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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

I have recently made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I couldn't be happier. They don't have all the features (calendars are coming soon!), but they also don't have Google+.

In my experience it's a lot faster, both web and IMAP are extremely fast. While the storage is smaller than Gmail I don't find this an issue.

I haven't used the XMPP servers yet, but it seems to have the same features as non-hangouts GTalk.

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Yeah I switched to Fastmail about a year ago for myself + my family members (using the Family plan with custom domain). Have had absolutely zero regrets.

Also important to note: Fastmail has been rock solid for me (and I should know - over 10 years there). Gmail outages seem frequent compared to the number of times I remember FM going down.

How are they with spam? I'd just run my own mail, but I can't beat Google's spam filtering. (They have millions of email accounts, real time, as a data source.)

Spotless. I've gotten maybe one false negative (i.e., the spam hit my inbox) and no false positives.

I have a very different experience. I've had my fastmail account for ~5 years and get 20 new pieces of spam in my inbox daily, while on my gmail account, that I've used for ~10 years, I only get 1 spam per month on average.

Fastmail's spam filtering is atrocious in my experience.

Works fine for me. They also have flexibility in how spam is handled, and you could even forward to gmail and back if you really wanted to use its spam filtering. https://www.fastmail.fm/help/spam_virus_protection.html

A few months ago I had to drop my spam threshold from 5 to something like 2.5 -- my spam issues cleared up immediately.

Another vote here that Fastmail is fantastic.

I hope Google never buys them. The whole Opera period was scary, but they managed to stay independent.

I'm a fastmail switcher, too. $40/yr.

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