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.
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.
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.
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...').
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jakobegger|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] akavel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flurdy|11 years ago|reply
Haven't really found alternatives for labels in other solutions. IMAP keywords is too restrictive etc.
[+] [-] Svip|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rtpg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkpankov|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vader1|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mostafah|11 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] moystard|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ansgri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nly|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chkuendig|11 years ago|reply
[edit: parent edited complete comment]
[+] [-] bismark|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brongondwana|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Uberphallus|11 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] cssmoo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brohoolio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefanve|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrrr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pan69|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldite|11 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] evook|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bad_user|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] manuelmagic|11 years ago|reply
"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:
[+] [-] jorams|11 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] antihero|11 years ago|reply
Does anyone know if this is remotely possible?
[+] [-] reustle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinyzh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brohoolio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply