it doesn't seem to work at all for large mailboxes. Also gmail doesn't expose any api for exporting mailboxes, so fastmail still has to copy each message individually which is very time consuming.

No calendar is a pretty big downside. I would venture to say this is even more important to me than staying on Gmail now. Especially with shared calendars between myself and my spouse.

Zoho Calendar (https://www.zoho.com/calendar/) is the only real alternative if you want something web-based, but let's face it; it's not as good as Google Calendar.

Calendar is one thing that I miss. I still use both GMail and Fastmail. My fastmail account has basically taken over as my "personal" email while GMail is now the all the other junk account.

I don't understand this point. Gmail doesn't have a calendar either. Google Calendar is a separate product. I don't even find the integration between the two particularly strong.

But if you have iCal, just store your .ics file in the FastMail file store and give the http url to whoever you like and viola - instant group/family calendar. iCal will do all the work for you once you set it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICal

I'm toying with running my own mail, calendar, and contacts on a VPS. Tired of being a second class citizen in Google's eyes for not using their apps.

If you do, please write a comprehensive guide on how to do this. I eventually gave up trying to figure out how to setup a mail server.

It might be a while (personally busy at the moment), but it's a project at the tippy-top of my to-do list.

You missed a very big con

- Does not support push on mobile.

Well, I'd prefer the mobile web version anyway. Which works, but isn't as slick as the desktop version.

This is going to sound trite, but I won't pay for something sight unseen. There is no preview option and there are no screenshots on their website. I literally have no idea what their webmail interface looks like. How could I possibly sign up for this service?

There's a free 60-day trial, no credit card required. https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html. What more could you ask for? :)

Thanks, not sure how I missed that!

Signed up, checked it out.

I'd like if the fastmail website provided some screenshots and other info about the product. Right now the only thing I'm told is the size of my inbox and some other numbers.

Here's what the Minimal Theme looks like: http://i.imgur.com/N8pqIG6.png. Also, there's a free 60-day trial: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

I paid for FastMail for about 5 years until they lost a lot of customers' data, including mine, and refused to come clean about it.

Can you provide some more information about this? As a current FastMail customer I am quite interested!

I just made the switch, and I have to add some things missing here

Cons: - No priority inbox - FastMail service is pretty poor

Another con that I didn't really expect:

Their address book is okay via the web (pretty much like Gmail's), but can only be accessed read-only via LDAP (and can't sync with iOS, you can search it but you can't populate the iOS address book with it). So, the only way to edit contacts is via web, and you can't keep your mobile address book up to date with it.

For now, I'm stuck with Google Contacts until I find a better provider.

Tried Zoho lately? I played with it two years ago, but decided going with Google Apps free tier at that time. It might be interesting to people sick of Google, though won't help much with the NSA issues.

Couldn't find anything that looking like contact hosting. Also, Zoho feels a bit overkill for that scenario.

Above the header in your folder you'll see the following buttons:

"All mail", "Unread", "Personal", "Notifications", "Mailing lists" and pinned sorting.

Still no priority inbox based on bayesian filtering. (hint: feature request).

In fact, I'm amazed that most other mail clients / providers haven't taken this further than Google. I mean, it would be great with bayesian filtering for everything (labels, folders, categories, stars, whatnot). I would love to be able to train it to filter email into different folders based on me just clicking "Belongs here" / "Does not belong here".

Ahh gotcha. I'll mention it. Thanks :)

What do you mean by "service is poor"? For me, no prio inbox is not a big loss, exactly.

Define pretty poor.

As someone interested in their service, seeing reviews saying "pretty poor" is worse than nothing.

rather costly if you ask me.

You can pay up to five years in advance and save money.

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