Announcing the FastMail Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the FastMail Calendar

blog.fastmail.fm

121 pointssygma36 comments

I switched from gmail to fastmail about six months ago and I'm very happy. It's fast, relatively cheap ($40 a year for 15 gigs of storage) and they aren't scanning my email to serve up advertisements. The addition of calendar is just another bonus that I'm immediately adopting.

Another great feature is the ability to use as many domains and email aliases as you want. I have all of my custom domains set up with both send a receive service, including DKIM. Also, if I ever need a throwaway email address, I just set it up, send an email, and then delete the address.

Here is an actual screenshot of the calendar: https://www.fastmail.fm/static/homepage/images/calendar.png

I'd argue its a better presentation than Google Calendar, and I love Google Calendar.

For comparaison: http://i.imgur.com/8i7w27C.png

I still prefer Google Calendar or Apple Calendar interface:

https://www.apple.com/osx/apps/images/galleries/calendar_her...

What are the security benefits gained by using FastMail over Google (in the context of a state-level eavesdropper)? Is it that FastMail is a smaller target? If you take all your centralized information from Google and move it over to FastMail, it's still centralized - what am I missing?

From a government spying perspective, I'd say there's no benefit. Fastmail servers, at least for US customers are in the NYC area at nyi.net, iirc.

I imagine most customers (myself included) are using fastmail instead of Google to avoid Google, or similar, not to avoid the governments.

This is exactly why I switched to Fastmail. It isn't for the 'tinfoil hat' crowd, who already know to avoid any service with assets in the US. Some of us think having an advertising company handle our email no longer makes sense.

I think anyone looking for a third-party commercial email service free from government snooping is already off to a bad start.

Really the only thing is the local legal environment.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-...

This is great! Well done. And not just from the Google Apps alternative perspective, the user interface is different. People might debate some of the major differences; but the infinite or continuous calendar scrolling feature along with the toolbar at the bottom makes navigating your calendar(s) easy. It feels more natural than Google’s … The syncing was easy to set up too; and will make transitioning off of Google a breeze.

I've been putting off switching away from google apps for my personal domain until fastmail had the tripod of mail+contacts+calendar in place, now to wait a couple of months for the initial bugs to be ironed out and it's happening.

I've ben using beta.fastmail.fm since I signed up. The calendar has been in Beta for months. Big bugs would most likely already have been fixed.

Always there is a difference between "bugs discovered in beta" and "bugs discovered when you let your application loose on the wider public". I don't have time to deal with bugs in my calendars, so will wait.

Good to see someone taking up competition against Google/MS.

If only they'd move their servers to Iceland (they already have backups there).

There are only a handful of independent nations in the world. They are Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and "the international community."

Iceland is a part of the empire. I wish that it weren't so. I do sympathize with your wish for privacy.

This is awesome, especially the two-way sync with iCloud is really neat if you want to use it on devices with no iCloud support.

I was excited to see this, and it works quite well, my only wish is that I could manage one calendar and have the changes push out to all connected calendars.

I'm waiting contact synchronisation and I'll only need google for the play market ! pretty neat.

I've been waiting for some way to synchronize contacts on FM for years. According to posts on the support forum, they are pretty close to having CardDAV support implemented. Fingers crossed that they roll it out soon.

You should check out the alternative app store F-Droid. It is completely free software apps, and all are Ad-free and high quality. There are alternatives or replacements for just about anything you might want, and you don't need Google anything.

Very nice. Unfortunately for iCloud sync, you need to provide your Apple iCloud account email and password. Not a very good security practice, but Apple doesn't provide any other way to accomplish this.

Fastmail does use Google authentication to access the Google Calendar.

What I'm really wanting is the ability to have completely separate IMAP accounts for my various domains, but it's good to see they're adding calendaring, that seemed like an odd omission

I know they've been working on it for a while, I remember reading at least one progress report or the like.

They undoubtedly got diverted by being bought by Opera when they sold the company to it in 2010 and did various things for it, then bought the company back in September of last year. Now that they're again their own masters, we've been seeing a lot of improvements ... and I myself am happy that I can continue using their older "classic" UI because I don't think their New and Improved one is, at least for myself and how I use it.

This might be the feature that makes me switch my personal email.

I switched about a year ago now (from Google Apps), and very happy with the email service. However this and 'contact sync' (coming soon) will make it a very real possibility for a lot more people. Well done fastmail! At the moment I still have my calendar with iCloud, contacts with Google and email with FastMail.

It's worth asking, is there a similar set of services that one could run on their own? Controlling one's own data and all that...

I guess you could try OwnCloud, but I'm unaware of it supports mail in any capacity.

OwnCloud's calendar doesn't support subscribing to changing calendars (like Facebook event feed; you have to setup an automatic import manually).

Kolab is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google mail, calendar, etc.

Why would you switch? The only benefit to me is: my mail/calendar is not on the servers of big companies like Google or Apple.

I somehow (not objectiviley) like the impression Fastmail gives me. The cowboy-ish yet serious way they try to compete with the big ones. That might be a reason to join too.

Because Fastmail's sole reason to be in business is to deliver robust email services. It's unlikely that they're going to pull out the service from underneath you at some point when email isn't fashionable.

They also have stellar support.

I switched around a year ago. Another reason is that the interface is faster than google.

Also the features are different, Google has some FM lacks vice versa. Depending on the features you need that might be an advantage or a disadvantage. Personally I only miss "Send & Archive" from Google.

The primary benefit for me (besides the infinitely nicer Web app) is that FastMail lets me send "From" any of my addresses without leaking my fastmail.net address in a header, which GMail kept doing no matter how many hoops I jumped through (SMTP AUTH to another mail server, &c.)

This is excellent, I've been very happy since switching to FastMail and now this just adds even more value. Keep it up FastMail!

I like this - really looking forward to a full featured google services replacement coming out of them.

Interested in switching off gmail. How are folks getting new email notifications on mobile?

I'm using fastmail and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onegravity... on push notifications, no issues at all. Very happy with it

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