From Gmail to Fastmail

There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:

"Getting my data back under control

In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."

If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].

It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].

[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.

[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to.

Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day.

The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused.

Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless.

Choose the Business email option - https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html - if you want them to keep an automatic archive of the emails you download via POP. When I signed up under the Personal Email option I found they didn't have this archive option, but they switched me over to the business account on request.

It's so worth the measly $15/year, considering the importance a good email/webmail experience, and how much it affects your every-day life.

I've helped a few friends switch over, and they've all been thrilled with it.

I moved to from Gmail to Fastmail last April, but this April, I moved back to Gmail. I have an email address (on my own domain) that I've used since the late 90's. It's all over the Internet in newsgroup archives, forums, etc. from before anyone was hiding emails from spam scrapers. Consequently I get several hundred spam per day. The FM spam filtering is no where near as good as G filtering. I had to manually flag as spam a couple dozen mails every day as well and go through the spam filter and pick out the false positives. I have no problems with G's spam filtering. The other problem with FM is administering multiple accounts on my domain. While it true it's only something I need to do once, as has been mentioned already, the settings/administration leaves much to be desired. Overall, using Gmail is just more pleasant to me, enough so that it outweighs the concerns (read: Google being creepy) that caused me to leave last April.

I also recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and haven't looked back. The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, IMAP works great across all of my devices (which makes me more inclined to use OpenPGP when I can), and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com. They're also working on CardDAV and a web calendar (with CalDAV support), which will get me completely off of google once completed.

The only thing I really miss is push notifications to my phone, but I've found that 15 minute fetching works well enough for the time being.

Overall I've been really happy with it over the last 3 months. Definitely worth the $40/yr in my eyes.

I made up my decision and finally made the switch this evening, after reading this post. So far I'm pretty happy about it. Thanks etix!

Several things I'd like to share here:

1. XMPP

Fastmail actually comes with a XMPP server. This is a big bonus feature that I didn't expect. It can also keep chat logs in an IMAP folder named 'chat'. Read more here: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html

2. External Account

If you want to manage other email accounts (receive emails from them), Fastmail seems only support POP (in contrast to Gmail supporting both POP and IMAP). Also, unlike Gmail which checks email with a dynamic frequency based on how many emails you receive at the time, Fastmail uses a fixed interval for checking emails from external account. The minimum interval you can set is 1 hour. I couldn't find a way to manually trigger a POP check in Fastmail either.

One hour is a bit too long for me, but fortunately I adapted to a better way than using external account. I simply set an auto-redirect rule in my other email accounts (e.g. my school uses MS Exchange) and that actually results in instant delivery of emails from external account. I guess this is the right way to handle the problem (other than making your primary email service pull emails from external account like what I did in Gmail before).

"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer"

This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer.

With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product.

With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information.

I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction.

Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly.

Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I like it so far.

For me, scanning my email to show me ads didn't really bother me that much. But the thing that I really like with Fastmail is that my outbound email alias works the way I want.

The university I graduated from gives us email aliases for life, and I prefer to use my university alias instead of my Gmail address. It obviously works fine when I receive mail, but when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever). And so for a lot of people, when they would add me to their address books they'd end up adding my gmail address because that's how it was presented to them.

With Fastmail everyone just sees my jhu.edu address as I prefer.

I'm currently reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, NO PLACE TO HIDE, and I have to say that a person should take much comfort in the fact that Fastmail is in Australia rather than the U.S. Australia is a member country in what the NSA terms the "Five Eyes" (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) These countries are thick as thieves when it comes to sharing signal intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Something I think is another huge plus people don't mention: you get an actual, living person for technical and other support.

I've been eying Fastmail for a while.

It's really sad that they won't offer Icelandic-only hosting, it would give some additional comfort. But perhaps that will change?

Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.

Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge.

If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.

The GET part of the fastmail link in this blog post suggests this is a fastmail sponsored ad rather than honest opinions of an unbiased user: http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553

Also, I don't see how "Getting my data back under control" is achieved by shifting from a free service to a paid service; if you're serious about this, you should rather setup your own mail server on a spareable machine (Raspberry Pi etc. + an ordinary desktop mail client + Roundcube etc).

And unless you use something like GPG, your email data is as secure as your corresponding mailbox.

I was going to signup with Fastmail.

But the Terms is pretty strict, i.e. they can terminate you without notice, not a warning, also they don't really care about refunds, no matter whatever the reason is?

I'm hesitated again. Is the hosting-your-own-mail-server the only way out?

8. TERMINATION

The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments. The Service Provider may also terminate or suspend your account for inactivity, which is defined as failing to sign-in to the Service for an extended period of time, as determined by the Service Provider. The amount of time that the Service Provider currently considers as an "extended" period of time may be viewed from the Help link. Upon termination of the Service, your right to use the Service immediately ceases.

The Service Provider shall have no obligation to maintain any content in your account or to forward any unread or unsent messages to you or any third party. 8.1. NO REFUNDS

Any refunds are at the sole discretion of the Service Provider.

The Service Provider may choose to make a refund at its sole unfettered discretion, however the Service Provider shall have no obligation to refund any portion of any payments, in the event that You wish to discontinue use of all or part of the Service, or in the event that your access is terminated by the Service Provider.

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail too but I am not that happy. And no, Fastmail does not protect you from the NSA since Australia is one of the Five Eyes:

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

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail because my personal CRM's mail integration depends on Apple Mail. Gmail and Apple Mail do not go well together because Gmail is not IMAP (and Apple Mail has some issues too, even with the latest improvements). So with Fastmail's 'real' IMAP implementation, that issue was resolved. But Fastmail is lacking in comparison to Gmail in many areas, just two examples:

Filtering: Spam, phishing etc. filtering cannot compare with Gmail. And for your own filters, you cannot create them directly from a mail and see immediately the result as you can in Gmail. You have to create your filters via the setting menu and have to manually check if they actually work …

Security: I use 2-factor authentication as often as possible. Gmail has a very balanced approach to 2-factor authentication. Fastmail on the other hand does not allow you to use 2-factor authentication as a general security measure but only as an _additional_ login. And the configuration is not user-friendly. And since it is only an _additional_ login, you do not get (or need) backup codes or another backup way for your 2-factor authentication like SMS.

Fastmail works fine as a very traditional mail provider but that is not far away from what hosting providers offer anyway.

Your mileage might vary of course. If you are looking for a traditional mail provider with reliable IMAP support, Fastmail is certainly a great choice.

ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html

Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.

The only downside I've seen switching from Gmail to Fastmail is that Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good. But I can live with it.

I recently switched from Gmail to a mail provider called Posteo. They are a German mail provider much like Fastmail. Here is the neat thing: You can create a mail account and physically mail them paper money, without ever giving them your name or address.

I wish more services would be doing that! In particular, I think we sorely need an anonymous way of paying money on the web, like physical money.

The coolest thing about Fastmail is a feature I didn't expect before making the switch: Fastmail is actually faster than Gmail. IMAP is quicker, webmail loads quicker, everything is just snappier. I still use Google mail for a lot of stuff (and actually only have one inbox at Fastmail currently) but I have been extremely impressed with Fastmail so far.

What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues.

If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?

I've been looking into doing this, so this post came at a good time. Especially the UI/keyboard shortcuts appeal to me, as that was the main reason I stuck with google over other solutions.

I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.

The lesson of Levison is that privacy assurances by email service providers are not necessarily trustworthy. Levison balked, but most wouldn't want to shut down their businesses.

For now the best bet is either to self host (it's not that hard, especially for most folks reading this) or to use something like ProtonMail where the content can't be routinely exfiltrated and the provider can't give the inbox keys to any third party.

The idea of privacy with email is, unfortunately, very ephemeral. As seen in other articles also submitted to hn in the past, even if you stop using Gmail, Google will still have a very huge chunk of your data to track simply because the vast majority of the people you communicate with have a Gmail account. There is no easy/apparent way out.

Just in case people are missing things like the priority inbox I'd like to mention Sanebox [0]. In my opinion they are better than what google does plus they offer more features (for a price).

[0] https://www.sanebox.com/

Just moved my domain over to Fastmail. I can live with $10 per three months.

After reading this I plan to switch to fastmail as well.

Thanks for sharing the good stuff!

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail about a year ago after using exclusively Gmail for email since 2007. I've been very happy with Fastmail since then. Primarily I was bothered by getting the service for "free" from Google--it's not free for them to provide it (no such thing as a free lunch), which means they have to find ways to monetize my personal communications with others without me directly paying them. Obviously there are the ads, but then there's the matter of having to stay up to date on their privacy policies... long story short, Google creeps me out a little, and I'd rather pay a bit of money to feel like I'm not a host for some kind of sprawling global parasite.

Anyway, pros:

- The Fastmail web interface is fast. I've never seen it take longer to load than 1 second on any computer or internet connection; it's noticeably faster to load up the entire interface than Gmail.

- Fastmail also uses basically the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail (j/k to go up and down, x to select, # to delete, y to archive, z to undo, r to reply, f to forward, a to reply-all, ctrl-enter to send--works from any field in fastmail rather than just the body or title as in gmail, which is handy for forwarding things).

- Sometimes sending/opening messages in Gmail was kind of slow; sending messages from Fastmail has always been virtually instantaneous, and opening them is definitely instantaneous. I think Fastmail preloads email content into the client so that it only has to request images from the server, because it definitely opens email too quickly to have done a round trip to the server to get the email contents. If you press 'o' to open an email, it will be open by the time your 'o' key comes back up.

- Fastmail can help with setting up DNS for emails for custom domains.

- Fastmail has this "Pin" feature that lets you pin emails so that they stick to the top of whatever folder they're in. I always wanted something like this in Gmail (like if starred messages stuck to the top or something). I think there's an option to toggle whether or not they float to the top if you're not a fan. Anyway, I'm not sure that having this feature has actually been beneficial to me in any way, but I like it a lot.

Cons:

- The Fastmail interface is not as pretty as the Gmail interface. There is no option to get a big, beautiful background picture, and the interface doesn't really have space for it anyway. This bothered me a little at first, but these days I don't care... if I'm gazing longingly at the mountains in the background picture of my email, I'm being extraordinarily unproductive.

- Fastmail's auto-complete when you're typing in the recipient list does not keep track of who you send to most frequently and push them automatically to the top of the list. This still bothers me sometimes.

- Fastmail's settings pages are a little confusing. There are a couple different ways to get to them, and it can be a little tricky to figure out where you're supposed to find something. I've never been a fan of the way settings are organized in any email client, though... Gmail and Outlook have settings pages that aren't as terrible these days; Fastmail's settings are a little less refined. On the other hand, it seems like you can do a lot more with the settings in Fastmail (so this is a bit of a pro, not strictly a con).

- Fastmail has a folder system with nesting like Outlook. I don't think this is really a bad thing; I like the concept of Gmail's labels a lot, but I never found it to be significantly more useful than folders. What sucks about Fastmail's implementation is that to create folders or rearrange them, you have to enter this special folder management menu. Then to create a folder, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and type the new name, and if you want it to be at the top, then you have to drag it up past all of the other folders, and there seems to be a max speed on how quickly you can drag it up, and it starts arbitrarily selecting the text as you're dragging and sometimes gets a little janky as you get to the top. Definitely my least favorite part of the interface.

Ambiguous:

- Not strictly a pro or a con in my opinion: there is no chat interface built-in (actually I'm not certain about that, there might be some option to enable chat and put in chat credentials, etc. but I haven't looked for it). Overall I think this has been very good for getting me in and out of my inbox very quickly and productively without any risk of distraction. I actually stopped using any form of chat until more recently when I needed it for work, and I think my quality of life was improved for it, but I know that for many people chat is an important part of communicating. But I haven't missed it in my webmail one bit.

Wow, that was a lot more than I expected to write! Anyway, to sum up, from my perspective as a web developer:

- Fastmail is faster and contributes better to getting things done, in my experience (worth the $60/yr for that reason alone)

- Fastmail has some nice options if you're setting up email inboxes for yourself for custom domains. I don't know if I would recommend it yet as a mail option for clients since it's a little less polished than Gmail and some of the settings options are a good deal more technical.

- Fastmail is a nice gateway drug to freeing yourself from the idea that Gmail is the be-all-end-all of email. Still waiting for someone more productive than myself to combine webmail, Trello, and Google Calendar into a glorious productivity app that ushers in a new era for humanity.

any offers / coupons / deals for hackernews readers ?

The spacing around "i"s is too much.

80k emails per ... a day? month?

edit: or it might be accounts?

I have been looking for a free e-mail provider that takes privacy seriously. Isn't there anyone out there?

I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.