From Gmail to Fastmail

http://blog.l0cal.com/2014/05/23/from-gmail-to-fastmail/

by etix • 12 years ago

145 163 12 years ago

blog.l0cal.com

stevenleeg• 12 years ago

I also recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and haven't looked back. The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, IMAP works great across all of my devices (which makes me more inclined to use OpenPGP when I can), and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com. They're also working on CardDAV and a web calendar (with CalDAV support), which will get me completely off of google once completed.

The only thing I really miss is push notifications to my phone, but I've found that 15 minute fetching works well enough for the time being.

Overall I've been really happy with it over the last 3 months. Definitely worth the $40/yr in my eyes.

etix15• 12 years ago

IMAP IDLE works great, it's not as efficient as push on mobile because of the battery drain but at least you'll get instant notifications. That's what I use with K-9 on Android.

microtonal11• 12 years ago

IDLE opens a TCP connection for every folder the client is IDLE-ing on. It surely drains the battery. I haven't used it, but NuevaSync provides Exchange ActiveSync for IMAP accounts.

chjj• 12 years ago

Just curious, does it support 2FA for the web login and api key (or device keys, whatever google calls them) access for IMAP?

etix15• 12 years ago

For the webmail yes, definitely. For IMAP I don't think it would work, I personally use OTP when I do IMAP on an insecure device.

nnx• 12 years ago

It does.

You can append your current 2FA TOTP code right after the password when your email client requests the password.

chmars8• 12 years ago

No, Fastmail does not support actual 2FA. You can add alternative login methods, for example Google Authenticator, but you can always login with your password only, i.e., it is not like Gmail where you have to use 2FA for untrusted devices or logins from strange locations plus specific passwords for IMAP etc. And the configuration screen is a mess:

http://i.imgur.com/NzW8o5h.png http://i.imgur.com/dmoBbpy.png

kunstmord• 12 years ago

Never heard of FastMail before this post, and I'm considering switching now. I have a personal mail server, but it was a PITA to set up, and it probably needs AWS SES (since everything I send mostly ends up in people's spam folders), and there's always the possibility of the VPS going offline for some time.

daxelrod2• 12 years ago

The iOS push notifications are what has been causing me to move my email over to GMail. Otherwise I'd much prefer something like Fastmail.

I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

Osmium• 12 years ago

The iOS push notifications are what has been causing me to move my email over to GMail.

Don't rely on Gmail for push: they discontinued Exchange-support recently, though they grandfathered in old users. What's irritating to me is that when I set up my new phone I lost it, and am now back to using fetch-only Gmail unless I want to use one of Google's proprietary apps (unless they've changed this recently).

Agreed that I'd like Fastmail to have push. Every time they come up on HN, I mention it, because I'm a paying Fastmail customer and would like to stay one because they're really perfect in every other way, but the lack of push email is just very disappointing.

I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

On iOS there are options like Boxcar and the like, but they're usually sub-optimal and rely on passing your login credentials to a third party.

tjtg• 12 years ago

I wrote a ruby script which watches Fastmail's IMAP inbox, does some filtering and then sends a push notification when mail arrives using the Pushover app. https://github.com/tjtg/imap-pushover

microtonal11• 12 years ago

I'm sure solutions exist for push notifications. Has anyone had success with any of them?

I played a little with PushOver, which seems to work fine. PushOver provides a user-specific (difficult to guess) e-mail address. E-mails sent there become push notifications. This can be combined with Fastmail's option to forward summarized e-mails.

One of the nice things about Fastmail is that you can use Sieve, so you can e.g. set up filtering such that only e-mails that arrive in the inbox are forwarded for push notifications.

It's not my default setup yet (I am mostly playing with Fastmail, while still using GMail as my primary e-mail provider), but it looked promising.

andrewmunsell• 12 years ago

I've also done the same recently-- though I always liked Gmail, FastMail has just been much better in terms of usability with the web client (e.g. no ads, it's fast, etc.)

lobster_johnson2• 12 years ago

If you want CardDAV and CalDAV support, you should take a look at Fruux [1]. They are a "headless" contact/calendaring server, no GUI, just the API. I moved to them (off Google Calendar) around the same time as I moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and I'm extremely satisfied.

[1] https://fruux.com

Semaphor4• 12 years ago

Does fruux now support keeping in sync with an ics file like facebooks private urls? Last time I checked that was the last hurdle I had to move away from google calendar.

microtonal11• 12 years ago

The webmail is fantastic, they're not scanning my email to show me ads, [...] and I can use it with my own domain rather than gmail.com.

In all fairness, if you use Google Apps for Business ($50 per year), you can also use e-mail with your domain and they are not scanning your e-mail to show you ads.

chmars8• 12 years ago

Google will still scan your mails but you will not be shown any ads.

I agree that Gmail (especially via Google Apps for Business) is a great mail provider. My main beef with Gmail is the sub-par IMAP support.

Aoyagi• 12 years ago

Something I think is another huge plus people don't mention: you get an actual, living person for technical and other support.

dueprocess3• 12 years ago

Responsive customer support is such a huge thing, and yet so few companies do it right.

etix15• 12 years ago

Probably because it's hard. Answering is easy, anyone can do it but making customers happy is way more difficult.

mercer7• 12 years ago

Especially for something as crucial as email. I am probably still sticking with gmail for a while, but I can't imagine the horror of suddenly being locked out and not being able to get on the phone with anyone.

vadvi• 12 years ago

yes! a week ago I opened a support ticket because of a bug. 2 days later it was fixed. pretty amazing!

microtonal11• 12 years ago

Yep. I recently filed a feature request and a bug report. Both were replied to and fixed within one or two days by one of their developers.

sandstrom• 12 years ago

I've been eying Fastmail for a while.

It's really sad that they won't offer Icelandic-only hosting, it would give some additional comfort. But perhaps that will change?

etix15• 12 years ago

It would be a wise choice. I really hope they'll do it too.

mercer7• 12 years ago

Is there any good reason why they haven't done this already? It seems to me privacy is a major selling point, especially after the Snowden revelations.

dueprocess3• 12 years ago

It's likely the NSA reads your Fastmail at the breakfast table. Their servers are on US soil.

It would take some wicked mental gymnastics to rationalize that fact away.

brongondwana6• 12 years ago

Basically, we just don't have the hardware in Iceland to support both running a full replica of everything from New York and also running production traffic in Iceland.

A fair bit of that is my personal fault for not pushing the extraction from Opera's racks into our own separate racks. We've been paying for capacity in Iceland for 3 months that we're not using yet.

nilkn2• 12 years ago

I just use the classic Gmail interface. I have for months now and will never go back. It's fast and cuts out all the cruft that I never use in Gmail, like the tabs and the G+ connectivity.

vosper• 12 years ago

I think the tabs are great. With little or no training they're right 99% of the time and are a very effective way of separating "real email" - friends, colleagues, family - from the automated stuff that's not spam but which I also don't care about as much.

nilkn2• 12 years ago

The tabs are great for mobile, where I can use them to control which emails generate push notifications. On the web, though, the entire new Gmail interface in general is so much less efficient at conveying information that I find that any categorization provided by the tabs is just not a big enough of a positive to justify using that interface.

lcnmrn• 12 years ago

You can disable Hangouts (chat), the top tabs and G+ from the standard interface too. I'm using this with Mail Notifr app along with two Gmail accounts. I get instant notifications and the web interface loads in an instant for each email inbox. This way I avoid crappy email clients.

xkarga004• 12 years ago

I have been looking for a free e-mail provider that takes privacy seriously. Isn't there anyone out there?

DanBC3• 12 years ago

What's your privacy risk assessment?

xkarga004• 12 years ago

I just don't want advertising companies or the NSA sniffing around my personal communications. It has to be private as private should be.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

The best option I found, to match my own preferences, was Runbox:

https://runbox.com/why-runbox/email-privacy/

Edited to apologise: The cheapest option seems to be $20pa, sorry. I find it excellent value.

bratsche• 12 years ago

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail as well, and I like it so far.

For me, scanning my email to show me ads didn't really bother me that much. But the thing that I really like with Fastmail is that my outbound email alias works the way I want.

The university I graduated from gives us email aliases for life, and I prefer to use my university alias instead of my Gmail address. It obviously works fine when I receive mail, but when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever). And so for a lot of people, when they would add me to their address books they'd end up adding my gmail address because that's how it was presented to them.

With Fastmail everyone just sees my jhu.edu address as I prefer.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

when I send mail from Gmail it would say "from me@gmail.com on behalf of me@jhu.edu" (or whatever)

You can configure Gmail to use your university's SMTP server and then Gmail is simply an e-mail client. They steer you away from that option but it's available.

_pius2• 12 years ago

If that's true, would love to see some documentation for it.

mercer7• 12 years ago

I've been looking into doing this, so this post came at a good time. Especially the UI/keyboard shortcuts appeal to me, as that was the main reason I stuck with google over other solutions.

_mikz2• 12 years ago

80k emails per ... a day? month?

edit: or it might be accounts?

etix15• 12 years ago

Total. Article updated.

braveheart1723• 12 years ago

any offers / coupons / deals for hackernews readers ?

_mikz2• 12 years ago

What is so wrong about Gmail's IMAP? I use it everywhere and don't see any issues.

If I use just IMAP, why use fastmail instead of gmail?

etix15• 12 years ago

Beside the non-standard way of managing folders (duplicate emails caused by labels) I find it slow compared to others.

brongondwana6• 12 years ago

FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server)

And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in size, and big slower disk for the rest. The index metadata is also on the SSDs, so most common usage patterns can be served entirely from SSD.

Those SSDs are a RAID1 pair of Intel DC3700 drives, which are enterprise drives and very fast even for SSDs. We dropped a chunk of money on moving to this setup, and it's made both IMAP and regular web usage very nice.

So basically, we're optimised for IMAP and we're optimised for speed. Every server has local storage, and the local storage is fast. It gives quite predictable performance, and very fast performance.

That's my story as both the author/maintainer of our IMAP server, and the designer of the server architecture.

That's not saying that GMail is awful, just IMAP isn't so much their focus, and they don't optimise for it.

emiunet2• 12 years ago

I am curious what sort of storage solution Google is using to compare to this one..

personZ• 12 years ago

I find it suspicious that these Gmail -> Fastmail submissions appear relatively regularly, and then see an abnormally high number of supportive commentary, out of proportion with other posts at the same time of day.

davidbarker• 12 years ago

Suspicious, how so? I've been using Fastmail for a few months and highly recommend it. My initial thought RE: the number of comments would be that many of the people who've switched to Fastmail are vocal in their support because they had specific reasons to switch.

etix15• 12 years ago

I'm not related to Fastmail in any way, you can verify that easily. I'm just a simple but happy customer who likes to share when he think that it might be of interest to others.

whichdan• 12 years ago

Same here. I've been with them since 2007 and they've made huge strides, especially with the recent interface overhaul.

brongondwana6• 12 years ago

I am related with FastMail (also pretty easily verifyable) - and we love how popular we are on HN. We do get kind of surprised at how often people post about loving us as well, but we're not complaining

(I'm sitting on my laptop during the break at my choir rehearsal today and reading through this thread to see if there are any questions I can answer. I'm doing this instead of going to get a coffee... which now that I think about it must mean I'm insane, because I'm going to need coffee to survive the next set of rehearsals. Madness. If anyone at Melbourne wants to come to an awesome concert next weekend, email me or something)

gress2• 12 years ago

I find it suspicious that every time a post that isn't supportive of Google is submitted, someone attempts to undermine it with innuendo.

Semaphor4• 12 years ago

I think the Snowden submissions + Reader shutdown made many people switch => more articles about switching. I know I wanted to end my reliance on google services after the shutdown and ended up on fastmail after comparing many services.

mreiland• 12 years ago

I've been thinking about switching to fastmail from gmail for a while now, even going so far as to ask for people's opinions about it on reddit. Seeing this really convinces me I need to go ahead and make the switch, and I would assume I'm not alone in slowly becoming disenfranchised with gmail, hence the many posts you're seeing.

My issues with gmail have nothing to do with the email scanning, etc, and everything to do with the interface getting more complicated over time. I just want an email web interface that's simple, and common.

ender7• 12 years ago

There are plenty of reasons to switch to another host from Gmail, but this oft-expressed one is not great:

"Getting my data back under control

In the past months we’ve had a lot of scary revelations about privacy violations, the biggest being of course the NSA spying scandal. It became urgent to regain control of my data."

If someone else is hosting your e-mail, then you do not have your data "under your control". A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process (as they should be able to, to be honest). Additionally, there's no evidence that FastMail (or any other e-mail provider) is better protected from NSA infiltration [1].

It seems like the author has plenty of other reasons to switch, but this one lends nothing but a false sense of security [2].

[1] Possible exceptions being Lavabit-esque systems that do client-side encryption or Google itself, which has begun encrypting their internal as well as external traffic.

[2] Not that I really recommend running your own e-mail server either. Setting one up (and maintaining it) is so error-prone that you're probably even less safe than before.

ForHackernews4• 12 years ago

There's two types of "data under your control" at play here.

The first (and for most users, more important) is about not giving away your data to marketing companies. Switching to Fastmail accomplishes that (probably?).

The second is about securing your data from governments/state actors. That battle seems kind of futile to me. Even if I were running everything on my own server in my own basement, with my own ISP, I'm almost certainly not qualified to sysadmin a machine that needs to be secure against the NSA.

kylec• 12 years ago

You probably couldn't resist intrusion if you were under an active investigation, but hosting your own mail server would certainly help to partially mitigate the mass surveillance dragnets that are logging all traffic en masse from popular mail providers.

paul• 12 years ago

It seems rather dishonest to imply that Google is giving (or selling) your data to marketing companies.

snird2• 12 years ago

"as they should be able to"? That's it? we are living in a world where privacy and freedom aren't ours to demand? Governments "should be able" to kill off our freedom? I haven't noticed we've gone that far away.

sp3323• 12 years ago

I don't mind service providers giving information to law enforcement provided there's due process and some court oversight. You can "demand" freedom all you want, but if convicted of a crime, the government should still be able to put you in jail.

tjr• 12 years ago

Even running your own mail system might not gain you as much as you'd hope: http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-bec...

RexRollman• 12 years ago

I've wondered about this from time to time. Its one thing to scan emails to serve ads to the person who is using Gmail, but is Google also using those emails to also create profiles of non-Gmail users? I would like to think it's not.

melville_X• 12 years ago

This is a good reason for all of us to keep switching away from GMail. It benefits us all via network effects.

mongrol• 12 years ago

If you're using email then various governments (UK, USA) have it no matter where it's hosted. It's not under your control while in transit. At best you can encrypt it, but they'll take a copy of it anyway and burst it open if they need to.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

A government can still compel Fastmail to turn over e-mails via legal process

If they get a court warrant, you should either give in or fight against it. I think most reasonable people would find that reasonable as opposed to secret surveillance (e.g. NSA).

I think it is necessary to realize that email communication is at least bi-direction. So if one side is vulnerable to attack, there is no privacy or security. The best we could do is of course encrypt the message.

chmars8• 12 years ago

Fastmail and other Australian mail providers are not protected from the NSA, on the contrary, Australia is one of the Five Eyes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

sivers• 12 years ago

I'm so glad someone wrote this up. I've been meaning to.

Of all the tech changes I've made in the last few years, moving from Google Apps mail to Fastmail is the one that's made me the happiest, every day.

The webmail is absolutely amazing. So fast, rock-sold, clean, minimal, focused.

Having your webmail experience be completely ad-free and snoop-free, and, well, Google-free is priceless.

Choose the Business email option - https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/business.html - if you want them to keep an automatic archive of the emails you download via POP. When I signed up under the Personal Email option I found they didn't have this archive option, but they switched me over to the business account on request.

It's so worth the measly $15/year, considering the importance a good email/webmail experience, and how much it affects your every-day life.

I've helped a few friends switch over, and they've all been thrilled with it.

ikusalic• 12 years ago

I have the same experience. I find the interface just beautiful and pleasure to use. The same is true when using it from phone.

One of the best tool-related decisions I ever did.

eknkc2• 12 years ago

Same here! Have been using fastmail for ~6 months now. I was hesitant, thought I'd miss push mail on iOS but it has been just fine. Also, there are some iOS mail clients that can push on FastMail (http://mymail.my.com) I always hated Gmail's slow/weird IMAP behavior. Switched to Office365 at some point. Exchange was great but so freaking slow. FastMail has standard, fast IMAP.

I also use the included DNS server for a couple of domains that had been lying around and the static file host for some http placeholder pages and stuff.

I'd never go back to Google at this point.

chmars8• 12 years ago

Fastmail seems to support IMAP Idle only. And IMAP Idle is not an option for mobile devices since the mail client has to keep the connection open all the time, so there goes your battery …

masnick• 12 years ago

Amen. I switched to FastMail from Gmail more than a year ago and also absolutely love it. I highly recommend it for anyone dissatisfied with Gmail.

A few things that may be helpful for people considering making the switch:

- If FastMail's IMAP import doesn't work for you, this might (it worked for me): http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...

- If you want to try FastMail "risk free" so you can switch back to Gmail if you don't like it: http://protips.maxmasnick.com/how-to-test-fastmail-risk-free...

- My own writeup about my experience switching to FastMail from Gmail: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944)

emiunet2• 12 years ago

I have been using Google Apps and actually have an "evil" thought whenever I heard someone is switching off of Google: maybe, the more people leaving Google, the better its performance will be (for the ones who stay) (ie: their servers will be less busy)

mattkrea• 12 years ago

While I'll agree that the interface is beautifully simple why not host your own? Aside from software updates I've had to perform zero maintenance and find comfort in the fact that I host my own.

chmars8• 12 years ago

Does Fastmail provide a matrix of all offers? I have for example never understood why business accounts have a USD 15/year management fee while family accounts have not …

etix15• 12 years ago

As far as I know they do not. Your best option is to contact them: sales@fastmail.fm

phaed• 12 years ago

ZohoMail does everything Gmail does, including using you own domain. http://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html

Ditched Gmail when it started getting slow, ditched Outlook when it disabled its domain feature. It has a REAL free tier of 5GB + 10 users. (unlike Fastmail's 250MB). Plus their webmail interface is nice and clean.

erikb• 12 years ago

Just FYI, they don't have the main feature I am using GMail for: priority inbox. Or at least I didn't find it in their feature lists.

Morgawr• 12 years ago

The idea of privacy with email is, unfortunately, very ephemeral. As seen in other articles also submitted to hn in the past, even if you stop using Gmail, Google will still have a very huge chunk of your data to track simply because the vast majority of the people you communicate with have a Gmail account. There is no easy/apparent way out.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

This is not a good argument for using or staying with Gmail.

In fact, writing this another way potentially identifies a more compelling reason to leave:

By using Gmail, you are incrementally harming the privacy of everyone you communicate with.

djokkataja• 12 years ago

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail about a year ago after using exclusively Gmail for email since 2007. I've been very happy with Fastmail since then. Primarily I was bothered by getting the service for "free" from Google--it's not free for them to provide it (no such thing as a free lunch), which means they have to find ways to monetize my personal communications with others without me directly paying them. Obviously there are the ads, but then there's the matter of having to stay up to date on their privacy policies... long story short, Google creeps me out a little, and I'd rather pay a bit of money to feel like I'm not a host for some kind of sprawling global parasite.

Anyway, pros:

- The Fastmail web interface is fast. I've never seen it take longer to load than 1 second on any computer or internet connection; it's noticeably faster to load up the entire interface than Gmail.

- Fastmail also uses basically the same keyboard shortcuts as Gmail (j/k to go up and down, x to select, # to delete, y to archive, z to undo, r to reply, f to forward, a to reply-all, ctrl-enter to send--works from any field in fastmail rather than just the body or title as in gmail, which is handy for forwarding things).

- Sometimes sending/opening messages in Gmail was kind of slow; sending messages from Fastmail has always been virtually instantaneous, and opening them is definitely instantaneous. I think Fastmail preloads email content into the client so that it only has to request images from the server, because it definitely opens email too quickly to have done a round trip to the server to get the email contents. If you press 'o' to open an email, it will be open by the time your 'o' key comes back up.

- Fastmail can help with setting up DNS for emails for custom domains.

- Fastmail has this "Pin" feature that lets you pin emails so that they stick to the top of whatever folder they're in. I always wanted something like this in Gmail (like if starred messages stuck to the top or something). I think there's an option to toggle whether or not they float to the top if you're not a fan. Anyway, I'm not sure that having this feature has actually been beneficial to me in any way, but I like it a lot.

Cons:

- The Fastmail interface is not as pretty as the Gmail interface. There is no option to get a big, beautiful background picture, and the interface doesn't really have space for it anyway. This bothered me a little at first, but these days I don't care... if I'm gazing longingly at the mountains in the background picture of my email, I'm being extraordinarily unproductive.

- Fastmail's auto-complete when you're typing in the recipient list does not keep track of who you send to most frequently and push them automatically to the top of the list. This still bothers me sometimes.

- Fastmail's settings pages are a little confusing. There are a couple different ways to get to them, and it can be a little tricky to figure out where you're supposed to find something. I've never been a fan of the way settings are organized in any email client, though... Gmail and Outlook have settings pages that aren't as terrible these days; Fastmail's settings are a little less refined. On the other hand, it seems like you can do a lot more with the settings in Fastmail (so this is a bit of a pro, not strictly a con).

- Fastmail has a folder system with nesting like Outlook. I don't think this is really a bad thing; I like the concept of Gmail's labels a lot, but I never found it to be significantly more useful than folders. What sucks about Fastmail's implementation is that to create folders or rearrange them, you have to enter this special folder management menu. Then to create a folder, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and type the new name, and if you want it to be at the top, then you have to drag it up past all of the other folders, and there seems to be a max speed on how quickly you can drag it up, and it starts arbitrarily selecting the text as you're dragging and sometimes gets a little janky as you get to the top. Definitely my least favorite part of the interface.

Ambiguous:

- Not strictly a pro or a con in my opinion: there is no chat interface built-in (actually I'm not certain about that, there might be some option to enable chat and put in chat credentials, etc. but I haven't looked for it). Overall I think this has been very good for getting me in and out of my inbox very quickly and productively without any risk of distraction. I actually stopped using any form of chat until more recently when I needed it for work, and I think my quality of life was improved for it, but I know that for many people chat is an important part of communicating. But I haven't missed it in my webmail one bit.

Wow, that was a lot more than I expected to write! Anyway, to sum up, from my perspective as a web developer:

- Fastmail is faster and contributes better to getting things done, in my experience (worth the $60/yr for that reason alone)

- Fastmail has some nice options if you're setting up email inboxes for yourself for custom domains. I don't know if I would recommend it yet as a mail option for clients since it's a little less polished than Gmail and some of the settings options are a good deal more technical.

- Fastmail is a nice gateway drug to freeing yourself from the idea that Gmail is the be-all-end-all of email. Still waiting for someone more productive than myself to combine webmail, Trello, and Google Calendar into a glorious productivity app that ushers in a new era for humanity.

Semaphor4• 12 years ago

The Fastmail interface is not as pretty as the Gmail interface.

I disagree, I find it prettier than gmail.

Pretty much agree with everything else you said.

One con I'd like to add: GMail has send and archive and you can set it as default. I really miss that in fastmail.

Groxx• 12 years ago

I've seen "no chat interface" come up in multiple gmail/fastmail comparisons, and I'm genuinely confused as to why. Do people expect email to come with a chat client? It seems weird to me to have email + xmpp/hangouts merged together and not separated (I use Adium, for instance). Email contacts are rarely people I chat with, with the exception of my innermost circle who I contact with pretty much everything, whichever fits best at the moment.

mariodiana2• 12 years ago

I'm currently reading Glenn Greenwald's new book, NO PLACE TO HIDE, and I have to say that a person should take much comfort in the fact that Fastmail is in Australia rather than the U.S. Australia is a member country in what the NSA terms the "Five Eyes" (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) These countries are thick as thieves when it comes to sharing signal intelligence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

mariodiana2• 12 years ago

s/should/shouldn't/

(Sorry for the typo.)

teach2• 12 years ago

Can't you edit your comment? You ought to be able to go that within the first hour or so.

plg2• 12 years ago

"IMAP was working less reliably and I felt more like the product than the customer"

This is the key for me. (1) IMAP not working well and in particular, (2) feeling more like the product than the customer.

With fastmail.fm their business model is they provide a service (email) and in return I give them money. They succeed as a business by getting more money. I am happy to give them money in return for a high quality product.

With Gmail their business model is they provide a service, and in return I give them permission to scan the content of my emails, to data-mine my contacts' names and addresses, and use that information to (a) serve me ads, (b) make money by selling it to third parties, and (c) who knows what else. Gmail succeeds by obtaining (and selling) more and more personal information.

I don't like this and frankly I persist in my surprise that Gmail users accept this transaction.

Sure, in principle, fastmail.fm could be surreptitiously selling my personal information as well ... but the point is that (a) they say they don't do this, and (b) their business model and their success (presumably) don't depend on this. If it was found out they were doing this, (presumably) their business would suffer greatly.

Anyway I recently switched over to fastmail.fm from Gmail as well, like the OP. So far I am extremely happy with it. A MUCH better experience on iOS and on OS X Mail.app.

bigtones• 12 years ago

Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.

microtonal11• 12 years ago

Fastmail also has PFS:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...

dan1234• 12 years ago

FastMail also claims PFS support

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...

plg2• 12 years ago

I know with google apps you don't get served ads ... but nevertheless, doesn't part of google's business model still depend on them mining the content of your emails?

Or to put it another way: does google guarantee that with google apps email, none of your content (or contact info) is used for any purpose other than just spam detection?

lallysingh• 12 years ago

What makes you think that Google sells any information about you to third parties?

United857• 12 years ago

Fastmail is great for email, but what really makes them awesome is they can also provide static web hosting, custom DNS services, and even a Jabber/XMPP service for no additional charge.

If you want to host a personal home page + your own email, this is really compelling. Much more power-user friendly than Google Sites, much more reliable than most virtual webhosts, and much cheaper/easier than AWS.

Semaphor4• 12 years ago

Just in case people are missing things like the priority inbox I'd like to mention Sanebox [0]. In my opinion they are better than what google does plus they offer more features (for a price).

[0] https://www.sanebox.com/

tpeng• 12 years ago

Fastmail should really invest in some better domains. While I can use google to find a company's website, I still have to communicate my email address literally on a regular basis. I'd rather not have to spell out a weird domain.

psychometry• 12 years ago

As someone who actually switched from Fastmail TO Gmail several years ago, this definitely resonates. "Fastmail" is not easily recognized by most people and becomes especially unclear if you're reciting your email address over the phone.

Fastmail doesn't even own fastmail.com! They do have many domains available [1] but none are that great.

[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html

joedavison• 12 years ago

They have one really great domain: sent.com

I have never had a problem communicating it.

zokier• 12 years ago

You should be using your own domains regardless of who is your email provider. That way switching email provider is only one MX record change away if the need ever arises.

kretor• 12 years ago

The spacing around "i"s is too much.

philwelch• 12 years ago

The only downside I've seen switching from Gmail to Fastmail is that Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good. But I can live with it.

ausjke2• 12 years ago

After reading this I plan to switch to fastmail as well.

Thanks for sharing the good stuff!

songgao• 12 years ago

I made up my decision and finally made the switch this evening, after reading this post. So far I'm pretty happy about it. Thanks etix!

Several things I'd like to share here:

1. XMPP

Fastmail actually comes with a XMPP server. This is a big bonus feature that I didn't expect. It can also keep chat logs in an IMAP folder named 'chat'. Read more here: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/clients/chat.html

2. External Account

If you want to manage other email accounts (receive emails from them), Fastmail seems only support POP (in contrast to Gmail supporting both POP and IMAP). Also, unlike Gmail which checks email with a dynamic frequency based on how many emails you receive at the time, Fastmail uses a fixed interval for checking emails from external account. The minimum interval you can set is 1 hour. I couldn't find a way to manually trigger a POP check in Fastmail either.

One hour is a bit too long for me, but fortunately I adapted to a better way than using external account. I simply set an auto-redirect rule in my other email accounts (e.g. my school uses MS Exchange) and that actually results in instant delivery of emails from external account. I guess this is the right way to handle the problem (other than making your primary email service pull emails from external account like what I did in Gmail before).

etix15• 12 years ago

Glad you like it as much as I do.

1. I did not mention the XMPP server primarily because I already use another server but it's always a welcome addition indeed.

2. I've read somewhere (can't remember where though) that when you're logged in the frequency is automatically increased and you can force a retrieval manually by using the refresh button. Maybe @brongondwana can comment on this matter.

iancarroll• 12 years ago

Just moved my domain over to Fastmail. I can live with $10 per three months.

napoleond• 12 years ago

The coolest thing about Fastmail is a feature I didn't expect before making the switch: Fastmail is actually faster than Gmail. IMAP is quicker, webmail loads quicker, everything is just snappier. I still use Google mail for a lot of stuff (and actually only have one inbox at Fastmail currently) but I have been extremely impressed with Fastmail so far.

YooLi• 12 years ago

I moved to from Gmail to Fastmail last April, but this April, I moved back to Gmail. I have an email address (on my own domain) that I've used since the late 90's. It's all over the Internet in newsgroup archives, forums, etc. from before anyone was hiding emails from spam scrapers. Consequently I get several hundred spam per day. The FM spam filtering is no where near as good as G filtering. I had to manually flag as spam a couple dozen mails every day as well and go through the spam filter and pick out the false positives. I have no problems with G's spam filtering. The other problem with FM is administering multiple accounts on my domain. While it true it's only something I need to do once, as has been mentioned already, the settings/administration leaves much to be desired. Overall, using Gmail is just more pleasant to me, enough so that it outweighs the concerns (read: Google being creepy) that caused me to leave last April.

microtonal11• 12 years ago

Did you train the spam filter with the minimum number of e-mails that is required to activate your personal bayes classifier?

Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to classify your incoming mail. Because it's been trained by the exact type of messages you receive, it is normally significantly more accurate at classifying spam than our general database. However, it can only do so once it's been properly trained, which is why we have to wait until it has seen 200 of each type of message before it is activated.

Source: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/stopspam.html

etix15• 12 years ago

Even though some spam reaches my inbox (around 10 per day) but I can live with that since it stops an other hundred of them.

Derbasti2• 12 years ago

I recently switched from Gmail to a mail provider called Posteo. They are a German mail provider much like Fastmail. Here is the neat thing: You can create a mail account and physically mail them paper money, without ever giving them your name or address.

I wish more services would be doing that! In particular, I think we sorely need an anonymous way of paying money on the web, like physical money.

etix15• 12 years ago

That's neat. Is it a German only website or do they have an English version available?

Derbasti2• 12 years ago

As far as I know, the website is in German only. The webmail interface can be switched to any language you want though. I guess you could sign up for it with the help of a German friend or maybe even Google Translate. Since payment is completely anonymous (or paypal), that won't be a problem.

To quote from the FAQ:

  The webmail interface can be switched to other languages. 
  However, the rest of the service is in German, i.e. 
  sign-up, EULA, mail settings (forwarding, POP download, …),
  payment information etc. If you don't know any 
  German, you might miss some things.

  Der Webmailer lässt sich auf andere Sprachen umstellen. 
  Allerdings ist unser Angebot ansonsten komplett 
  deutschsprachig, also Anmeldung, AGBs, Einstellungen rund 
  um die Mailadresse (Weiterleitungen, POP-Sammeldienst,…), 
  Zahlungshinweise usw. Wer gar kein Deutsch kann, geht da 
  vielleicht etwas verloren.

chmars8• 12 years ago

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail too but I am not that happy. And no, Fastmail does not protect you from the NSA since Australia is one of the Five Eyes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail because my personal CRM's mail integration depends on Apple Mail. Gmail and Apple Mail do not go well together because Gmail is not IMAP (and Apple Mail has some issues too, even with the latest improvements). So with Fastmail's 'real' IMAP implementation, that issue was resolved. But Fastmail is lacking in comparison to Gmail in many areas, just two examples:

Filtering: Spam, phishing etc. filtering cannot compare with Gmail. And for your own filters, you cannot create them directly from a mail and see immediately the result as you can in Gmail. You have to create your filters via the setting menu and have to manually check if they actually work …

Security: I use 2-factor authentication as often as possible. Gmail has a very balanced approach to 2-factor authentication. Fastmail on the other hand does not allow you to use 2-factor authentication as a general security measure but only as an _additional_ login. And the configuration is not user-friendly. And since it is only an _additional_ login, you do not get (or need) backup codes or another backup way for your 2-factor authentication like SMS.

Fastmail works fine as a very traditional mail provider but that is not far away from what hosting providers offer anyway.

Your mileage might vary of course. If you are looking for a traditional mail provider with reliable IMAP support, Fastmail is certainly a great choice.

cpach• 12 years ago

The only trustworthy way to make sure that only the recipient is reading your message is to use end-to-end encryption. Which for e-mail means GnuPG.

vsl• 12 years ago

I moved from FastMail to Gmail a few years back because of poor spam filtering.

Recently, Gmail was getting worse and worse at filtering spam for me. Plus IMAP was never reliable, so I switched back to FastMail last year and its spam filtering is now considerably better than Gmail's for me.

FastMail's 2FA is indeed horrible, horrible thing, I wish they fixed that. Unfortunately, most of the development attention seems to be on Fastmail's webmail UI these days, something I use only very rarely.

Still, I'm satisfied overall and like the setup much better than Gmail. I learned my lesson about using my own domain for email, though, to make any future migrations painless.

motters• 12 years ago

The lesson of Levison is that privacy assurances by email service providers are not necessarily trustworthy. Levison balked, but most wouldn't want to shut down their businesses.

For now the best bet is either to self host (it's not that hard, especially for most folks reading this) or to use something like ProtonMail where the content can't be routinely exfiltrated and the provider can't give the inbox keys to any third party.

tagrun• 12 years ago

The GET part of the fastmail link in this blog post suggests this is a fastmail sponsored ad rather than honest opinions of an unbiased user: http://www.fastmail.net/?STKI=12089553

Also, I don't see how "Getting my data back under control" is achieved by shifting from a free service to a paid service; if you're serious about this, you should rather setup your own mail server on a spareable machine (Raspberry Pi etc. + an ordinary desktop mail client + Roundcube etc).

And unless you use something like GPG, your email data is as secure as your corresponding mailbox.

etix15• 12 years ago

Sorry but I wouldn't spend my time writing good reviews for a service I don't like just to get few dollars off my next subscription (which is going to be in 2 years anyway).

And yes I've used my referral ID to link to their website. I don't see what's wrong with that since I mentioned it in the article and everyone is free to remove it and I'm pretty sure a lot of the readers did anyway.

ausjke2• 12 years ago

I was going to signup with Fastmail.

But the Terms is pretty strict, i.e. they can terminate you without notice, not a warning, also they don't really care about refunds, no matter whatever the reason is?

I'm hesitated again. Is the hosting-your-own-mail-server the only way out?

8. TERMINATION

The Service Provider may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever, with or without providing any refund of any payments. The Service Provider may also terminate or suspend your account for inactivity, which is defined as failing to sign-in to the Service for an extended period of time, as determined by the Service Provider. The amount of time that the Service Provider currently considers as an "extended" period of time may be viewed from the Help link. Upon termination of the Service, your right to use the Service immediately ceases.

The Service Provider shall have no obligation to maintain any content in your account or to forward any unread or unsent messages to you or any third party. 8.1. NO REFUNDS

Any refunds are at the sole discretion of the Service Provider.

The Service Provider may choose to make a refund at its sole unfettered discretion, however the Service Provider shall have no obligation to refund any portion of any payments, in the event that You wish to discontinue use of all or part of the Service, or in the event that your access is terminated by the Service Provider.

From Gmail to Fastmail

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