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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

That's why I use Fastmail. For some reason, I feel that they're pretty clear about what they are doing. I had a problem a few months ago, one of my Sieve rules stopped working. The second reply for the support ticket already came from a developer, and we figured it out quite quickly.

At Google, I felt that there's no human I could ask, at Microsoft (Outlook.com) there're the incredibly simple, low-paid humanoid robots pasting stupid 'answers' on answers.microsoft.com (things like I should try clearing the browser cache, uninstall plugins, etc. when there's something wrong on their side).

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Same here. I've been slowly migrating all my mail off Gmail as it's continually gotten slower and less reliable for me. Not to mention that FM actually does backups, has a great webclient with nice logical keyboard shortcuts, and is working on a CalDav complaint calendaring solution. Now if they'd only develop a replacement for Google Voice...

And it needs to be mentioned, they're the gold standard for how a private company interacts and supports open source projects. I used to run a large Cyrus installation, and their contributions to the project as well as the time and effort they put into supporting Cyrus users on the mailing list is exemplary and something I wish happened more often. I'm pretty sure the large majority of their work on Cyrus for FM has been contributed directly back, they were instrumental (Bron's work in particular) in many of Cyrus' killer features and its vastly improved and expanded feature set over the past several significant releases.

If you're looking for a supremely talented and caring bunch of people to look after your email I cannot recommend anyone else. If you need proof, go read the Cyrus mailing list archives where you can actually see how they work with the community, improve the product and make excellent technical and tactical decisions about how a large email service provider should be run.

I made the switch from Gmail to Fastmail in December 2013 and have been very happy with it. The speed is incredible and as you said the web client is pretty good. One thing I have noticed, and I just don't know if it's by chance, by my spam folder has been empty since the switch. With my gmail address I was regularly having my spam folder increase by one or two every week.

One other neat thing with Fastmail is they give you the ability to use your storage for more than just email [1]. No to mention it's even accessible via FTP/WebDAV.

[1]https://www.fastmail.fm/help/files.html

I was falling out of love with Gmail, and at that time I was reading their site or a post regarding them on HN. Once I saw brong's Github branch as mentioned, I was sold and got an account.

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

Their public communication, blog, old Slashdot interviews, everything else are a gold standard to me. Bought a VPS to stand up my own backup Cyrus server.

By the way, Cyrus IMAP server has a beta CalDAV and CardDAV integration, where your contacts and calendars are stored in special IMAP folders and then pulled into the proper protocol. Through Fastmail I learned this might be the best self-contained communication platform for me and others. Just a FYI.

http://www.cyrusimap.org/mediawiki/index.php/Downloads#IMAP_...

Not that I thought being owned by Opera was a bad thing, but now they're completely employee owned again:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-st...

So I have high hopes that they'll continue to improve all that core functionality goodness.

The CardDAV and CalDAV stuff has been around for ages in Cyrus, but it's always needed a lot of work. I'm happy that the FM team has decided to take it on, even in beta it's been working wonderfully for me.

I remember attempting to use KOLAB groupware, which was based on Cyrus, but instead of improving the crappy CalDAV functionality (at the time) of Cyrus, they simply saved all the calendar objects as messages in special folders. Not necessarily a bad thing, but then they made the unwise decision to store the calendar data in a binary blob inside the message, meaning that they couldn't leverage IMAP/Cyrus' native indexing. Which meant that every message in the calendar folder had to be fetched, downloaded and parsed by the client for every view. Ugh, what a disaster. It basically fell over on calendars with more than a couple dozen events on them.

Just curious, what makes you think Google doesn't do backups for Gmail? They do, even on tape! [1]

[1]: http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.at/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-...

There is a saying in many businesses that goes like this: "price..quality..speed pick any two".

I guess that could be modified to "price..quality..speed..personal attention pick any three".

To me the personal attention factor always ranks very high. I have found many cases where someone who cares and communicates go much further than someone who knows more and doesn't care. [1]

[1] This is simplistic of course and doesn't take into account many different factors and I use it as a rough guideline.

I also agree -- this makes me very happy to be a FastMail customer. Can you imagine any of the other big email providers offering this kind of technical explanation of data loss, or going to these lengths to recover every message possible?

I wrote a blog post about switching from Gmail to FastMail last summer that may be of interest to anyone considering switching: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944).

The level of support and communication provided by Fastmail is one of the reasons I use their services as well. I even got a very human and nice response when asking a Symbian-related question.

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