Switching from Gmail to FastMail

http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

by masnick • 13 years ago

223 214 13 years ago

darxius• 13 years ago

Fastmail is nice, but I don't see how it removes the right to complain that Gmail is sneaking ads in as email without warning its users first.

Kurts2• 13 years ago

They're not "sneaking ads as email": http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/ads-in-gmails-promo...

gulbrandr• 13 years ago

This is not an official source.

jackreichert• 13 years ago

The fact that they even offer 200mb and 800mb plans makes it hard for me to take them seriously. Shame.

nly3• 13 years ago

Some people won't pay $50/year/user for email, I know my parents won't. I had a hell of a time even getting them to move away from ISP provided mail to GApps. Neither of them have managed to use more than 300MB in 3-4 years.

In any case, an account with 8 GB of email storage and 6 GB of file storage (Family account), or 10+2GB (personal account) is still cheaper than Googles 'one plan' service.

Google just aren't interested in marketing GApps to enthusiasts and families.

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

Huh?

I've had my email address since 1995. I have 5Mb / 6 emails in my Maildir and that's only because I've got lazy recently. I've recieved probably 500,000 emails over the years.

Hoarding email is like recording all your phone conversations and keeping the tapes in your living space. If it's worth keeping, save it elsewhere. If it's not, delete it.

baudehlo• 13 years ago

I completely disagree. I've kept every email I've ever received or sent since 1996 (close to a million emails, all searchable/indexed) and it has proved extremely useful over the years to be able to find ancient emails very quickly. I'm sure some large proportion of those emails I will never use, or will never be useful, but space is cheap, and keeping them doesn't hurt at all.

davidcollantes2• 13 years ago

The main problem with abandoning Google is all the services associated with it, not only mail. And paid Gmail continues to offer mobile sync, which FastMail does not.

Yet, FastMail looks quite nice.

masnick14• 13 years ago

Push email isn't something I really want, but that's a good point if that is important to you.

The other thing I forgot to mention in the post is contact syncing. I'm honestly not sure if I like the contact pollution gmail does more or less than not having sync between FastMail and my phone.

davidcollantes2• 13 years ago

My contacts are perfect on Gmail, no pollution at all. I use Contacts extensibly (birthdays, addresses, notes and all). They are all synchronized with my OS X Contacts as well, photos included. How are yours getting polluted?

don_draper2• 13 years ago

Also, FastMail doesn't appear to have 2 factor authentication.

ChemicalHarm• 13 years ago

Actually, they do have it: http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/03/google-authenticator-now-...

ryanmcbride2• 13 years ago

Damn, I was about to sign up until I read this. I have to handle a lot of my work from my phone, and if it doesn't work well then I don't think it would be too useful for me.

Do you know if there's any plan for them to release an android app that would let my phone sync?

And I do realize the irony in trying to cut out google while using an android phone.

decode• 13 years ago

Do you know if there's any plan for them to release an android app that would let my phone sync?

I use K-9 Mail on Android with Fastmail. They both support IMAP IDLE, so you get immediate push notifications of new messages.

__mp• 13 years ago

Maildroid works good for me. I made the switch to my webhoster a couple weeks ago.

tehwalrus2• 13 years ago

American company, American servers, American jurisdiction. Sure they won't read your email, but the NSA will (just like Gmail.)

Update: hmm, so Opera aren't american? interesting. All the servers are definitely in the US though:

"we have standard servers and a high speed connection in the US." - https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_about.html

roel_v2• 13 years ago

Who? FastMail? They're not American.

bcvbcvbcv2• 13 years ago

Servers are in New York.

adestefan2• 13 years ago

Fastmail is owned by Opera a Norwegian company. Nice try though to inject a completely worthless comment.

waxjar• 13 years ago

Their servers are located in the US according to the article.

yapcguy• 13 years ago

Although Facebook were looking to buy Opera last year.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/facebook-opera_n_15...

wyclif• 13 years ago

It's actually not a worthless comment. Norwegian ownership makes absolutely no difference to the privacy equation wrt the NSA if Fastmail's servers are colocated in the US.

nwh2• 13 years ago

Yep. If the servers are in the US, or any of the NSA-tained countries like Australia, somebody is reading it.

adestefan2• 13 years ago

Can you please tell me where you think a server needs to be located were you would consider to be "safe." Please note that every European country also falls into the will be happy to spy on someone camp.

minor_nitwit2• 13 years ago

If you're in the US and your data passes through a pipe outside of the country, to say go to an email server, they nab it too. It has to be encrypted locally to be secure.

milhous• 13 years ago

Fastmail is hosted by NYI.net in Lower Manhattan, a major FreeBSD shop. The site lists Opera as one of their customers.

The very nature of e-mail leads me to conclude that it really doesn't matter where an e-mail provider is located, because it will always be intercepted at some point. One can use another e-mail service, but if the people you talk to still use gmail, then does it really matter?

Perhaps it's time to talk about new messaging systems, with encryption by default, and a new address and routing system coupled with Tor.

dsl• 13 years ago

Opera owns Fastmail

autodidakto• 13 years ago

We've had anonymous remailers for about a decade. Maybe people will start caring.

Bitmessage is up and coming, but needs a lot more development.

You could use OTR with servers for offline support and contact management (jabber, etc), but this isn't as convenient as email.

OTR (instead of PGP) over email is a theoretically possible, but the problem is still the same: No money in open source encryption == No easy to use interface.

tlrobinson2• 13 years ago

There are two ways the NSA can collect your email: fiber taps sucking up unencrypted SMTP connections, and "direct" collection from servers/FISA orders etc. Ironically if your email provider is in another country it's much more likely that emails to and from the US will be captured.

It would be interesting to setup a mail service with numerous SMTP relays around the world and attempt to connect the "closest" (least likely to be eavesdropped) relay to 3rd party SMTP servers. Communication between the relays and the main service (which stores your email in a friendly jurisdiction) would be strongly encrypted.

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

This would be trivial to do with the right DNS provider and virtual machines spread across the world.

rdl2• 13 years ago

With our VPN thing we're doing "nearest hop to destination outroute" for traffic (essentially the opposite of most network providers who try to get shit off their net as fast as possible); doing the same thing for incoming for services is essentially what CDNs do. A CDN you could trust (for policy + technical reasons) to handle this kind of thing for all kinds of traffic, combined with DoS protection like CF or Prolexic, would be kind of baller.

BoomerangZang• 13 years ago

Do Americans realize servers hosted in Europe will have more latency for you in North America? FastMail then becomes NotSoFastMail. I guess you all are okay with this trade off, in fear that the NSA is reading your super secret chain letter emails from your grandma.

pcora• 13 years ago

This is kinda going to a different direction than the article.

http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/#fn:1 "This may be a deal breaker if you’re concerned about government spying. "

I believe that Fastmail is a valid option if your main problem is with Ads and the fact that Google might be reading all your mails and companies are buying this big data to sell you better services / more targeted Ads around the web.

I'm currently switching to Fastmail because I don't believe in free lunch and I won't stand for it anymore.

If I want to make sure no one is reading my mails, then I have a problem. Most governments are doing this and we can't do much about. If I need privacy, then I use GPG.

tammer• 13 years ago

I recently switched from Fastmail to iCloud, and I can say I'm very happy. (I initially switched from Gmail for the reasons you describe).

No functional difference for me, and I save some bills. I don't consider it a free lunch, either, since I basically pre-paid when I bought my iPhone.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

Only S/MIME, PGP or similarly encrypted mail messages are secure. All other mail is routed through various servers which may or may not use an encrypted connection. It's like trusting the post office to never read your mail (which they have the authority to do if they perceive some kind of safety threat). Encrypt the message contents if you care for message privacy.

If you want sender/receiver privacy too, you can try using Tor hidden services direct to the individual. I can't think of any other way off the top of my head to send SMTP mail and completely conceal the recipient(s).

contingencies2• 13 years ago

encrypted mail messages are secure

What is secure? If government sezies your key, in some jurisdictions they can compel you to release your passphrase (if one is required), then they can go back and decrypt absolutely everything you ever sent. (OTR gets around this but this is largely by leaving the network layer location privacy / initial authentication / key exchange problems out of scope.)

Finally, traffic analysis is pretty powerful. Even if Eve can't read your messages, she can see who they went to and when (and maybe who they in turn communicated with afterwards) and thus easily determine probable relationships - Tor based endpoint, or not. (Hrrm ... but two Tor based endpoints, on the other hand...)

mikevm2• 13 years ago

So why not use Gmail with PGP?

cschmidt2• 13 years ago

Fastmail has always been an Australian company. Then they were bought by the Norwegian company Opera, who seem to have left them largely to their own devices. I haven't really noticed any changes from the acquisition. And yes the servers are in the New York, probably for latency reasons.

Here's more of the text from

https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_company_info.html

FastMail.FM's was started by Rob Mueller and Jeremy Howard in 1999. We are located in Melbourne Australia, we use IBM servers hosted by NYI in NYC US. FastMail.FM is now run by Opera Software Australia Pty Ltd, a whole owned subsidiary of Opera Software ASA of Norway.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

From only a week ago here on Hacker News, a comment about a news story on Australia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6037235

From the article:

"The contract was prompted by Telstra's undersea telecommunications joint venture called Reach. When it sought a cable licence from the US Federal Communications Commission, the DoJ and the FBI insisted on a binding security agreement.

"The contract does not authorise Telstra or law enforcement agencies to undertake surveillance. But under the deed, Telstra must preserve and 'have the ability to provide' wire and electronic communications involving any customers who make any form of communication with a point of contact in the US, as well as 'transactional data' and 'call associated data' relating to such communications."

. . . .

"The document was signed by Douglas Gration, a barrister who was then Telstra's company secretary and official liaison for law enforcement and national security agencies. "He told the Herald he could not remember much about the agreement. 'Every country has a regime for that lawful interception,' he said. 'And Australia has got it as well.'"

This looks like a pattern of mutual agreements among governments that cooperate in routing and connecting cables for international telecommunications. The statement is NOT that every telephone call from Australia to another country is listened to, but that a data archive is maintained that might be accessible with court orders. Particularly significant is the statement that other countries ask for the same arrangement if a cable connects to or through that country.

Switching email providers has little to do with what governments have access to your data by mutual agreements among the governments.

616c• 13 years ago

Network protections are, as you pointed out, something they cannot control. At the legal policy level, they are somewhat less cooperative as an Austrialian company with US server assets.

"> I feel safe in speculating that if you will not pony up the emails to a US judge, the people who maintain the server farm here in the US will.

They can't - they have no access to the emails, because they can't login to the machines and they can't access the encryption keys for the data. All maintenance of the OS/software is done from Australia.

We've had a number of US-based law enforcement bodies over the year try to get hold of our data without going via the appropriate Australian bodies, and it doesn't work out for them. In the end, they have always ended up submitting a request for cooperation via the Australian Federal Police, as they are required to do, and we respond to that request in line with Australian law."

2009 Slashdot.org Interview with Howard Jeremy, Founder of Fastmail

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391605&cid=2963395...

Kurts2• 13 years ago

I think it's fair to assume that HN is a fairly technical community and could manage such a feat on its own, so these: "here is how to switch from [insert Google service] to its competitor" posts strike me as karma-bait (and they do get votes).

As to these ads you're so troubled by:

Twitter ads look like tweets, Facebook ads look like Facebook posts, and of course search ads look like search results, at least in Gmail they have their own designated area. They replace the webclip ads when the "promotions" tab is enabled http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/06/ads-in-gmails-promo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069372

Also quoting some random Marco Arment anti-Google troll as though it has some weight or authority doesn't help your point.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

As to these ads you're so troubled by: (...)

Yeah, those are good arguments to avoid using Twitter and Facebook as well.

coin• 13 years ago

infinite scroll is not a feature

brongondwana• 13 years ago

classic.fastmail.fm

rocky1138• 13 years ago

Am I the only one here that doesn't care about Gmail ads? I don't even notice them.

masnick14• 13 years ago

My point is that if you don't like Gmail ads, you should investigate switching to something else. I feel like many people are uncomfortable with the ads but might feel locked in.

I actually don't care that Google is machine-reading email to serve ads (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do care about polluting the interface with ads that look like email for the same reason I don't like the new compose interface. Both make the interface worse, and email is bad enough as it is without bad UI.

warcode• 13 years ago

Or just, you know, block the ads for a fraction of the effort.

djim3• 13 years ago

i pay for my gmail (google apps) so I don't have any ads.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

Is there anything (for example in the T&Cs) that stops Google from creeping ads to paying customers in the future?

I bet not.

s3r3nity• 13 years ago

I don't really care either -- it's a free service that I'm able to access on pretty much any web-accessible device on the planet. Sometimes maintaining a service like that requires a way to pay the bills (FastMail is a paid service.)

Why would I be 'uncomfortable' with ads? Sometimes I feel like the issue with ads in Google/other services falls victim to the 'Nickelback Effect', where a few other very vocal people hate the subject at hand and it spreads virally to the point where people can't describe why they hated the subject in the first place.

ryanmcbride2• 13 years ago

Please be fair, people hate Nickelback because they make bad music.

jstalin• 13 years ago

If you're gonna pay, might as well stick with hushmail.

savszymura• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/353955117411737600

Don't use hushmail. Never use hushmail or suggest it to others - they snitch out their users. Fuck them.

gcr2• 13 years ago

Context?

lloeki2• 13 years ago

MailMate and it's interesting thread hierarchy view.

How is it different from the threaded view that has been present since at least Netscape days?

masnick14• 13 years ago

All the UIs I've seen in the last several years present threads flat (without any hierarchy). If there are other modern mail clients that have this kind of UI, I'd love to see them.

lloeki2• 13 years ago

Thunderbird and Postbox

https://www.google.fr/search?q=thunderbird+screenshot+thread...

http://www.postbox-inc.com/images/screenshots/1_main_interfa...

icebraining3• 13 years ago

sup-mail: http://supmua.org/images/old_screenshot_2.png

http://supmua.org/

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

their servers are in New York

For us as a European business, that's a dealbreaker. It's not that we are completely paranoid and migrating off of American systems in a big hurry, but moving forward, not in the US and not owned by an American company is a requirement for any new service we use.

Even if we didn't care, we have to take into account our clients, and "no data under US control" has become not just a selling point, but a strict condition for many projects.

This was already very much the case before the PRISM scandal, and it's only going to get worse now.

nly3• 13 years ago

You're naive if you think hosting in Europe means you're necessarily any safer.

tomp• 13 years ago

For (European) businesses, it's not the issue of safety, but the issue of compliance. If I (EU citizen) have personal data with EU company that stores said data on US-controlled servers, they are potentially viable for breach of data-protection laws. Since these laws are EU laws, it wouldn't be a problem if EU governments would read this data, since that's governed by the same set of laws.

steveklabnik• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter if clients are naive or not, it matters if they have a checkbook.

iandundas2• 13 years ago

Well that's how it would seem, in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

dioltas• 13 years ago

Do you know of any good alternatives with servers outside the US?

cpursley3• 13 years ago

What's the point of switching to an inferior email service if their servers are still under US jurisdiction? Might as well stick with Gmail and suffer the adds and NSA spying.

bcvbcvbcv2• 13 years ago

The point is to not support a company that does things you dont like.

But if you dont feel strongly about issues such as privacy, of course you dont see the point.

cpursley3• 13 years ago

That's the thing -- I do feel strongly about privacy. That's why I don't see the point in switching to another US based service. Better to use a European or Asian provider or roll your own.

maaaats3• 13 years ago

For me, it's not that I'm afraid of GMail removing IMAP, it's that Gmail IMAP works really, really bad. For an email-client to work well with Gmail, it has to be tailored to Gmail, and that has given me some issues lately.

For instance, most of my mail is sorted into labels, skipping the inbox. When using a mail client with IMAP, these labels shows as folders. Deleting the mail from my client, doesn't delete it from Gmail, only removes the label. Useless.

masnick14• 13 years ago

I agree that IMAP will probably stick around in some form. My big concern is if they start doing some kind of rate limiting, it could make it very difficult to get all your email out.

However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed federation support, then they killed it altogether). Limiting or removing IMAP is not outside the realm of possibilities.

jmillikin2• 13 years ago

  > However, along these lines the removal of Jabber support
  > from Gmail is a little bit scary (first they removed
  > federation support, then they killed it altogether)

Federation support was temporarily disabled, then re-enabled once they got spam filtering in place. Currently, XMPP works perfectly with a Gmail account.

gohrt2• 13 years ago

What happens if you delete from the All Mail folder?

mhurron• 13 years ago

Wait, IMAP sucks because you do something in a non-standard way (labels in GMail) that is exposed over IMAP in the best way it can fake (folder) and it is IMAP's problem that automagically do what you think it should?

And just for added measure, deleting the label seems to me to be the right thing to do.

gcr2• 13 years ago

OP's point was that one of IMAP's weakenesses is that it provides no clean way to represent what gmail does.

maaaats3• 13 years ago

No, I'm not blaming IMAP, I'm blaming Gmail for making it hard for me to use my email with a standard mail-client.

xwowsersx• 13 years ago

I love FastMail's interface and used it for couple of months. Recently, I let my free trial expire and allowed my account to be deleted. Why? Because it's not just about email. Everything, I mean everything, is in my Google account...docs in Drive, 10s of thousands of photos in G+...and it's all integrated so well. Bailing on the email part of the Google suite just adds a layer of disconnect and complexity...it's unfortunately just not worth it to me at this point.

cake• 13 years ago

Google sure is getting bad press lately !

sheri• 13 years ago

I'm suitably impressed that Fastmail has been around since 1999. At first glance I would have dismissed it as a service which I wouldn't expect to outlive Gmail (and thus be leery about moving to it). It still may not outlive Gmail, but its history seems that its been pretty solid so far.

nly3• 13 years ago

They were responding to Gmail, by working on a more modern AJAXy web interface, even before Opera bought them.

I remember being concerned about the buyout, but it seems it's been nothing but good for them. Opera are a great company.

johnpowell3• 13 years ago

I installed http://www.iredmail.org/ on a five buck a month Droplet at DigitalOcean around six months ago. Seems to work great and I control it. I never use Roundcube. I use IMAP from the built in Mail.app on OS X. There is even a tutorial to set everything up.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

I use a home made version of iredmail I.e. Debian, postfix, dovecot. I use various IMAP clients for access.

Works wonderfully.

vermontdevil• 13 years ago

What about spam filtering?

harrytuttle3• 13 years ago

It uses spamassassin which works pretty well.

johnpowell3• 13 years ago

I maybe get around one spam message a month. And it is always someone trying to sell me web design services.

maqr2• 13 years ago

What about backups? I don't worry about Gmail backing up my email (though I probably should), but is there some way to get iRedMail to send encrypted backups to S3 regularly or something?

jeffasinger• 13 years ago

Backups every few days on a DO server like that costs about $1/mo I believe.

latchkey• 13 years ago

What ads? http://gmelius.com/

username42• 13 years ago

AdBlock works perfectly well with gmail (my manual filter is mail.google.com##[class="mq"]). For privacy, I have installed "Mymail-Crypt for Gmail", but I know noone who uses pgp.

dochtman• 13 years ago

I've been trying FastMail for the past two months or so and have been very impressed; it's actually better than GMail in many ways. Most importantly to me, it seems to be quite a bit faster than GMail for me.

One problem I've had is with their spam filtering. I've marked everything spammy as Spam (some 800 messages so far), but I can't figure out how to get things marked as non-spam (so that the personal database gets enabled). I've setup auto-non-spam folders and a lot of messages get routed into those, but they're not being counted as non-spam. I've also moved a few messages manually, and they also don't get counted.

masnick14• 13 years ago

If you use a custom Sieve script, you can definitely whitelist certain addresses, domains, subjects, body text, etc. Google "fastmail sieve" for more info on this.

Also, if you haven't talked to support about this, I'd definitely recommend it. They've always been super helpful with me.

thrownaway24242• 13 years ago

I'm interested in quantitative evidence of "faster". I have 1.5GB of mail in gmail that I sync to fastmail and gmail is significantly, noticeably faster for me. Especially search.

I am skeptical of performance claims especially by people (not referring to you, but to the author of the post) who think mail.app is fast. Mail.app needs several seconds to do things that gmail does in 50 milliseconds, like load a thread with 100 posts, or free text search.

corobo• 13 years ago

"Ready to give FastMail a shot? I’d suggest: Moving all your existing email to FastMail."

This is not how you test things. For those prices vs storage I'd rather roll my own if I had to move off Gmail

Osmium• 13 years ago

I just did recently, and I'm very happy with the decision.

Two feature requests though:

1) Push support for iPhone

2) Have my email encrypted on disk (in the unlikely event there's a security hole or a rogue sysadmin or something, I don't want my email copied wholesale by one attacker) -- I'd pay extra for this

msh• 13 years ago

But fastmail don't give you calendar and contacts that you can sync to devices...

maxsilver• 13 years ago

Is there any service like FastMail, with a FastMail-like quality web interface, that offers ActiveSync support?

I don't mind paying a little extra to cover the licensing. But I don't want to be stuck with IMAP again -- the biggest draw for service for me is the "Contacts + Calendar + Tasks + Mail" instant syncing of something like ActiveSync.

Rackspace E-mail comes closest from what I've tried. But being stuck on Outlook Web Access isn't awesome.

purpl3p3rs0n• 13 years ago

NuevaSync offers push for FastMail. http://www.nuevasync.com/index.html

robszumski• 13 years ago

You can use ActiveSync with Rackspace Email: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/mobile-phone/

zw2• 13 years ago

While I can't find myself living without push, it's not like ActiveSync is the silver bullet. Contacts in Exchange, for example, are a ridiculous and horrible mess with a limit of three on everything and no custom synced fields.

wambotron• 13 years ago

I find it somewhat disappointing that so many people still rely so heavily on email that they can even become a "power user" of gmail. I check my email a few times a day, and even my work email has gone to once per day. It's an incredible time sink otherwise.

spdegabrielle• 13 years ago

What is the point when you are sending and receiving unencrypted email anyway...

kailuowang• 13 years ago

I am glad there is a great alternative to Gmail. Somehow somebody has to pay for the service you use. It's either your pocket, or your data, or companies paying for ads. Each service provider can use a different option and it's great for us consumers to have all options on the table.

dmix• 13 years ago

I recommend Steve Losh's Homely Mutt for replacing gmails web interface with a local client. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/

Then this can be combined with an email service that encrypts all incoming emails as they arrive such as Countermail or Lavabit.

MitziMoto• 13 years ago

Does anyone out there know of something similar to FastMail (or gmail) that is self hosted? I've been dying for a fast, modern webmail app that I can host myself, but everything I've tried is just terrible (by comparison).

workhere-io3• 13 years ago

http://roundcube.net/

maqr2• 13 years ago

I just disabled the 'promotions' tab, and it also disabled it on my android client. If they start sneaking ads in as real email, I'm gone. If I can disable the ads, I'll probably hang out for a bit longer, but it's time to start evaluating alternatives.

dalks2• 13 years ago

It's not an email.

sp332• 13 years ago

There's a screenshot going around that shows ads in the gmail interface among the actual emails (not off to the side like they are now).

workhere-io3• 13 years ago

Another alternative is http://www.runbox.com/ - hosted entirely in Norway which has strong privacy laws.

tombrossman• 13 years ago

Is Runbox still storing account passwords in plain text?

They looked like a great option but when I set up an account recently they emailed me my username and password in plain text. I cancelled immediately but if they get the security basics right I may look at it again.

socksy• 13 years ago

Whilst I can't condone the sending off passwords over in plain text, if done at the registration stage it doesn't necessarily mean that they're being stored as plain text.

dalks2• 13 years ago

This is a false dichotomy and an unfair one. Firstly, fastmail is a paid product that may show you graphic ads if you are using their free tier. (https://www.fastmail.fm/help/advertising_web_interface_ads.h...)

To those who are arguing about advertisements not showing up in the Fastmail's paid tiers should also realize that there is the Google Apps for Business accounts, where you don't see ads. It also beats the popular 'if you are paying you are the product meme'.

masnick14• 13 years ago

There is no longer a free tier for FastMail.

As I mention in my post, Google Apps is a lot of overhead for just email. There are additional complexities with switching from gmail to google apps because of the integration with all other google services.

If someone was interested in switching from gmail to a paid service, I would argue that FastMail may be a better choice than Google Apps.

mikelat• 13 years ago

I want to see a gmail type application I can run from my own servers, I don't have much faith in the cloud these days.

johngalt4• 13 years ago

Tried fastmail and wasn't impressed. Rackspace email is a great choice. Its cheap and fast. Outages are rare. Has active sync support and IMAP push works on android/iPhone.

Rackspace also allows you to run exchange mailboxes alongside IMAP if you have a few users who are still tied to outlook.

conorh• 13 years ago

What were your issues with fastmail?

johngalt4• 13 years ago

It was two years ago so it may be better now. I had a number of mailboxes to migrate (~200). Their mass input tool didn't work. No timely response to a ticket opened on it.

Additionally it seemed like they were chasing the smaller accounts. Whenever I consulted the help/documentation it focused on the converting the 1-5 user shops into paid accounts. There wasn't many resources for someone who walked in expecting to pay $2k/month. I had to dig for details. Eventually I created a paid account just to test all the details.

Contrast that with rackspace where everything worked smoothly out of the box. Any limitations were spelled out clearly. In general it felt like all my needs were anticipated. In two years with them I've opened maybe three tickets all solved exceedingly fast.

stock_toaster4• 13 years ago

I wish rackspace email had 2-factor auth and/or application-specific-passwords. :/

johngalt4• 13 years ago

Secure ID token is a little much to ask for $3/month email.

monkey264• 13 years ago

How's the Rackspace web UI?

JohnTHaller• 13 years ago

I have a few clients on it and they like it. I don't use webmail myself, though.

johngalt4• 13 years ago

No complaints. It's well organized and tends to follow a clear and minimalist design. Their status page follows a similar theme.

http://status.apps.rackspace.com/

vsvn• 13 years ago

These kind of posts are useless at most. Lets say 2 months from now FastMail is doing 90% of the things the author didn't like. What then? Switch to yahoo and then do another post why I switched to Yahoo?

SamWhited• 13 years ago

Great post; I'd love to try the service but I have over 10 Gigs of content in my current Gmail and can't really justify spending an extra $119.95 a year extra on email. This makes me wish I could though.

masnick14• 13 years ago

Thanks!

That's a lot of email...how much does it cost to store on gmail?

thrownaway24242• 13 years ago

Nothing. The free tier of gmail is now 15GB.

brightsize3• 13 years ago

So ... you could get FM's "Enhanced" account (10G mail storage + 2G file storage) for $40/yr and then pay $5/G for additional space. It sounds like $50/year, perhaps less, would get you what you need at FM.

tippytop• 13 years ago

Snowden used lavabit.com, which is located in the US (and probably being scrutinized a bit more than usual these days).

I think it's more important to diversify services than to insist on airtight alternatives. My mail is not terribly exciting, but when combined with the rest of my searches, visited webpages [1], chats, news reading habits, social network connections, and phone location, all housed under Google's roof, it seems like I'm making it easier to piece together my life [2]. At least make it a little difficult by having to go to separate companies with court orders.

[1] And web developers contribute to the surveillance by installing analytics code.

[2] That of course is the Google AI wet dream, moar data.

junto• 13 years ago

Thanks. I've just created an account at lavabit.com. Will consider paying for this as well, maybe for a custom domain. Nice tip.

mehrzad2• 13 years ago

If you don't pay, it's not encrypted. https://lavabit.com/secure.html

matthewdavis• 13 years ago

Snowden used lavabit.com, which is located in the US (and probably being scrutinized a bit more than usual these days).

Any proof to this? And, no, twitter is not a source of record.

tujv• 13 years ago

http://english.ruvr.ru/news/2013_07_12/Snowdens-letter-to-hu...

kaolinite• 13 years ago

I switched to Fastmail from Google Apps a month or so ago and absolutely love it. Really fast, great web UI and works better with desktop clients than Gmail (none of the weird label issues, duplicate folders, etc). The entire migration process was very smooth too and the support always got back to me within an hour or so.

klancaster1957• 13 years ago

I did the same thing, also about a month ago. The latest gmail ui updates were bugging me. Now I have all my accounts forwarding to my fastmail account - works great.

pan69• 13 years ago

It seems that these Fastmail guys are primarily charging for storage. My question would be, do they allow to set up many different domains and email addresses inside a single account or is this a one email address/domain per account thing?

wmf• 13 years ago

An account is only one account, but it can have a number of aliases that varies by plan. https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

masnick14• 13 years ago

Yes, you can use as far as I can tell an unlimited number of domains and aliases in a single account. Another plus over Google Apps is that the aliases are domain-specific (as far as I could tell, aliases for Google Apps applied to all domains).

brightsize3• 13 years ago

I've been on the "Enhanced" plan for years now and have at least a dozen domains and maybe a dozen and a half email addresses configured. FM will also let you (if not encourage you to) to use its DNS servers instead of your registrar's, but that's up to you. I generally use FM for DNS hosting but you absolutely do _not_ need to do this to host domain mailboxes with them.

dkoch• 13 years ago

I've had the same Fastmail account since 2003 -- they were one of the first webmail providers to have strong IMAP support back in the day. It's always been reliable for me with very few outages through the years.

dtjohnnymonkey• 13 years ago

I've had a Fastmail account for about 10 years and the spam filtering is nowhere near as good as Gmail. There are some days I'll see 20-30 spam messages in my inbox.

masnick14• 13 years ago

I've heard the same thing, but it hasn't really been a problem for me.

If it was, I'd try http://mailroute.net. Apparently it's supposed to be pretty good at handling spam.

pwelch• 13 years ago

I'm really interested in switching email providers but is there a solution for calendar? I really enjoy my calendar syncing across multiple devices and sharing with my friends and family.

Anyone have some good solutions?

masnick14• 13 years ago

I actually use iCloud because the Google Calendar -> Calendar.app syncing was pretty flakey. Obviously that's a bad choice if you're not all on Apple devices, but if you are I think it works pretty well.

Based on this excellent post (https://kkinder.com/2013/05/21/leaving-googles-silo-alternat...) it seems like there isn't a great drop-in replacement for Google Calendar (except for iCloud).

zw2• 13 years ago

It's not actually a bad choice at all, though, considering their CalDAV support is best-in-class.

D9u• 13 years ago

I've been a Fastmail user for about seven years now, but my reasons for choosing Fastmail had nothing to do with security, it has to do with mobile accessibility.

From the first time I tried Fastmail I noticed that the site was compatible with my mobile devices, which, at the time (2006), was the exception rather than the rule.

When ASA/Opera took the site over, the site quality went down, IMHO, but I still use Fastmail today because it just works.

jarek• 13 years ago

For the record, the ASA in "Opera Software ASA" is short for Allmennaksjeselskap, the Norwegian term for a public limited company.

monkey264• 13 years ago

Are most of you happy with Fastmail's pricing? I'd really like to switch away from Google apps for my families email needs, but would much rather pay $X for a domain and diskspace, and then create accounts as needed.

The family plan seems overpriced as well, as I'm the only one who needs large disk space, the other 3 accounts don't need so much.

monkey264• 13 years ago

Oops, just noticed that not all accounts need to be the same capacity. That saves a few dollars.

monkey264• 13 years ago

So, is there a market for a hosted email solution with a killer web ui that is not hosted in the US? How about Canada? Just wondering if there is an opportunity here for a non-US startup.

kayoone• 13 years ago

i dont think so. Its not like Reader which was shut down, gmail will operate like it always has and most people wont bother to switch or simply dont know anything about PRISM/NSA etc.

The noise on HN regarding this is extreme because this is a community of people who are really passionate about these topics, most people are not though.

pilif• 13 years ago

MailMate and it's interesting thread hierarchy view.

How times change. This is how message threading has always worked before we got gmail and Mail.app which I have resisted switching to for years because the just didn't do threading "right".

And now get off my lawn :-)

masnick14• 13 years ago

So I've been told :)

I've been using email since like 1996 but had never seen that kind of thread hierarchy display until I used MailMate. I can't believe all these email clients have been holding out on me!

jes5199• 13 years ago

I actually use gmail's "Priority Inbox" - I'm not into "Inbox Zero", most of my mail I never read. So I like that gmail lets the real human people I talk to regularly pop up into a special zone. I've got my phone set to only make a noise when I get email in Priority Inbox.

So sadly, I think gmail still has what's basically a killer app for me.

brownbat• 13 years ago

FastMail's (one of) my backup accounts. I don't use it often, so I don't really give out the address, but log in once every few months to confirm it still works.

It's wall to wall spam every time I open it up, stuff I don't ever see in Gmail.

There are tradeoffs....

Aqueous• 13 years ago

The ad messages are under the promotions tab. Who clicks the promotions tab? You can even disable it.

Honestly, if they were interspersing ad messages with my regular mail it would be a big issue. But just like with search, where ads are separated off to the side, the ads here are clearly marked and separated. So I don't see a problem.

Switching from Gmail to FastMail

Related Stories