Especially given that most people are using Gmail, or Outlook / Office365, or Yahoo! Mail, all of them coming from companies that can be and have been coerced by the NSA, without the people finding out about it until those leaks. In fact, as a European citizen, I would be more comfortable with an Australian company, than with a US-based one, simply because the governmental agencies in non-US countries are less competent than the US is at mass surveillance.
But the fact of the matter is ... if you do not encrypt your email on the client-side, you can't expect privacy protections from a global enemy that has the resources for MITM attacks. All the protection you can hope for is against local enemies (organized crime syndicates, competition, etc.)
So here we have a smaller player that's competing against big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and the first comment is about fear mongering about some laws that haven't even passed yet and targeting a company that has nothing to do with it. Don't take this the wrong way, but seeing this from a community of entrepreneurs is disappointing.
Well done! I love FastMail, and am very glad that I switch from GMail. However, one of the best parts of FastMail is that it's just proper IMAP at the end of the day, so while I'm sure some people are going to love this app, I personally don't have much of a use for it.
Fair enough, we love IMAP too, and there's no way its going anywhere. We've always cared about standards compliance and client choice, so use what you like and be happy! :)
I've been no waiting for this for so long! I have been using K9, and I love using a FOSS email client, but having native Fastmail support is just so much better.
The native AOSP email app, for example, doesn't even allow you to choose which email address to send from when replying (that, or it's so hidden that I was unable to find it.) Unfortunately, like most AOSP apps, it's been effectively deprecated in favor of the Google alternative (Gmail) so it's unlikely to get any better anytime soon.
I'm also so glad to see that they are releasing on both platforms simultaneously. Having used both an iPhone and an Android, I find it very frustrating when a product is released on one but not the other[0]
[0] Yes, I understand why startups choose to do this. We had to decide which platform to support first at my startup, so I understand the tradeoff involved.
But as a user, it's still frustrating.
It was actually a really interesting development process. We already had the web app, and our main UI developer is an Apple guy, so he took on the iOS version. Meanwhile I'm primarily a Linux guy and work on FastMail's backend services, but also an Android user, so I did the Android version.
What it meant is that the other guy could make supporting UI tweaks as he needed, and I could make supporting backend tweaks as needed (eg push system integration), but we had to come together a lot to find the similarities and differences between the two platforms and do changes for each other.
It became a bit of a competition and we both were working very fast. We had something we could use every day in less than a month and we each learned a huge amount about the other person's area of speciality.
I'm fairly confident if we did just one app first we would have gone much slower and made some bad architectural decisions that would have hurt when we got onto the next platform. If we ever do a third platform client it'll be really easy.
So, hosting email has two hard parts:
- Spam filtering incoming mail.
- Sending mail in a way that the other end will accept.
The actual IMAP server part I'm happy to host myself, but these other two parts take up too much time. Right now I use gmail to do these two things, but it's imperfect for a lot of reasons.
Would FastMail be a better choice for this? Or are there better ways to outsource these hard parts? I feel like there should be a reliable service that does just those bits, but I've never found one.
I have been using fastmail for a month now after switching from gmail. I quite like it, but the two drawbacks are that it's just a little bit more likely to let spam in than gmail, even with aggressive spam options enabled, and with fastmail I'm missing out on the growing gmail ecosystem (Streak, Dropbox mailbox app, others).
It's fine though, I really am happy to be paying for an email service instead of depending on Google. I am quite happy with everything else. Really easy to set up and integrate. Works well with Android's email app and Mail.app. The webmail isn't terrible but I just use it to report spam. Having an Android app now is super exciting.
We're talking to Dropbox about mailbox app - hopefully it will support us soon, as with everything it's a matter of engineering resources.
We're also talking to many companies about a better API for everyone - the draft spec is at http://jmap.io/ - it's based on the API that our app already uses.
with fastmail I'm missing out on the growing gmail ecosystem (Streak, Dropbox mailbox app, others).
While I have no doubt a better ecosystem around would be appreciated by some, the ecosystem thing as a whole is a double-edged sword.
I personally fled the Google-sphere because I felt I was gradually getting locked into something non-standard, non-portable.
These days I'm very hesitant to using non-integrations which aren't strictly needed. For instance: I prefer to create a proper user-account over "just" signing in with Facebook or Google.
I properly own my own domain and email-address. My Google or Facebook-account not so much.
Edit: To be clear, the value-add for me is that fastmail isn't some non-replaceable thing tied to an ecosystem, but a standards-based service provider which I can mix and mash with other best of breed-services as I see fit.
I have the opposite complaint, Fastmail marks my bank receipts as Spam, but I don't mind at all.
My bank probably is dumb enough to send newsletters, promotions and other spam-like mails next to notifications, statements and other not-spam-like mails from the same sever, also, Spanish is like a third-class citizen over the Internet, so I got accustomed to the language barrier.
FastMail looks tempting. But, excusez-moi, it seems quite expensive for what (you seem to) get. I have an email archive that's around 20GB on server. That would cost me $120 a year.
Right now I'm paying for a Dreamhost account. For around $100 a year I get "unlimited" storage, IMAP access, Roundcube access and support for domains. And this is only besides all the shared hosting features has never let me down so far.
I know FastMail is dedicated to delivering email/calendar only and that they are famous for an elegant service. But seriously, how fancy can email be?
Dreamhost is not a great mail host. Before moving my email to Google Apps for Domains I found Dreamhost's IMAP and SMTP notably slower and not super-relable (not constant failures but enough to notice). Do they even have any meaningful spam filtering?
It never happened to me but I think with Dreamhost mail hosting you run the risk of your email suffering from collateral damage if another customer using the same mail server is labeled a spammer (even if you pay extra for a static ip for your web hosting, I don't think it's used for your mail traffic).
What's good about Dreamhost for email is the "unlimitedness," not just mail storage but also domains, email accounts, email aliases, etc. I still use them for a bunch of per-site addresses that forward to a real mailbox so I can just delete the per-site address if it gets spammed.
I'm not sure what Dreamhost's e-mail offering is like, but I chose FastMail over running my own e-mail server because I'm not enough of a sysadmin to be confident in setting up and maintaining my own e-mail server without opening it up to abuse (there are enough involuntary spam relays already).
When I compared the major e-mail providers at the time, FastMail won because it was the closest to running your own server in terms of configurability (but much easier), it provided a great web UI (not as important for me personally, but some people don't use native clients), it was somewhat open about its technical infrastructure and it was doing one thing and one thing only (i.e. providing e-mail/calendar/contacts services).
Speaking as a recent convert to Fastmail from Gmail and Dreamhosts roundcube offering I have to say Fastmail is a hell of a lot better experience, it's quick, uncomplicated, and slick with great keyboard shortcuts. Roundcube on Dreamhost is fine for what it is but couldn't be compared with Gmail in terms of usability, Fastmail can. Don't get me wrong I'm not sure its as good as Gmail (spam protection for example is not as good), but you're getting a vastly better webmail experience than Roundcube.
Is there any way to sync my contacts/calendar such that they are available outside of the Fastmail app? For me that is the only reason I haven't completely switched over to Fastmail. There doesn't appear to exist a nice solution on Android to do that.
The main feature of the Android app is push notifications, which requires Google Play Services. A version of the app without push notifications is pretty much identical to just using the regular web app in Chrome Android, so there didn't seem to be a lot of point doing distribution via other means (with the extra maintenance overhead that brings).
If there's enough demand for something else then we'll be happy to revisit this.
I concur with this request. There are many new devices that don't ship with Play services and to facilitate them your apk will eventually be ripped and hosted on sites with little guarantee of authenticity.
So instead it would be great to have a direct, trustworthy download link with checksums / signature.
On Android I keep getting "Sorry, legacy Guest/Member accounts are not supported. Please upgrade your account to use the FastMail app". I only signed up a few months ago, and can't find any options for an upgrade. Help?
(p.s. Excited to try it out!)
Edit: I am using a custom domain (a few different business accounts) if that is relevant.
It seems to only be a slick wrapper around the website. No options, no unread message count on the icon, no ability to easily switch between mail and calendar...
I love FastMail, and can't wait to see where they go with a 2.0 release.
It _should_ have an unread message count on the icon. But yes, the iOS version's only significant feature over the regular web app is the addition of realtime push notifications.
The Android app has a lot more right now, mostly because the web app experience has been pretty terrible in the stock Android browser so there was a lot more work needed to get it up to scratch.
Of course we'll keep working on it; we've got loads more plans :)
I would love FastMail to add tags or labels. That is the one primary feature making me still forward my FastMail email to Gmail. I love having email in my inbox already labeled (or tagged) so I can have context.
For example, one of the companies I work for uses purple in their logo. So I tag all emails from them with their company name, and add make it purple.
In FastMail you could already search based on some of the email headers, like from:thatpurplecompany.com (or has:attachment, https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/search.html) and then you could save the search.. It's visually not that rich, but it solves your problem.
Tagging (for me) is more about ad-hoc grouping. As giving it a thought right now it's even hard for me to come up with a realistic use case.
actually, nevermind. I see (at least on android) that all this bacially is a webview of the default mobile interface. (which works quite nicely by the way...)
Thrilled to see FastMail tastefully and respectfully grow their ecosystem. I can see that, at least for the iOS app, it's pretty much a web view wrapper; I'm willing to give it a pass for the most part because FastMail's webapp is one of the best I've used… ever.
Even still, as a green-fields iOS app, I'd expect to see a little more in the way of embracing features that are now native. We have notification actions, extensibility, file sharing, and a Pebble SDK too, y'know.
Still, keep up the good work! You'll have my dollars as long as you're not Gmail.
> We have notification actions, extensibility, file sharing, and a Pebble SDK too, y'know.
Apart from the Pebble SDK, most of those landed in iOS 8. We were already in testing at the time it came out and our lead developer was preparing to travel, so we decided it was better to release rather than wait a few more months.
Of course there will be updates. We want to do lots more with the app; this is just the beginning :)
[+] [-] sasas|11 years ago|reply
The government is scrambling to pass laws for mass surveillance [2] and controversial data retention laws. [3]
[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/australian-government-...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/16/privac...
[+] [-] bad_user|11 years ago|reply
Especially given that most people are using Gmail, or Outlook / Office365, or Yahoo! Mail, all of them coming from companies that can be and have been coerced by the NSA, without the people finding out about it until those leaks. In fact, as a European citizen, I would be more comfortable with an Australian company, than with a US-based one, simply because the governmental agencies in non-US countries are less competent than the US is at mass surveillance.
But the fact of the matter is ... if you do not encrypt your email on the client-side, you can't expect privacy protections from a global enemy that has the resources for MITM attacks. All the protection you can hope for is against local enemies (organized crime syndicates, competition, etc.)
So here we have a smaller player that's competing against big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and the first comment is about fear mongering about some laws that haven't even passed yet and targeting a company that has nothing to do with it. Don't take this the wrong way, but seeing this from a community of entrepreneurs is disappointing.
[+] [-] vincentkriek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|11 years ago|reply
The native AOSP email app, for example, doesn't even allow you to choose which email address to send from when replying (that, or it's so hidden that I was unable to find it.) Unfortunately, like most AOSP apps, it's been effectively deprecated in favor of the Google alternative (Gmail) so it's unlikely to get any better anytime soon.
I'm also so glad to see that they are releasing on both platforms simultaneously. Having used both an iPhone and an Android, I find it very frustrating when a product is released on one but not the other[0]
[0] Yes, I understand why startups choose to do this. We had to decide which platform to support first at my startup, so I understand the tradeoff involved. But as a user, it's still frustrating.
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
What it meant is that the other guy could make supporting UI tweaks as he needed, and I could make supporting backend tweaks as needed (eg push system integration), but we had to come together a lot to find the similarities and differences between the two platforms and do changes for each other.
It became a bit of a competition and we both were working very fast. We had something we could use every day in less than a month and we each learned a huge amount about the other person's area of speciality.
I'm fairly confident if we did just one app first we would have gone much slower and made some bad architectural decisions that would have hurt when we got onto the next platform. If we ever do a third platform client it'll be really easy.
[+] [-] stormbrew|11 years ago|reply
The actual IMAP server part I'm happy to host myself, but these other two parts take up too much time. Right now I use gmail to do these two things, but it's imperfect for a lot of reasons.
Would FastMail be a better choice for this? Or are there better ways to outsource these hard parts? I feel like there should be a reliable service that does just those bits, but I've never found one.
[+] [-] swartkrans|11 years ago|reply
It's fine though, I really am happy to be paying for an email service instead of depending on Google. I am quite happy with everything else. Really easy to set up and integrate. Works well with Android's email app and Mail.app. The webmail isn't terrible but I just use it to report spam. Having an Android app now is super exciting.
[+] [-] brongondwana|11 years ago|reply
We're also talking to many companies about a better API for everyone - the draft spec is at http://jmap.io/ - it's based on the API that our app already uses.
[+] [-] josteink|11 years ago|reply
While I have no doubt a better ecosystem around would be appreciated by some, the ecosystem thing as a whole is a double-edged sword.
I personally fled the Google-sphere because I felt I was gradually getting locked into something non-standard, non-portable.
These days I'm very hesitant to using non-integrations which aren't strictly needed. For instance: I prefer to create a proper user-account over "just" signing in with Facebook or Google.
I properly own my own domain and email-address. My Google or Facebook-account not so much.
Edit: To be clear, the value-add for me is that fastmail isn't some non-replaceable thing tied to an ecosystem, but a standards-based service provider which I can mix and mash with other best of breed-services as I see fit.
[+] [-] Aldo_MX|11 years ago|reply
My bank probably is dumb enough to send newsletters, promotions and other spam-like mails next to notifications, statements and other not-spam-like mails from the same sever, also, Spanish is like a third-class citizen over the Internet, so I got accustomed to the language barrier.
[+] [-] unicornporn|11 years ago|reply
I know FastMail is dedicated to delivering email/calendar only and that they are famous for an elegant service. But seriously, how fancy can email be?
[+] [-] extra88|11 years ago|reply
It never happened to me but I think with Dreamhost mail hosting you run the risk of your email suffering from collateral damage if another customer using the same mail server is labeled a spammer (even if you pay extra for a static ip for your web hosting, I don't think it's used for your mail traffic).
What's good about Dreamhost for email is the "unlimitedness," not just mail storage but also domains, email accounts, email aliases, etc. I still use them for a bunch of per-site addresses that forward to a real mailbox so I can just delete the per-site address if it gets spammed.
[+] [-] pluma|11 years ago|reply
When I compared the major e-mail providers at the time, FastMail won because it was the closest to running your own server in terms of configurability (but much easier), it provided a great web UI (not as important for me personally, but some people don't use native clients), it was somewhat open about its technical infrastructure and it was doing one thing and one thing only (i.e. providing e-mail/calendar/contacts services).
[+] [-] bloke_zero|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirsadm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
Once we have CardDAV available, then we'll be recommending CardDAV-Sync.
[+] [-] bruce_one|11 years ago|reply
(eg Aptoide or similar, or even just a link to the apk)
I have Fastmail and support for Android apps; but no Play store access...
(And if it was a concious decision not to, any particular reason? :-) )
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
If there's enough demand for something else then we'll be happy to revisit this.
[+] [-] dingaling|11 years ago|reply
So instead it would be great to have a direct, trustworthy download link with checksums / signature.
[+] [-] pwnna|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joneil|11 years ago|reply
(p.s. Excited to try it out!)
Edit: I am using a custom domain (a few different business accounts) if that is relevant.
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsl|11 years ago|reply
I love FastMail, and can't wait to see where they go with a 2.0 release.
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
The Android app has a lot more right now, mostly because the web app experience has been pretty terrible in the stock Android browser so there was a lot more work needed to get it up to scratch.
Of course we'll keep working on it; we've got loads more plans :)
[+] [-] yfefyf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisblackwell|11 years ago|reply
For example, one of the companies I work for uses purple in their logo. So I tag all emails from them with their company name, and add make it purple.
[+] [-] grault|11 years ago|reply
Tagging (for me) is more about ad-hoc grouping. As giving it a thought right now it's even hard for me to come up with a realistic use case.
[+] [-] swartkrans|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigphishy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moretrees|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpope|11 years ago|reply
Any plans on open sourcing the app(s)?
[+] [-] jpope|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zw|11 years ago|reply
Even still, as a green-fields iOS app, I'd expect to see a little more in the way of embracing features that are now native. We have notification actions, extensibility, file sharing, and a Pebble SDK too, y'know.
Still, keep up the good work! You'll have my dollars as long as you're not Gmail.
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
Apart from the Pebble SDK, most of those landed in iOS 8. We were already in testing at the time it came out and our lead developer was preparing to travel, so we decided it was better to release rather than wait a few more months.
Of course there will be updates. We want to do lots more with the app; this is just the beginning :)
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robn_fastmail|11 years ago|reply
Now that our app is released we're unlikely to pursue this further.
[+] [-] cvburgess|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hendry|11 years ago|reply
Even more a shame since their Web app is pretty good.
[+] [-] brongondwana|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|11 years ago|reply
Let's hope it's as user friendly as their mobile website.