Fastmail: Increased storage quotas and other service level changes | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail: Increased storage quotas and other service level changes

blog.fastmail.fm

32 pointssp854 comments

Before anyone does anything too rash, have a look at NeoMailbox.net[1]. It's secure offshore email hosting in Switzerland, and it is excellent. A true Gmail alternative for powerusers who value their privacy.

[1] http://www.neomailbox.net

Q: Why does Fastmail get free advertising on HN? Their servers are on US soil. I think it's a fair question to ask, esp. when there are better alternatives like NeoMailbox and Runbox.

Got a demo/screenshot of the webmail interface?

All I can find are screenshots of their old web interface. They've made a lot of improvements recently; better customer support, a much faster server, and while the interface isn't 'purdy', it's better. More upgrades are on the way too, I've been told.

I definitely don't speak for anyone but myself... However, some of us have been using Fastmail for several years, as even before Opera took over, Fastmail was a mobile friendly service, pre iPhone era, so we like this service regardless of their physical location.

Powerusers who value their privacy will have already taken steps to encrypt their communications before sending into the wild.

Then there are those whose accounts are free because they joined up back when free accounts were available to all; those accounts are still free! <(;-)

That seems like a poorly thought out service that might lull a normal user into thinking that their email is actually secure. It sounds like they encrypt the email between their servers and the client. Great. Your email is flying around the internet unencrypted (most likely through the US, mind) and it's stored on their servers unencrypted, yes?

NoMailbox has built-in encryption functionality. It's one of the many features and options in the new web interface.

To be clear, I'm just a satisfied customer. Using NeoMailbox gives me peace of mind. It's the best option I've found, and that's after months of testing many different paid and free email services.

  Using NeoMailbox gives me peace of mind

This is essentially what I'm talking about. It probably shouldn't give you peace of mind. You click an 'Encrypt' button on a web interface and it encrypts it and sends it off. I presume that you can go into your 'Sent Items' and look at that email's contents even though you've encrypted it, yes? So it's either sitting there unencrypted on the server or they have the keys.

It's PGP sign/encrypt email with a passphrase option. There's also an option to read receipt.

Look, I'm not the sales department and I'm not going to hold your hand. Please, do your own homework.

While I appreciate the condescencion, their website says "We use OpenPGP" and doesn't specify how you can decrypt a message using their webmail client without storing (or sending) your keys on their server. If there is a workable solution to that, I'm genuinely curious about it.

I'm sure they're a lovely email provider, but when they emphasize 'Secure Email' the onus is on them to prove that their secure system isn't a series of wishes and 'trust us'.

Wow, NeoMailbox is pretty expensive for the family plan. How is it better when it's 50% higher priced?

I guess our priorities are different. I place a high value on my communications with family, friends and business partners. People who communicate with me know I value their privacy.

A ciascuno la sua.

You can value their privacy all you want, but so long as your email crosses a US, UK, or US-cooperating border your messages aren't safe. And I doubt RC4 over TLS, which most connections are, is enough to stop the NSA for more than a few seconds. And even with PGP your metadata, which is what they want anyway to establish probable cause, is revealed anywhere your message goes. Good luck keeping your email private! I wish we could, I really do.

I'm in the US and need to economize as much as possible. I already have hosting but dislike their email services. I can't afford to pay ~$175/year for email alone, in addition to my personal web hosting costs.

BULLSHIT. Yes it has to be said this strongly.

These guys are reading your mail: https://www.li.admin.ch/en/index.html

Random sample from heise news: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/9/9462/1.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Big-Brother-Awards-Sc... http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Online-Durchsuchung-u... http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bericht-Datensammlung... http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Neuausrichtung-der-Ko...

If you can't read German laws and news (or whatever language the jurisdiction in question uses), you can not make an informed decision on these matters.

Who said I can't read German? My mother is German. Besides, I trust the Germans a lot more than I trust the US government.

What has your mother to do with this? Have you read Swiss laws on the subject? Have you followed the news about Swiss email surveillance?

You can't go around promoting a service based on a countries privacy laws, when those laws are ineffective against the intelligence agencies the users seek protection from.

To give just one example: The German Bundesnachrichtendienstgesetz simply exempt the BND from entire sections of the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz. The BND says they are respecting the law. What they don't say is that there is nothing left to respect.

Has anyone used Fastmail on an ongoing basis?

I've been contemplating the switch - but don't know anyone who's actually used it.

I've been using it for about 6 months now - couldn't be happier. The web interface is far better than Gmail's and it works better with desktop mail clients than Gmail ever did.

Only thing I miss is push email on my phone but I don't miss it as much as I thought I would.

I'm pretty sure Fastmail supports IDLE... you sure it's not your client?

IDLE isn't supported in Mail.app on iOS because it drains the battery (also, IMAP IDLE isn't push email).

I switched and was very happy with it. The webmail felt much leaner and faster than anything Google has offered these last years.

That said, it's not a switch without cons:

1. Calendar/Contact management. Still not built in to the service (although fastmail say they are working on it), so until then you will need something to double for that in. I double up and use Baikal[1] for CardDAV and CalDAV and it works for me.

But even with that in place you need to import your contacts and they wont get auto-synched to your device when you start emailing new people.

Get on it, fastmail! ;)

2. Fastmail does not offer any proprietary Google/Gmail or MS/Exchange protocol-support. This means that you will need to use IMAP to hook up, and not all IMAP clients supports push-email. This includes the built in Android mail-client.

3. Not accessing mail over webservices and http/https, you may find some corporate firewalls blocking you from checking your email. This is super-easy to forget! In that case, OpenVPN mobile is your friend.

Apart from that, I made the switch and I'm very much happy about it.

[1] http://baikal-server.com/

I've been using it for a couple of months now. (enhanced account), mostly as an implementation detail. Setting it up and migrating is simple, their web interface is nice, and the few questions I had were adequately and quickly answered. I've also been using them for DNS, which is very simple as well.

In short: Does what it says on the tin. It's email and they do it well.

I've used Fastmail for years. It's been rock-solid, both before and after the acquisition. I can only recall one outage that was long enough for me to notice in that time. It's very, very good if you want an imap provider. The only compelling argument for gmail, imo, is the integration benefit, which continues to increase (e.g. recent Now enhancements).

Excuse my ignorance: what acquisition? who acquired them?

They acquired themselves from Opera most recently. Prior to that, they were bought by Opera in 2010.

http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/general/opera-ac...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448549

Opera if I remember correctly.

Opera (the browser maker) acquired them, but then Fastmail bought themselves back. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail

I've used them for years. In fact I'm grandfathered on an old plan that had a single payment for "lifetime" service. They've steadily improved, and while I still prefer the very simple webmail interface they had a year ago, they've improved their current one since it was introduced.

I have the same grandfathered plan. I wish I had bought more storage when it was available. It looks like we aren't getting any upgrades not that I blame them.

There is already some praise here for them (I'm a happy enhanced user as well) so I'll add two more negative points:

1. No "always load images for x@y.tld", minor annoyance for certain newsletters that I always want to see fully

2. No reply and archive which requires me to press 2 buttons / keys instead of one to keep my inbox clean.

If you switch you'll be impressed how true the "fast" in their name is ;)

For the first issue enable "Always load remote content from people I know" and add the newsletter sender as a contact, or is this not what you mean?

While I'd prefer not to have newsletter senders in my contact list, I guess that'll work :) Thanks, I didn't know of that setting.

You probably would actually, because the other side effect is that they get a positive spam protection score which means they are unlikely to be detected as spammy.

Yes, and it's excellent.

I took their 60-day trial and switched from Gmail. I was initially cautious because I didn't think anyone had improved spam filtering and search as much as the Gmail team, but – for me – Fastmail is better at both. They have a pretty powerful search system like Gmail's: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/mailbox_searching.html and their spam filter is excellent.

The whole experience is faster than Gmail, you have much more space to write and read email, and there's no nagging feeling that, by using the service, a company is slowly building a profile on you.

Migration-wise, they have an IMAP importer which works great. You can tell it which labels/folders to import; their defaults for Gmail worked fine for me.

Their new mobile web app is very impressive too – it feels native (minus the notifications, which I've set up by forwarding mail headers only to an IFTTT recipe that sends notifications via Pushover on iOS). I now use Fastmail's mobile app instead of iOS Mail. http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/21/faster-than-native-introd...

The only things I missed from Gmail were the "Undo Send" feature, which I've learned to live without, and the automatic "Promotions" inbox filter; Fastmail has automatic filters for "Personal", "Notifications", and "Mailing lists", but not one for marketing HTML email. I've unsubscribed from most lists and resubscribed using plus addressing – just create a folder named 'News' and subscribe to any lists using you+news@example.com. Newsletters then skip your inbox and fill the news folder. This works with your custom domains too – not just the Fastmail-assigned domain.

Additional domains (they call them "virtual domains") are easy to set up, and they provide DKIM and SPF entries for each domain you add for you to copy into your DNS records. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/quick_tours_setting_up_domain.h...

Their documentation is _really_ thorough, so I haven't needed to bother their support team; hopefully I can keep it that way – at $40 a year for the Enhanced personal email service (which gives you multi-domain support and now 15GB of space), I would hate to be a burden on them.

I signed up last week because I wanted a way to send mail from anything@mydomain.com. GMail lets you receive anything@mydomain.com (like every other mail provider), but needs you to jump through verification hoops to send from anything.

With Fastmail's wildcard feature, you can just have a "from" input field that can be anything from your domain. And when replying, it's smart enough to reply from the same user.

I've been using it for 1.5 yrs now, they're pretty good. Switched from Gmail. They don't have a calendar yet (it's on their stack though).

I switched to Fastmail about 6 months ago. There were a lot of things about GMail I missed for first two months, but now it's settled into my workflow and I love it, particularly given all the GMail overhauls lately.

I've been using them since January 2008 and I couldn't be more pleased.

Their documentation is excellent (e.g. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/features_plus_addressing_and_su...) and their blog often has cool little technical details about how they solved certain problems (e.g. http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-communication-u...)

Yes. Happy user for just over 10 years (if memory serves). I remember a couple of outages back in the early days, but since then it's been rock-solid, AFAICT.

I have been using Fastmail since January of 2005. It has been rock-solid for virtually all of that time, save for a single prolonged outage many years ago (they have since rearchitected).

The web user interface is clean, effective, and comes with a complete set of keyboard bindings. Searching is fast and flexible, as is folder manipulation.

I'd like to see some improvements in the spam filtering, but am otherwise very happy with my paid account.

Just wanted to add that the importance of a clean mail interface can't be overstated. It helps you to focus on the emails. Fastmail accomplishes this perfectly.

Yes! I switched a few months ago. I find that the web interface and features offered are GMail-competetive. It's good, reliable, ad-free, and is accompanied by good customer support.

Overall I really like Fastmail. I had 1 bad experience where my inbox became unusable for about a week because of spam. Support eventually fixed it.

Been using it since 2009, it's rock solid, enough so that I'm now buying 3 years of service at a time (the most discounted).

If you buy a high enough level, I'm at Enhanced (lets me use my own domain), you get "Priority support", and it's very real. I think I've only used it once, fairly recently when some new spamming scheme started frequently outwitting their very good spam system, and the response was personalized and detailed, the support person even appropriately adjusted my spam score threshold. Which I assume they do since many customers aren't that sort of sophisticated.

They support static web sites, which have provided everything I've needed to do stuff for my family, e.g. make pictures available with viewing support, even a choice of light and dark background schemes.

They also offer a nice window into their operations and development through their blog.

That's excellent news. I was bumping up against the 8GB limit on a Superior family account, and they sheepishly couldn't give me any more storage. Now I've got 15GB, and an option to get 60GB within my family account. (I run email accounts for my less technically inclined family members.)

It does seem like buying themselves back from Opera has been a good move for customers.

Nice steady improvements across the line.

I also think the move to unify how personal accounts and family accounts works is a good move. It was a source of quite a bit of confusion and extra cognitive workload when I looked into fastmail the first time around.

I agree. I recently signed up, and wanted to use my own domain. I could either go for the highest level or personal account, with way more storage and transfer than I need, or get a "family" account with only one user, which felt like cheating. Pondering these options caused me to hesitate for a month or two before signing up.

Can anyone compare Fastmail to Rackspace Mail?

I have used Rackspace Mail for 7 years and have been happy with it for both my clients and my family. It looks like RS is much cheaper for similar mail box sizes and offers pretty significant upgrades such as mobile sync, archival and exchange support. As a Rackspace customer for over 10 years, I have always been happy with their service. I do think the webmail interface is a bit dated.

However, I do see plenty of praise for Fastmail, and perhaps I haven't investigated their services fully.

I really wish you guys had an API. My startup would love to be able to automatically provision mailboxes, perform Single Sign-on, and resell your service.

My biggest problem with Fastmail is that they make it extremely difficult for a single person to have an email address with your own domain. IIRC you either have to purchase a family plan or go throw aliases, the latter of which is user unfriendly.

Their Enhanced level of service doesn't work for you?

It does for me, catches everything sent to ancell dash ent dot com, which allows me to do the usual "who's selling my email address" trick with customized addresses, like redcross.org.ph@anc... when I sent some money to the Philippine Red Cross.

Enhanced isn't domain hosting, it's domain aliasing, which is a big difference.

There may be some distinction here I'm missing. In addition to this domain aliasing feature I haven't tried out, Fastmail.com is hosting my domain. Right now it's got their standard settings:

       ancell-ent.com  Type=MX   TTL=3600  STANDARD_MX          (standard email - e.g. user@ancell-ent.com)
     *.ancell-ent.com  Type=MX   TTL=3600  STANDARD_MX          (subdomain addressed email - e.g. user@mail.ancell-ent.com)
       ancell-ent.com  Type=A    TTL=3600  STANDARD_WEB         (main website - http://ancell-ent.com/)
     *.ancell-ent.com  Type=A    TTL=3600  STANDARD_WEB         (subdomain websites - including http://www.ancell-ent.com/)
  mail.ancell-ent.com  Type=A    TTL=3600  STANDARD_MAIL        (webmail login - http://mail.ancell-ent.com/)
       ancell-ent.com  Type=CSV  TTL=3600  CSV_DENY_ALL         (no email sending machines identify as ancell-ent.com)
       ancell-ent.com  Type=JABBER TTL=3600  STANDARD_JABBER      (standard chat server - chat.messagingengine.com)
   wap.ancell-ent.com  Type=A    TTL=3600  STANDARD_WAP         (cellphone WAP service - http://wap.ancell-ent.com/)
       ancell-ent.com  Type=DKIM TTL=3600  STANDARD_DKIM        (dkim key mesmtp._domainkey.ancell-ent.com)
       ancell-ent.com  Type=AUTOCONFIG TTL=3600  STANDARD_AUTOCONFIG  (mail autoconfig)

But there's also a "Custom DNS - control all records published for the domain" feature I haven't tried out yet, since I don't at this time have anything else for my domain publicly accessible.

Ah, maybe you're referring to how this translates to Fastmail mailboxes. Specifically a "virtual domain" concept where aliases are established, and I have both the wildcard * and hga at my domain aliased to hga at fastmail dot fm?

If the above is what you're trying to do, how is it user unfriendly? If not, out of curiosity and maybe a need to do this myself in the future, what are you desiring to do?

It's user unfriendly because the @fastmail.com is your actual email address. It's user unfriendly because you have to know that. It's user unfriendly because if you enter settings incorrectly into your mail app, you'll be sending email as @fastmail.com.

Yep. But that's why we've unified the family plan levels to be the same as the personal ones.

So the only difference now is it's $5/y extra to have the family "container", which lets you create accounts in your own domain rather than having an @fastmail.fm account and aliases. Having that container then also lets you setup multiple accounts, manage them, share folders between users, etc. If you only have 1 account, then yes, it's a bit annoying, but I don't think $5/y is too onerous.

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