From Fastmail back to Gmail | Hacker News Reader

From Fastmail back to Gmail

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34 pointspvinis57 comments

I agree that Fastmail's default spam filter settings are a bit to lenient, I also got around 3 spams a day. After increasing the spam settings I get about 1 spam a week, which is acceptable.

There are a few reasons why I'd never switch back to gmail:

1) Reliability: Gmail sometimes had issues with Apple Mail where messages would show up twice, etc. Since switching to Fastmail I had no more problems.

2) Customer support. I once had an issue where all my mail disappeared from my inbox in Gmail. There was noone I could contact, all I found was a user forum with other people complaining about the problem. I never got my email back from the archive to the inbox. When you have a problem with Fastmail, or can't find what you are looking for in the docs, just contact customer support.

3) Backup: Fastmail allows you to restore email from backup (for a limited time). Really nice when you accidentally delete an email.

4) Web interface. I assume that's a matter of taste, but I really prefer Fastmail.

5) Folders instead of labels. I don't like Gmail's labels, and I'm glad Fastmail has proper folders.

what's the difference between gmail's labels and fastmail folders?

A mail can be in multiple labels, but can only in one folder (copy doesn't count).

If I may add, Gmail has removed the feature to send from other email addresses. Or rather, they now require you to have an SMTP server to send from other email addresses. Fortunately, the change has not been retroactive, so all my previous addresses were still available, but I couldn't really set up new ones. Which became a deal breaker.

That - and the fact that I been looking for something not Gmail for a long time - made me switch to Fastmail.

I must say, my experience with Gmail's spam filter has been the reverse. There are a lot of false positives in my Gmail's spam folder. But I am new to Fastmail, so maybe it'll bother me at some point.

As to the spam filters, on the other hand in Gmail I'm getting more and more proper ("ham") mail landing in the spam folder recently... thus I have to tread the spam bin ~weekly to make sure nothing important/interesting is lost... particularly, it seems to like having certain persons on a blacklist (probably based on some misconfiguration at their email provider?), regardless of the fact that I always patiently go through them and mark as "Not spam". (Notwithstanding that I had them trigger a "send to gmail team for spam filter tweaking" dialog countless times, obviously selecting "yes" always.)

Labels is the one lock-in that stops me from migrating off Gmail/Google Apps. It is now what I insist on in a mail solution. Folders is just to inflexible for me these days as I auto label across multiple folders too much.

Haven't really found alternatives for labels in other solutions. IMAP keywords is too restrictive etc.

I have 4 virtual domains bound to same account. Why isn't it an option? You can filter stuff based on "To:" address to put it in different "Inbox" folders. And storage usage is more optimal since you don't pay for a lot of nearly-empty inboxes.

Exactly, I don't really see the problem in the article. I have a $40/year (15GB) account and apart from my fastmail and my forwarded pobox.com address, I also receive mail for and host DNS records and web pages for 2 other virtual domains. Also, I'm very happy with spam filtering and Fastmail's service quality (they even post on Twitter things like 'mail is slow currently, investigating...').

Well, I can't say I'm happy with spam filtering - I regularly get some stupid spam to the inbox (not even something smart enough to bypass the filters, IMO).

I'm at a point with Gmail where I'd be happy that I'm getting a bit of spam in the inbox. Unfortunately I'm starting to see a lot of false positives recently. I was actually looking to move out of Gmail myself

I get some spam too (which passes both pobox.com's and fastmail's filtering), but it's much less than I previously had with gmail and I assume that spam has become more elaborate these days. Also, with gmail I had more false positives.

Not to mention a federation-friendly XMPP server that supports external domains via SRV records. For this and the features you list, I've also been a very happy FastMail user for the past few years and could never return to the walled garden that is Google.

"that I use for e-mail for myself and a few other family members."

If the domain is dedicated to yourself, there's no problem as you can indeed add an unlimited amount of domains, forwards and aliases. Sharing one account with 4 family members isn't very convenient though.

I’m doing the same thing very happily. The upside is that you can have email addresses that you may rarely use, but still prefer to have, without having to pay separately for them too.

FastMail’s “personalities” make it possible to do this very easily. Almost all the mail clients have decent support for this too. (I use Mail.app on Mac and Dispatch on iPhone.)

In terms of privacy, the issue is that most people out there use GMail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, so even if you self-host or use a privacy aware service, when you'll send emails to others, or receive them, your privacy won't be fully respected anyway...

A good article but I just made the opposite decision. I recently switched to using GMail as a catch all email that I check about twice a day and use FastMail with my own domain for email from people close to me. It is not as much an issue of privacy as wanting to slow down the information firehose from Google, Twitter, G+, etc. I would like to reduce the surface area of marketing aimed at me.

For me the killer feature of fastmail is their Calendar. Having recently used Google Calendar I was astonished how totally unusable it is compared to fastmail's. I'd be glad to hear what calendar do you use, what are considered good nowadays.

What did you find better? Thanks!

* less context switches. In fastmail you do everything in popup windows where in Google you sometimes have to go to a separate task window.

* very easy to modify individual occurrences of repeating tasks. Just drag or resize, it'll detach automatically.

* the week view is sliding, ie you can view events from Wednesday to Wednesday.

* much less clutter in UI and interactions overall.

I think good old POP and mailbox discipline needs to make a come back... at least for Average Joe users.

I have a similar Fastmail setup to the OP. My parents get $10 Lite accounts and I set them up to fetch all their mail via POP, so their mailbox never gets full. I also downgraded my own account from Enhanced ($40) to Full ($20) some time ago after I used Fastmails superior web interface and search to finally prune my inbox (I imported something like 10,000 unread emails from Gmail). All this is less than the cost of one GApps user.

I have all my important mail from the last 8 years or so and I'm only using something like ~500MB.

he might (like me) still have a grandfathered-in account which is free (with ads) for up to 10 users.

[edit: parent edited complete comment]

Originally they allowed more than 10 users... My account lets me have up to 200 users.

Sorry about the edit... I decided refuting the arithmetic was a fairly blunt way to deal with the debate.

I moved from an older (50 user) free GApps account to Fastmail. If I had been paying I would have saved $150/year, but just saving my time, and avoiding the now shitty experience of managing my mail via Gmail, was well worth the cost to me. Early on Gmails web interface was a revelation, now it's just below standard... and any momentum from their multi-GB storage giveaway doesn't cut it anymore.

I think the final nail was one of principle... Google just aren't interested in offering premium personal mail services, like own-domain hosting to families or individuals. Using free GApps made me feel like an unwanted freeloader... a second-class citizen.

I'm a happy Fastmail user but one thing I wish they would bring over from Gmail is SASL OAuth. I understand it's still in a draft extension but any improvement to the state of email authentication would be great (restricting read/write access based on IMAP folder on a token by token basis would be even better). The idea of handing out my email credentials in plain text to email SaaS products just gives me the willies.

We're looking at making this easier, but you can already set up a separate login token for the individual SaaS products - just create a regular password alternative login with something from pwgen or your favourite line noise source.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html

You can then revoke the individual token.

Per-folder permissions isn't something on our radar yet. You could hack it up with a family/business and separate accounts with folder sharing, but it costs money and is a right pain to administrate.

Looks like it's a decision made for very personal reasons, but some of the issues are not really issues.

> As of this writing, I'm up to 4 accounts.

They're not all yours, they're your family members'. And given the fact that you have to pay for them, they probably won't really need Fastmail, they can use Gmail and you set up aliases/forwards for their addresses.

> FastMail's spam filtering is good, but it's not as good as Google's.

My experience is the opposite, somehow. I very rarely get spam in Fastmail, and 99% of the time it falls into spam folders (even having *@myuser.fastmail.fm wildcard, catchall addresses!). I get very few false positives, too. It might be not as heavily targeted by spammers.

Meanwhile I get 10-30 a day in Gmail, with roughly 20% of false positives, with so many false positives that I had to switch my email account to Fastmail on certain websites because I missed important emails (like notices of cancelled flight reservations, Amazon refunds, work reminders). It doesn't matter how many times I mark a sender's email as non-spam, Gmail thinks it knows better.

> Mailbox being compatible with only Gmail and iCloud accounts.

Well, duh. I'm good with Aquamail, mutt and the web client, as Fastmail rules do all the filtering I care about. I wanted to test Google Inbox and Dropbox Mailbox, so I set a forward to my Gmail address. They didn't do anything interesting to me, so I disabled it again, but if you want to use them, you totally can.

I have to say, though, that Fastmail Android app is sluggish as hell and, last time I checked, it didn't cache messages (deal breaker for me, I travel a lot and want to have boarding passes and reservations handy).

> IFTTT integration

Forward to Gmail, enjoy IFTTT.

I use GMail. However remember if you pay for it via Apps, the terms are different so that is worth bearing in mind.

Google Apps for work is $50 per account per year. The terms of service for apps for work protects your privacy.

To each there own I guess. I have been a happy fastmail user for many years, I get some spam maybe 1 or 2 mails per month and I just use the default spam settings. Seems like a personal choice not a tech or feature driven decision. Not sure why this is on the front page

Related to this, especially with regard to privacy, I recommend everyone to check out the LEAP project and also this list of related projects: https://leap.se/email#related-projects

I would switch to Fastmail in a heartbeat if they let me pay for storage (say in 5 gig intervals) and let me mount as many domains and create as many inbox as I want. Other than that, I see no point in paying for email. Sorry. I'm a snob.

I pay for email because it's the keystone to my online 'identity' - pretty much the single point of failure for recovering all sorts of accounts, and the thing in the way of theft of many accounts.

Technical merits aside, by using a small but well run non-gmail provider for a mere £25 pa I get (i) near instantaneous tech support in my time zone, from people who know more about email & admin than I do. They even have a phone number. (ii) out of the monoculture, thus vastly diminished risk from various canned account theft problems

Would you mind sharing who you use as a provider?

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/ - having looked, it turns out they don't have a telephone number, but as all my support emails have been answered within minutes I'd never felt the need :)

I don't see the problem to rent a small server and host open xchange, zimbra or something similiar yourself? Even postfix isn't that hard to configure and will likely run forever.

The same goes for the author. I don't get how gmail is even considered as a mail provider for more than a spam oder mandatory account. The list of better and serious mail providers is tremendous.

For my family and me, I am hosting a small exchange server, with a synchronous replica in a datacenter, at home. It's safe, has nearly unlimited disk space and I know where my backups are.

Postfix will run forever, but other hosts won't accept your emails forever unless you keep up with the latest spam techniques (DANE nowadays, isn't it?)

Personally, I just use a free smarthost, but that loses some of the privacy advantages.

Personally I don't use Postfix, I am going with Zimbra. Postfix was just an example. As well as DANE would require exactly 4 commands to be enabled.

For myself I am going with a major commercial antispam solution, which is hosted in two of our datacenters. Since I am working with the developers and admins on regular basis there's no reason not to trust them.

Antispam and security updates are a pain. I ran exim in a colo for years, including handing out free accounts to friends (rookie mistake, yes), and eventually decided to stop bothering after it hit some critical problem while I was on holiday.

Because then I have to manage that server. I'm suddenly responsible for security, rebooting if there's an outage, keeping things up-to-date, etc. I've had both a small personal Linux server (for web hosting) and Fastmail (for everything else) for several years, and I've easily spent 2-3 times the cost of my Fastmail account in time spent fiddling with my web server over that time period.

He mentions the availability of Mailbox as a useful third-party app.

However the fact that Mailbox only works with proprietary services, being restricted to GMail and iCloud, should send red flags, because this app is not provided by Google, but by Dropbox and personally I'm seeing a conflict of interest and given that it isn't based on standards, you can bet that it won't last. I also tried it out and I found it half-baked.

This point was weird. It's because of Google's poor support for standards that I'm considering ditching Google Apps. Because GMail and Google Calendar are all fine only as long as you're using the official apps.

Regarding space upgrade, what you write is not true: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a68...

"Purchasing extra space.

Rather than upgrade to the next plan, it's possible to just purchase extra mail or file storage. This is charged at:

    Lite: 100MB for $5 USD/year
    Full: 500MB for $5 USD/year
    Enhanced/Premier: 1GB for $5 USD/year"

I always wonder what people do with their email address to receive that much spam. I have a Fastmail account with a catch-all that receives all mail sent to a domain, and I rarely receive spam. I'm not exactly careful spreading my email address around either.

I have noticed that almost all spam I do receive is sent to an address I posted here on HN, so perhaps I just haven't posted any addresses on other sites that are crawled by spammers a lot?

I'd switch back to Gmail if I could somehow change my Google account to incorporate my real e-mail (and pay), as opposed to having a separate Google Apps for Domains account for e-mail that was separate from my real e-mail and is on my old Gmail address.

Does anyone know if this is remotely possible?

I simply stopped using my old gmail account. Switching email addresses is a pain, absolutely, but at least leaving gmail is as easy as an MX record change in the future.

Yeah but what about things like App purchases, calendar, Drive, etc?

3 to 5 false spam negatives a day is better than the 1 false positive a week that I get with Gmail, IMO.

Just in case it's relevant, I'm developing http://ownmycopy.com for cloud-to-PC backup, aiming at for backing up cloud-only services.

Ahhhh the cost of privacy.

Without arguing against OP's decision, IFTTT can be wired with any email account, using the Email channel, you just need to set up a rule to forward the emails to their address.

I've been looking at Fastmail when switching from Gmail this year, but the lack of flexibility in prices vs. storage size turned me off.

All I wanted was a fast IMAP host, with 5-10GB of storage, DAV for calendar and contacts and a simple fast web interface. After some testing, I've found ServerMX [1].

They're EU based (.nl, .de infrastructure) [2], have SOGo for DAV and webmail (offers full size contact pictures, which is really neat for mobile phones), IMAP sync is instant and seamless over all clients (Aquamail on Android, eM Client on Windows desktop, SOGo on webmail) and all that for merely 18€ per year. Their plans are well considered IMHO if you don't need much space [3].

Sorry if this feels like an ad, but I've been more then happy with their service and like to recommend it to people. They have a 30 day free trial to test the service.

[1] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html [2] http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html [3] http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy

While we are recommending mail hosts, http://www.mailbox.org also is nice. From Germany, privacy-minded (you can have totally anonymous accounts, they encrypt everything with your PGP-key as soon as it arrives, ...), run by people who are quite well-known when it comes to mail servers (author of books on postfix, running conferences, ... so they hopefully know what they are doing)

Webinterface is ok, but not perfect.

They even offer exchange push sync.

Oh yeah, I considered mailbox.org too, but was a bit more expensive for the plan with ActiveSync (for mobile), but major argument was that I've found IMAP sync faster (basically instant) then Exchange push in my testing.

IMAP sync? You mean IMAP push extensions? I only use IMAP and it is seconds between me sending an e-mail to my mailbox address and my devices going "pling".

Maybe a poor expression on my part, I think it's the cause of IMAP IDLE. I tested marking an email as read with putting all three mobile, web and desktop client side by side and change was practically instant in a second. Too bad iOS doesn't support IDLE and goes as low as 15 min only.

I wanted to leave google due to privacy concerns. Fastmail is based in Australia - not an option. I did not want anything EU based either. Got a Proton mail account but without IMAP, what is it good for?

An email service that is based in Switzerland and that you can use with you own domain: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging

tl;dr author switches back to Gmail because it's convenient. I wish the article would simply say that.

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