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Comment by 2bluesc | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently using Fastmail and might be too lazy/busy to switch as I'm currently a trial user. The Android + Web app is better then K9-Mail and Roundcube IMHO.

If I did switch back to running my own show, I'd do Digital Ocean + Mailinabox via Docker.

Mailinabox aims to do all the things right out of the box:

https://mailinabox.email/

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Came here for Fastmail shoutout, was not disappointed.

When we started blogging the advent series last year (http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/01/fastmail-advent-2014/) I had a few support tickets asking "aren't you giving away all your secrets?"

We had a bit of a laugh about that, because we don't really have any secrets. The fact is, it's just a ton of hard work - new spammer tricks, new interoperability woes (ask us about SSL negotiation with other people's MXes some time, but make sure you provide the alcohol), and just trying to get the best possible performance out of the hardware and the software so we can handle both the person with 500,000 emails in their Inbox who never moves anything and the person with 10,000 folders each with 5 emails in it, and everything in between - and provide a fast loading experience for every single user when they hit the site, even though there isn't space in memory to hold that many mailboxes cached.

I'd like to second mailinabox, works nicely. Setting up the docker branch was not as straightforward initially, but most issues have been resolved.

What do you think of Fastmail? I'm considering migrating from Gmail (Google Apps) to them.

I've never had a problem with them, and I've been a (paying) customer for over a year now.

I've used them since 2006. It's probably the only service I have never even questioned whether or not I should renew every year. It is very good.

Great. The thing I like is that you get maximum flexibility, and good web interface. For example: I run a mail server which handles mail for some subdomains, and the root domain mail I route through them. Every time I give an email out to a company, I name it company-name@one-of-many-short-fastmail-domains.com. I never have to worry about spam from those email address, as I can filter and cycle those at will.

I do something very similar, but instead of using the company name (or something close to it) I use a long random string instead. It mainly prevents someone from 'company hopping' (i.e. changing 'facebook' to 'google'). The chance of that happening might be small, but I figure I may as well as it isn't really any more effort

I have both. Advantages/disadvantages compared to Google Apps:

+ Far more configurable

+ Sieve scripts

+ The web interface is faster

+ Easy to access their engineers (hang around on emaildiscussions.com)

+ The contribute to Cyrus, etc.

+ Family/business accounts where not everyone needs to be an an expensive tier.

+ Standard IMAP, so works a lot better with most clients.

+ Some Dropbox integration.

- Mail gets blocked more often (e.g. there seem to be ongoing issues with Craigslist).

- They don't support labels. If you have a label-driven workflow, you are going to be frustrated.

- Extra storage space is much more expensive than Google Apps (which has e.g. 1TB for $10 per month).

- No real 2-factor auth, there is always an account with full access. Not a possibility to make a restricted IMAP account.

- Obviously fewer apps than Google Apps.

- Relatively slow support times (though I have never contacted Google Apps support).

- The Google Mail client is still much better than the Fastmail client (e.g. reflowing text, when the internet connection is spotty).

o Australian company with servers in the US (and Iceland). So, no real advantage wrt. the NSA et al.

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