Fastmail Labels Beta

[ocdtrekkie]

When I transitioned from Gmail to FastMail, I had to get used to using folders again instead of labels. While it was painful, I am glad I am no longer using labels, and I have no intention to start using them again. I vastly prefer being able to rely on the basic email client functionality in any given mail app, and using goofy nonstandard parts like snooze and labels makes that difficult.

I appreciate that with JMAP, FastMail has essentially become the first entity to do labels correctly, with a freaking standard behind it, but client support isn't going to be there for many years so I will avoid it. The big upside for me is it'll take away one reason people say they can't leave Gmail.

[ccmcarey]

It wasn't super obvious to me, but you have to use beta.fastmail.com for this to work.

Confused me for a moment as you can complete the first step of enabling this (changing to New Rules) using the stable client.

---

Oh, no, it's even more confusing than that. You enable the labels beta function on the beta website, but then it applies even on the main website.

[pointillistic]

you are right, does this mean that labels will work on the main site?

[erdaniels]

Might as well put it here since Fastmail doesn’t come up often. Does anyone find Fastmail’s spam detection to be pretty mediocre? I usually get a few obviously spam emails a week in my inbox. The volume is low so I don’t mind it but that’s really the one thing I miss from Gmail.

[massysett]

I find it far superior to Gmail because although Fastmail occasionally does not flag spam, Fastmail almost never sends legitimate mail to spam. Gmail would routinely give false positives which in my view is much worse than occasional false negatives.

[ocdtrekkie]

Been on FastMail since 2016 and I barely receive any spam to begin with. It took me years to hit the 200 spam emails to activate the personalized filter, which brought my false positive rate to zero.

[dimastopel]

The problem I frequently encounter is with emails incorrectly classified as spam. Once a month I go to spam folder and find few emails that were not spam. Even though I click "not spam" on each, I don't feel algorithm is getting any better with time.

[nvarsj]

Not at all. Rarely ever get a spam email in Fastmail. Gmail is the worst in my experience. It’s far too aggressive and would regularly capture legit emails when I used it. I lost a few important emails this way. The best email filter I ever had was to use greylisting on a self hosted email machine - this method had almost 100% perfect filtering for me. Unfortunately custom email servers don’t really work in the modern email ecosystem. Fastmail is the best managed system I think at the moment and have been happy with it for years now.

[ttul]

Spam detection requires a few ingredients:

1. Lots of email that you can categorize.

2. Lots of users to label the email as spam or not spam.

3. Tons of code to identify classifiable features such as clickable links, the ASN from which the message originated, and so many other things.

4. Some kind of classifier that pulls all the above into a decision about each message. And make sure it’s really fast and doesn’t require gargantuan resources either, because you’re trying to provide cheap mailboxes.

Google has enormous advantages in solving for spam filtering. It has over a billion active users, enormous computing resources, and top AI talent. Not to mention legions of talented general programmers to build all the feature extraction stuff. Competing with Google on spam filtering is an unwinnable game IMHO.

[karlshea]

I trained the “personal” filter myself using their instructions years ago when I first started using them and it’s been pretty solid since.

[snazz]

I would imagine that they have far less email volume to train any kind of spam-classifying AI on, as well as a smaller amount of (human) resources to spend on advanced spam classification. Google has a huge leg up in this particular aspect.

[codegladiator]

I regularly receive spam in gmail (russian and gmail originated spam) in main inbox.

And promotions box is usually just spam.

Also lately started getting spam google calendar events and they just wont go away even after reporting them as spam multiple times. I don't why is that even a feature, why can someone completely random add recurring-daily events to your calendar.

[rckclmbr]

ive been using fastmail for several years and this hasnt been an issue for me.

[selsta]

My “Personal Spam Filter” is trained and spam has not been an issue for me.

[meitham]

Indeed. I went through the efforts of creating their recommended “learn safe” and “learn spam” folders, but this didn’t help. There doesn’t seem to be a way to reset their spam dataset.

[seb314]

yes, e.g. thunderbird's builtin junk filter seemed much better to me. Gmail's too.

I believe I saw somewhere that fastmail's spamfilter may have a 'feature' that whitelists mails from certain senders so that spam gets through if it was forwarded via my university account.

There even was an option to tell Fastmail about these forwarding accounts, but it didn't seem to work, maybe due to multi-hop forwards.

[nullandvoid]

My spam folder seems to catch a fair bit across my hundreds of aliases so far

Is that not the idea more than relying on the spam filter. Just delete aliases?

[dewey]

I never get any spam on Fastmail, I set up a training folder and it has been solid for the past 5 years or so.

[ancarda]

One reason I switched to Fastmail is it's just folders, not labels. I HATED labels in Gmail. It never works right with external clients, even if you use plugins in Thunderbird or try to use labels like they are folders.

I gave up and basically used the web interface until I switched to FastMail.

Will folders ever become mandatory? If so, maybe I should finally give in and host emails myself. It can't be more painful than being forced to use labels.

[bad_user]

Labels will probably remain optional, since folders are better supported by IMAP clients and they've been in the standard forever.

The only service that does not support folders properly is Gmail and the actual problem with Gmail is that they're abusing IMAP folders for emulating their labels. Fastmail has always been very standards compliant and I don't see them abusing the standard without a way to turn the behavior off.

So I don't really understand the drama. Also note that a lot of users, including myself, are craving for labels ;-)

[sv9]

I can't find the blog post, but I read one once that said, basically: you don't need labels or folders. You need your inbox, the archive, and trash. Once you've tended to an email, either archive it (and just use your search function later), or delete it.

I've tried unsuccessfully to maintain folder/label systems over the years, and I always end up having to search my emails anyway. So why bother with trying to make a consistent folder/label structure? I'm much more likely to remember some key words from an invoice than remember which labels I would've applied.

[jbc1]

I can't see why they would ever be mandatory, but Fastmail is a big player when it comes to email standards, so if they're bringing in label support I expect that it's becoming a part of standard emailing and proper support will appear in external clients soon.

[lars_francke]

It's not quite clear to me: Can these rules be applied to already existing mails at creation time?

This is convenient in Gmail and when I last looked at fastmail in 2014 this wasn't possible.

This was the support answer: "I am sorry, but our filters only work at email delivery time. You can't really use them on emails already delivered to your account.

However, to work on already delivered emails, I would suggest you use our 'Search' feature. You can search for emails matching specific criteria, and then select them and move them en masse to a different folder, or even delete them."

This works but makes migration/reorganizing a bit annoying

[getlawgdon]

As a longtime Fastmail user, it's taken a long time to get to this point -- a labels beta. At this point, I'd like to see some truly unique native analytics on my storage rather than somewhat late attempts at market feature parity. I'd like to see a unique suite of management tools, like, say, an intelligent bulk unsubscriber. But sure, I'll test labels out.

[x0x0]

I also would have loved this earlier but serious question: who else, besides Google/gmail and Microsoft/Outlook, is even trying this stuff? I've periodically looked pretty hard and been unable to find anyone.

Fastmail is the clear market leader for people who don't want to use gmail or outlook, and I'm pretty excited to try their labels. I would love to see them implement answers to some of the questions the basecamp (hey) folks raised here [1], but I'm pretty confident they'll implement some of them. I also suspect that many of the things basecamp/hey want to do break interop with other email clients for editing. That is, you can read them, but not use the hey features from other clients; Fastmail may not be willing to make that trade. Super excited to see what hey do though!

Either way, building a super-reliable email service that can handle 10s of gigs of emails and hundreds of thousands of messages is not easy and Fastmail does a good job.

[1] https://hey.com/problems-with-email/

[DarwinMailApp]

This is quite a leap forward in organising emails. I believe emails need to be organised into concise groups in order for you to become your most productive.

One thing I would suggest is to allow the organisation of labels according to when the last email was received. Today, Yesterday, This week, Last week, This month, Last month etc.

I actually run a similar product called DarwinMail [1], which was built shortly after GoogleInbox announced it would shut down in 2018.

We have supported bundles (labels in Fastmail) for about 12 months now. Through consistent iterative updates (thanks to feedback from our users) we have made huge progress.

Apart from the core (built-in) bundles: travel, finance, purchases, forums, promotions, social, updates you can also create a bundle from any label you wish.

[1] https://www.darwinmail.app

[tyingq]

Interesting. Is there an IMAP attribute similar to Gmail's X-GM-LABELS?

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

While I sympathize with a company providing a good service and being paid accordingly, $5 a month still seems too high for email.

[ocdtrekkie]

Email is way more important than Netflix, so you should probably be willing to pay more for email than Netflix. FastMail can get pretty pricy in a multi-user scenario, but as a single account it's a pretty reasonable price.

[mb_72]

$5 / month is still pretty close to $0 / month for many people. I transitioned from Gmail -> Fastmail a year ago, and I'm very happy with all aspects (reliability, features etc). Would be fine with paying > $5 month if that's what it took.

[sudhirkhanger]

Is there a standards for labels in IMAP protocol? Or this another Gmail like proprietary protocol? Does this sync all emails multiple times if they have multiple labels in a regular email client?

[bad_user]

I've been a Fastmail user for my personal email for several years now, however I still miss labels. Therefore I love seeing this.

It is unclear to me how this works with IMAP clients. Are these labels still exposed as folders over IMAP?

If so, I assume messages get duplicated, just as with Gmail, therefore the client will need special hacks to deal with it, just as with Gmail.

[wodenokoto]

So it looks like labels are like “multi-folders”, and unlike gmail, there is no mix of labels and folders. It’s either or.

[nnutter]

If you have a spouse and/or kids, and you want them to use FastMail for the same reason you do, consider putting pressure on FastMail to offer a (reasonable) family plan. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade but they’ve raised their prices (which would affect new accounts) and do not offer a family plan so this year be my last year with them.

Edit: typo

[newscracker]

This is a big reason why I list cheaper alternatives to Fastmail whenever the topic of emails comes here. If your needs are more than one mailbox (not aliases), then Fastmail soon becomes prohibitively expensive. A few years ago, when asked about cheaper pricing plans, Fastmail replied that it has no plans (no pun intended) to go cheaper or offer cheaper plans.

There are other alternatives that are cheaper and focus on privacy, reliability, etc. They may not be as famous as the Fastmail brand. Posteo (no custom domain support), Mailbox.org, Runbox, Migadu, Mailfence and Mxroute are just some of the providers out there that give Fastmail a run for the money. Vote with your wallet.

[stanmancan]

I’m in the same boat. I would happily migrate my wife, kid, parents, and possibly even my siblings over if it was more affordable to do so. They don’t see the value in not being in the Google ecosystem, so they aren’t willing to pay themselves, which is understandable. I would be happy to pay for them, but at $50/year per user that adds up too fast unfortunately.

[wbond]

I have five children, three of which have an email address. Right now we are on a grandfathered free GSuite account. I would love to get away from Google, but $250 (and $350 in a few years) per year feels pretty steep. Most of the family plans with other software tend to be in the vicinity of ~3 full price users for up to 6. This would feel very reasonable to me.

Just wanted to add my voice that I’d love to see a discounted family plan! Even if there were constraints on subsidiary accounts - it isn’t like my kids are sending 50 emails a day.

Edit: I should note I am already a paying customer with my business email.

[tW4r]

If anyone from fast mail reads this, I would like to agree to this too.

I would love a family plan that would let me put my parents on my domain, however I cannot justify current fast mail pricing for the several emails each week

[tilolebo]

Does it work with Spark?

[floatingatoll]

Does Spark implement the JMAP protocol (successor to IMAP)?

[HelenePhisher]

So Mailmate should be compatible with those, can anyone confirm?

[everybodyknows]

>Add colors to your Labels ...

>Switching back to Folders mode: ... Your labels will be converted into Folders.

Upon converting back to Folder mode, what happens to our painstakingly entered per-label color assignments?

As a Fastmail user, this worries me, as on its face suggesting a destructive bulk state change to all metadata of the account.

[chrismorgan]

In the backend, there’s no difference between labels and mailboxes. This switch is purely a boolean that instructs the the webmail client which set of behaviours to use.

Your colours will remain intact if you switch between the two. Mailboxes can have colours too.

[kamfc]

what about zoho? i use it for business but is it viable and friendly for non-tech literate families? I simply connect zoho to thunderbird.

[marc]

Curious to hear how people use these!

[paulmendoza]

How many users does fastmail have?