[HN Gopher] Integrating with Fastmail
___________________________________________________________________
Integrating with Fastmail
Author : ljoshua
Score : 541 points
Date : 2022-09-27 21:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastmail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastmail.com)
| cdnsteve wrote:
| What scares me about Google is:
|
| - the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time,
| one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs
|
| - the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to
| power their profiles of users for ads
|
| - the fact it records nearly every transaction and vendor I've
| used, is scary
|
| - I recently sent a friend a one word subject with a link to a
| tweet and it was red flagged as dangerous sender and content in
| my friends Gmail, he sent me screenshot
|
| - the fact Google is so deeply integrated to state now, in other
| verticals like YouTube and this disinformation hunt against free
| speech against anyone who doesn't agree with what you should see
| or read
|
| Time to switch folks, $50 a year to me is worth it.
| jsnell wrote:
| > - the known and blatant indexing it does of your email
| content to power their profiles of users for ads
|
| They have made very explicit statements about not using email
| content to target ads. So it's neither "known" nor "blatant".
| cdnsteve wrote:
| This isn't actually true. Source examples but many more. -
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/google-tracks-your-
| purchase...
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/5tfd8n/google_knows
| _...
|
| -
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Google doesn't deny that it scans your email for
| information, it denies that it uses that data for ad
| targeting and profiling. Your links don't challenge that
| claim.
| jsnell wrote:
| How does either of those example demonstrate email contents
| being used for ad targeting? What I see is just a more
| convenient UI for displaying what I've bought than
| searching for the individual receipts in the email archive.
|
| There's just no ambiguity in Google's statements about
| email contents not being used for any kind of advertising
| purposes.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time,
| one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs
|
| I was lucky in that the first time I encountered one-click
| sign-on was in the early days when Facebook was aggressively
| pushing it. There was no way in hell I would give Facebook the
| discretion to allow me access to integrated services, so I
| created a login for the service. That lesson has stuck with me
| ever since and I'll never use these integrated logins. If you
| lose access to your Google account (which more and more people
| are experiencing for any and no reason at all), you also lose
| access to any integrated services. That's crazy. I wish more
| people would take that consideration seriously.
| dvcrn wrote:
| Shameless plug for my CLI for creating MaskedEmails that is using
| these APIs (since beta actually) -
| https://github.com/dvcrn/maskedemail-cli
|
| If you're into domain/service-specific email addresses, give it a
| go!
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| Sweet, thank you!
| notemaker wrote:
| I just wished Bitwarden would integrate with this... I know
| 1password has.
| munkkeli wrote:
| They just did! https://bitwarden.com/blog/use-bitwarden-to-
| generate-email-a...
| lcmatt wrote:
| Perfect! Just noticed they need to update the Firefox
| extension though as it's not supported just yet.
| fastforious wrote:
| The feature was added over two weeks ago, but the update
| hasn't been pushed to Mozilla's repository yet,
| apparently.
|
| https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/releases/tag/browser
| -v2...
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| An advance gentle warning to people moving to Fastmail: never use
| the email address on their domain "fastmail.<tld>. Just don't.
|
| Pretend it doesn't exist. It'll be difficult to move away from
| Fastmail if you have to. Because they don't have any free tier
| for that which is fine.
|
| I regret using it on mailbox.org and I have used it at so many
| places in last many years that moving away seems tedious and I
| give up on it even before I start.
| kbd wrote:
| I've been meaning to switch to Fastmail from Google Apps forever,
| I really need to get on that...
| patleeman wrote:
| I did it recently. It was pretty painless. Their import tool is
| top notch.
| azinman2 wrote:
| +1 to their import tool. I was really surprised at how good
| an experience that was. So simple and effective. And
| idempotent - I had to restart it after re-enabling some of
| the labels and no dups.
|
| My only issue is the spam filtering isn't nearly as good. I
| need to regularly check spam.
| beefsack wrote:
| On that note, I've noticed that the Gmail spam filter has
| been less effective recently - I get spam coming through to
| my inbox almost every day now. I've also had some
| legitimate email going through to the spam box which has
| very rarely happened with me on Gmail.
|
| If there's one thing that will finally push me to jump to
| something different it would be if spam filtering becomes
| ineffective.
| broodbucket wrote:
| Gmail catches more spam than Fastmail does. I almost
| never get actual spam in my Gmail inbox, though they
| sometime mark non-spam as spam. Having actual spam turn
| up in my Fastmail inbox roughly once a week is a little
| annoying.
| lepetitchef wrote:
| Love the Fastmail UI. If you are not using any email client
| software, please use Fastmail on the browser to enjoy all the
| latest update in the UI.
|
| The most recent feature is Fastmail calendar allows user to
| change the color of events. You will love the web interface more.
| kureikain wrote:
| I love fastmail and its REST api but also at the same time I love
| to use google stuff like google docs, calendar etc, google voice.
| Technically I can use all gmail service without using a gmail
| account but it's always less intuitive somehow and always
| something break here and there when people invite or tag you in
| drive or google docs.
|
| So I ended up build an email forwarding service, it runs on my
| own domain, forward email[1] back to my personal gmail. So I
| still have full control at my own domain level, have the
| flexibility that gmail give me, and have a REST api to access
| email.
|
| Having this access REST API[2] in hand, I have been thinking I
| maybe able to scrape bank alert email to build out a a read-only
| API for my own banking transaction.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: https://mailwip.com
|
| [2]: https://mailwip.com/api/#introduction
| aussiedude wrote:
| Until they offer an office suite, cloud drive and directory that
| supports SSO/SAML they'll stay a fringe email provider.
|
| Why pay $5 to fastmail when Microsoft offers heaps more.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I actually trialed Office 365 when I decided to drop Gmail.
| Their IMAP import was broken so I couldn't transfer my content
| over, and the admin dashboard was actually throwing HTTP
| errors. Customer support was functionally illiterate in English
| and unable to comprehend the problem, let alone solve it.
| Disastrous.
|
| Email is so foundational to online identity, that I would
| rather pay for the services of a smaller company that sees it
| as their main business, rather than an also ran arm of a
| massive big tech company who sees customer support as an
| outsourceable cost center to be cut to the bone.
| tanin wrote:
| Long time customer of fastmail. Great support. I once forgot to
| cancel sub, contacted them, and they refunded with no question.
| Really built the trust.
|
| Now I have my personal and side business on fastmail.
|
| UX is simple, service is reliable. Keep up the good work.
| Collier wrote:
| anderspitman wrote:
| The real integration services like Fastmail need is for DNS. It's
| crazy that I need to understand DNS records and copy/paste them
| in order to have _someone else_ host email on my behalf. When I
| sign up for Fastmail, there should be a quick OAuth flow out to
| my domain registrar for me to delegate a [sub]domain for Fastmail
| to control, which returns a token they can use to set all the A,
| AAAA, CNAME, SPF, DKIM, etc up for me. There is a protocol[0] for
| such a thing, but adoption has been slow, and I found it a bad
| fit for open source projects.
|
| [0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/
| aeden wrote:
| Yes, yes, yes! We've wanted to build a connector for them for a
| while now, but so far, there's no API to pull the appropriate
| DNS records to automate setup of DKIM.
| anderspitman wrote:
| IMO this is an API that should be implemented on your end
| (dnsimple), not theirs. There are a relatively small number
| of DNS providers which all provide essentially the same
| interface (CRUD operations on records), but there are a huge
| number of services that need to set up DNS records, including
| open source projects self-hosted by many individuals. It's
| not realistic for DNS providers to implement integration with
| every possible service, but the opposite is totally doable.
|
| If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect,
| Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because
| it sends traffic your way.
|
| As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for
| open source projects in its current form. I've done some work
| on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1].
| Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the
| perspective of a DNS provider.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Domain-Connect/spec/issues/64
|
| [1]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io
| 4pkjai wrote:
| Very cool, I was just thinking I wanted an email API to check my
| company's customer support inboxes to see if a user has been
| contacted or not.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| Is there a service like fastmail with pw-encrypted inbox like
| posteo.de (not pgp based like mailbox.org), bulk mail
| import/export, custom domain and imap support (as in: no special
| app required unlike protonmail/tutanota)?
|
| Thx.
| Tryk wrote:
| Protonmail has imap support with their Bridge application
| (https://proton.me/mail/bridge)
| password4321 wrote:
| Fastmail [updated: allowed] customers to spoof email as From:
| other customers, unless you manage your custom domain's DNS DMARC
| p=reject. This is a social engineer's dream come true!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996200#18997054 (2019)
|
| https://fastmail.blog/advanced/spf-dkim-dmarc (2016)
| nmjenkins wrote:
| This has not been true for some time. You must verify you can
| receive email at an address before we allow you to send with it
| from Fastmail.
| password4321 wrote:
| Glad to hear this! It seems some content should be updated
| then?
|
| https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty
|
| > _We are quite aware that users can set arbitrary From
| addresses on emails, that our SPF records allow arbitrary
| hosts to send email as our domains, and that our DMARC policy
| is not enforcing passes. These policy decisions are by
| design, and we track the actual sender in a separate header._
|
| https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280461
| (not as clear here)
|
| > _Fastmail domains have a DMARC policy of none_
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Apart from Fastmail being amazing for email, they've been a great
| source of customer service to me in several ways. I like to point
| it out in case people are on the fence and considering a switch.
| My most appreciated instance was this:
|
| Many years ago I was broke and going through rough financial
| strains. My yearly contract with Fastmail was up and I asked for
| a grace period. They did it, no questions asked, for 2 months.
|
| It wasn't a thing. When I renewed my contract we settled up and
| it was all good. It's been quite a while now and I'm still glad
| to support them.
| mk89 wrote:
| It's always nice when there is a human in the loop.
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| system16 wrote:
| I made the switch to Fastmail from Gmail (which I used since it
| launched) about three years ago and haven't looked back. What a
| fantastic service at a reasonable price. Their mobile app is also
| great.
|
| About this API in particular, who is it targeting or what type of
| apps are expected to come out of this? Email clients that
| leverage Fastmail-specific features?
| jjnoakes wrote:
| The android app doesn't always notify me of new email - and if
| it doesn't notify me for one email, it won't notify me again
| until I get another email (which might be a day or two apart).
| That's my only complaint. I have a support ticket open for it;
| I'm hoping they can figure out what is going on.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I agree the service is fantastic but their pricing is still
| pretty expensive compared to some of their competitors
| ok_dad wrote:
| For me as an American, $5 a month (or less with longer terms)
| is pretty damn good! Who has cheaper prices that actually
| competes on features, performance, reliability, goodwill,
| etc.?
| jmcphers wrote:
| Have to disagree about the mobile app, while it looks nice and
| is full-featured and responsive, it is a glorified webview and
| is totally useless offline -- you can't search emails or even
| view them without an active mobile data connection.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| This is my biggest gripe! I travel a lot and often need
| offline mode.
|
| I would also love to be able to use widgets on iOS for the
| calendar.
|
| So many things could be improved with the mobile app.
| wbercx wrote:
| This is the one thing I wish I checked more thoroughly before
| I moved 5 domains from Gmail to Fastmail.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Eh, just use another client with IMAP (or maybe JMAP; I
| haven't dug in enough).
| berkut wrote:
| Yeah, while I like their service in general having (mostly)
| switched in 2018, their mobile app really isn't that great in
| my experience due to the lack of offline mode, and every so
| often it seems to forget my login (maybe the session expires,
| but I never remember that happening with GMail app).
| Hardwired8976 wrote:
| Question for people with fastmail and a .net custom domain: Do
| you usually get blocked sometimes? I wanted to send an email to
| my therapist and one email to my insurance but both had blocked
| me. A mailbox.org address worked just fine. Is it because of the
| domain or because of the .net ending?
| Avamander wrote:
| I'd propose a third and a fourth reason - your domain's volume
| is too small and its security setup isn't top-notch.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I am generally a happy user of Fastmail, but there are a few
| improvements I'd like:
|
| 1. The "report spam" button doesn't also delete the message on
| the web version. You have to select "report phishing" instead to
| do both at once.
|
| 2. The UI for updating mail filter rules was buried under several
| layers of options last time I tried using it, and I don't think
| there was an easy way to update a filter and re-apply it to
| existing messages without going through several menus.
|
| 3. The UI on Android is sluggish when opening messages at times.
|
| I still prefer Fastmail over Gmail, however. A minimal version of
| the UI like old Gmail's HTML-only view would be nice.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Report spam moves it to the junk mail folder, where it gets
| removed after 60 days. Deleting it instead would be surprising
| behavior.
| gunther2 wrote:
| Fastmail is great. I have used them for years. My only issue with
| them is their policy on recycling usernames
| https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277342-Ca....
| Gmail and Proton do not allow for username recycling, for
| example. I hope Fastmail changes their policy for folks who use
| an @fastmail.com username.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I'd love to switch over to Fastmail from Gmail with my custom
| domain email, but I face two hurdles before being able to move
| over:
|
| 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..
|
| 2) I have a ton of documents in Google docs. Will those continue
| to work, and if not, what's the alternative? Google is terrible
| for privacy, but at least my sensitive documents aren't going to
| get stolen. I'm not sure I'll trust a startup to my personal
| docs. Self-hosting is such a massive pain, so not something I
| want to do.
|
| Would love advice on transitioning away from the big G.
| synicalx wrote:
| On your second point - do you need to transition documents? If
| it's free you may as well just keep them with Google.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I'm not sure I'll trust a startup
|
| Is Fastmail considered a startup? They've been there for a
| while.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| No, they seem trustworthy. I meant I don't trust a startup to
| host my documents (Google drive alternative) because Fastmail
| doesn't have a google docs alternative as far as I'm aware.
| bigyikes wrote:
| For (1): consider that your entire digital life is bound to
| your email address. In a sense, Google owns you. $50/yr is a
| small price to pay for truly owning your digital life. That's
| what I tell myself, anyway.
|
| (I recently renewed my Fastmail subscription for an additional
| two years)
| cynix wrote:
| > $50/yr is a small price to pay for truly owning your
| digital life.
|
| For some people it's not just $50. If their whole family is
| on GSuite Legacy, for example, migrating away will be 4-5
| times that, or more.
|
| I wish Fastmail offered storaged-based pricing without a hard
| limit on the number of accounts.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I left Gmail for that exact reason. I just didn't want to
| wake up one day to find my digital life had been locked out
| because Google Photos has thought my picture of a funny tree
| was somehow an object that violates their terms of service.
| Fastmail has been great, and I also prepaid for multiple
| years. No complaints.
| georgyo wrote:
| > ... custom domain ... > 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such
| a tough pill to swallow.
|
| Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They removed
| the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google Workspaces.
|
| At least for me, the switch was a forcing function to move off.
| tallanvor wrote:
| They backtracked on that for personal/family use.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They
| removed the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google
| Workspaces.
|
| FWIW, I have a custom domain with GMail for free. All
| incoming email to *@thedomain land in my GMail inbox, though
| replying is more of a faff since I have to individually add
| each one with its own app password pointing to GMail's own
| SMTP server.
|
| https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6328630?hl=en (the
| "Email forwarding" option) +
| https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en .
| People like lordofgibbons might have such a setup.
| troydavis wrote:
| > 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow
| ..
|
| If you're in a first-world country and knowledgeable enough to
| be reading HN: how can that be? It's one coffee a month. If
| needed, think of it as charity to support an indie developer.
|
| #2 is not an issue. Your Google account and associated files
| and services continue to work. Email moves, nothing else.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Deliverability is the bigger concern in such cases. Especially
| for business emails. Gmail seems to have the best deliverability
| among all that is available.
| [deleted]
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Hopefully they can use this to add a long-desired 'scheduled
| send' feature to fastmail web and apps.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Scheduled send exists, I use it regularly (on web).
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Wow. Good to hear. In that case, I should probably go back to
| using it.
| krallja wrote:
| Next to the Send button there is a little dropdown that
| contains scheduled send.
| vivan wrote:
| I cannot recommend fastmail to anyone for the simple reason that
| if your account expires and gets deleted, anyone can create an
| account with the _same_ email address and take over your
| identity. This seems like a massive security flaw.
| evgen wrote:
| You should always own the domain your email is sent to. If this
| is the case then the solution to this problem is trivial with
| DKIM/SPF, if this is not the case then it does not matter what
| third-party provider you are using because this can always
| happen. Your complaint has nothing to do with fastmail.
| vivan wrote:
| Other email providers don't allow recycling of account names
| - once they're gone, they're gone.
|
| That said, I do agree that using a domain you own is better
| practice. However, I have been burned there before - I used a
| .eu domain for pretty much all of my email sign-ups for over
| a decade, then had the domain yanked away because of Brexit.
| Yes, my fault for not realising that this would happen (I lay
| some of the blame with my domain provider for not mentioning
| it to me at all).
| devilkin wrote:
| I think you are woefully mistaken here, plenty of mail
| providers allow you to scrap your account and get a new one
| with the same mail address.
| amelius wrote:
| > You should always own the domain your email is sent to.
|
| Can you _own_ a domain name? I was under the impression that
| it can still expire, which makes this solution about just as
| bad.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Well it can expire if you let it expire. There is nothing
| that can absolutely guarantee you keep you email address,
| but owning a domain name (say with a 10 year prepayment) is
| damned close.
| mdiesel wrote:
| But on the flip side, good luck making any kind of sensible
| Gmail account for example, which means either fastmail needs
| multiple domains or their service will see new customers
| reducing over the years as people can't get sensible email
| addresses.
|
| The same thing is true of phone numbers, but it's more obvious
| that there's a finite number of... numbers... So they need to
| be reused eventually.
| nicky0 wrote:
| Fastmail does indeed use multiple domains. However it's much
| better to use your own domain with fastmail to truly own your
| email address.
| rashidae wrote:
| Why is this better than sendgrid, a part from pricing?
| Vvector wrote:
| I don't see it as a replacement for sendgrid.
|
| I believe the API is more for the management of a FastMail
| mailbox. For example, this might allow IFTTT to monitor for
| emails and take an action.
| outworlder wrote:
| This has nothing to do with sendgrid.
| OJFord wrote:
| The best thing Fastmail could do (IMO obviously) for JMAP
| adoption is to open up their own clients to other servers.
|
| (i.e. if I'm developing a JMAP server, let me use the Fastmail
| app to test. If Protonmail wants to focus on server & security,
| let them recommend 'a JMAP client such as Fastmail' to their
| customers.)
|
| Unfortunately though I tweeted (something snappier to that effect
| towards) the CTO a while ago; it's 'not on the cards' was the
| phrasing as I recall.
|
| (I'm a former happy customer - I was doing something a bit weird
| receiving via SES, but no reason to think it wouldn't work, and
| indeed it did work for years as a paying customer until it broke
| overnight. Response was no sorry deliberate configuration change.
| I raced (no access to email!) to get something workable without
| Fastmail before my renewal that weekend; suddenly it started
| working again, no further contact from support, but by then I'd
| got my own solution almost working which I'd always intended on
| anyway. The JMAP part's still early WIP though, so I really would
| like to be able to use their client app as a solid reference.)
| core-utility wrote:
| I've been looking for an alternative to Spark (Readdle) for iOS
| and MacOS for years, and have yet to find anything that even
| comes close. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of things Spark does
| and it's missing some nice features, but the unified look and
| feel across both platforms is fantastic.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| At least for iOS, Mailtemi is a great JMAP client:
| https://mailtemi.com
|
| Other JMAP clients: https://jmap.io/software.html
| Mailtemi wrote:
| Glad you like it. The plan is to double down on JMAP support.
| Push notifications, contacts, masked emails, macOS, etc.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| mailtemi looks like it's the only native JMAP app for iOS,
| which is great, even the fastmail app isn't native. It's a
| free app but isn't open source either. Is this a hobby
| project, or what's the long term plan for mailtemi?
| Mailtemi wrote:
| It's not a hobby project. The app will remain free as it
| is now. But some extra features like push notification
| will require subscription (probably a few $ a year).
| yosito wrote:
| Mail temi looks promising, but it's been around for a long
| time and only has two reviews, and no reputation. It's also
| not open source. How can I know that the app is trustworthy?
| Mailtemi wrote:
| Honestly not sure how to answer this. Mailtemi is just like
| any other iOS email app. Actually it doesn't include even
| crash logging, just avoid sending anything to 3th party
| service. Just curious , is there any iOS open source email
| app? Proton-mail is not really an email client ,it's more
| like a viewer for their service.
| AnonC wrote:
| I have a related question. What is the business model for
| mailtemi? Since it looks like a free app with no
| subscriptions or in-app purchases, how well is it going
| to be supported in the future? If it's always going to be
| free, then why not open source it?
|
| I'm not saying that paid apps always receive great
| support at all times, but it's about incentives.
|
| The questions about business model should be answered on
| your website in an FAQ page or on the homepage.
| Mailtemi wrote:
| Yes , I guess I need to update the site to include this
| info , as this question emerges too often. Some extra
| features like push notification will require subscription
| (probably a few $ a year). Right now it works (only in a
| dev environment) with MSGraph and Gmail. Just waiting for
| JMAP push notifications to be enabled by Fastmail , to
| release support for the tree protocols.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Would that require giving up the access credentials to
| app-supporting servers or there's a way to avoid this and
| make two servers meet "in the middle" with client
| orchestrating the initial setup (at least with JMAP)?
|
| I self-host and don't like how way too many client apps
| deal with credentials in the name of convenience, many
| without even announcing that they do send them somewhere
| outside the device. I don't currently have JMAP but I'm
| interested in replacing IMAPv4 as soon as something
| better is ready aka has all the features I use and mobile
| and desktop clients (I don't really care about the
| webapps).
| Mailtemi wrote:
| The only credentials which will flow is OAuth/API token.
| Mailtemi (future)server would not store it, only
| ephemeral (http + cert check) connection to advice for
| push notification.JMAP and MSGraph protocols are fine by
| design. Gmail needs a bit of tweaking to hash email
| addresses , because in their API the key is email. There
| are edge cases like non ascii email addresses.
|
| For IMAP there is no push protocol without a password
| knowledge. No plan/wish to deal/know/store it. But still
| I think of small open source AWS golang/nodejs
| code(+markeplace bridge). Just the password possession
| should be only of the owner.
| eterevsky wrote:
| From time to time I'm thinking about switching to Fastmail. I
| just had a look at Fastmail vs Gmail page
| (https://www.fastmail.com/gmail-alternative/), and I find some of
| the comparisons inaccurate, and others just plain funny:
|
| "No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a
| missing feature as an advantage
|
| "Use your own domain (you@yourname)" - marked as missing on
| Gmail. On Fastmail you're paying $5/month to have your own
| account, while in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered
| in with GSuite Legacy.
|
| "No ads" - ads are also missing in paid Gmails accounts
|
| "Notification settings that respect your attention" - Google
| makes a big deal of detecting the importance of a particular
| email threads. I doubt Fastmail is better at this than Gmail.
|
| Also Fastmail claims better privacy, but I'm not sure what it is
| based on.
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| Further, at a technical level, a Markov chain can hardly be
| described as "creepy". Sadly, a lot of folks are not impervious
| to marketing snake-oil, such as the one you pointed above.
| californical wrote:
| We'll, it's creepy because of where the data comes from (in
| gmail). It reads common patterns in email, then uses that to
| make predictions.
|
| The predictions aren't creepy, but using my emails in
| "anonymized" training data is creepy.
|
| Note: I am a (very happy) Fastmail user, and I do not use
| Google at all anymore
| eterevsky wrote:
| Google certainly doesn't use emails as training data.
| Source: I work for Google and know that there are strict
| policies regarding what can and can't be used as training
| data.
| blowski wrote:
| I think your original should be clear that you work for
| Google. It may certainly affect people's judgement of
| your comment.
| eterevsky wrote:
| My top comment just points out inaccurate comparisons.
| Also, as you can notice I'm not hiding that I work for
| Google, though I do consider myself just a customer in
| this situation.
| blowski wrote:
| Better privacy - I imagine it's based on not allowing the
| world's largest advertising company to sell their knowledge of
| everything you do.
| eterevsky wrote:
| Google doesn't use email contents for ad targetting:
|
| "We don't show you personalized ads based on your content
| from Drive, Gmail, or Photos."
| (https://policies.google.com/privacy)
| blowski wrote:
| You know what data Fastmail sells about me to advertisers?
| Nothing.
|
| I have no idea what Google is collecting or selling, beyond
| legalistically phrased ts and cs.
|
| Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of
| interest in defending them so much.
| eterevsky wrote:
| > You know what data Fastmail sells about me to
| advertisers? Nothing.
|
| Why do you think so? Specifically what are the reasons
| that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to
| Gmail?
|
| > Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of
| interest in defending them so much.
|
| I mean, technically I probably shouldn't be writing
| anything about Google products. But my area of work is so
| far from Gmail, that I only interact with it as a
| customer.
|
| I don't know whether it will convince you that I'm not
| very biased about Gmail, but I do want to point out that
| I find at least one argument in favor of Fastmail pretty
| convincing and it's human support. Google has a pretty
| abysmal track record of handling accounts that they think
| are suspicious and if ever I change company I don't want
| to be in a position where my account is blocked without
| any recourse.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Specifically what are the reasons that you think this
| about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?
|
| Not OP, but one of them is an email company, one is an
| advertising company.
| eterevsky wrote:
| Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses.
| The fact that one of them has to do with advertising
| doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through
| advertising.
|
| Conversely here's a reason why I think Google is _less_
| likely to invade Gmail users' privacy: It's already one
| of the most scrutinized companies in the world. If it
| were doing something shady with emails, it would likely
| to be picked up. Furthermore, it's a big company. More
| employees would know about that and it's more likely that
| someone would whistle-blow.
| pwpw wrote:
| > Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses.
| The fact that one of them has to do with advertising
| doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through
| advertising.
|
| Correct, but 80.78% of Alphabet's revenues were from
| advertising related income last year. See Note 2 to their
| financial statements[0]. Alphabet is through-and-through
| an advertising company at its core. It's a fair
| assumption that their other ventures are potentially used
| to generate more advertising revenue in one way or
| another.
|
| Also as a former auditor, I'm glad we've disclosed your
| conflict of interest working for the company.
| Unfortunately that means others cannot take you _as_
| seriously as you'd like.
|
| [0]Alphabet Inc. - Form 10-Q (2021): https://www.sec.gov/
| Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204421...
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| That does not mean they don't train all sorts of models on
| the data, or harvest it to fill out their profiles of
| users, or any number of other things Google exists to do
| that are user-hostile.
| beshrkayali wrote:
| I think you might be preaching to the wrong crowd. Fastmail
| users (which I am one of) are mainly interested in Fastmail
| because email (and co) is the only thing they do.
|
| > "No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a
| missing feature as an advantage
|
| To the privacy conscious, that's a feature. I and other users
| pay them enough not to have to harvest, collect, train ml
| models on, or use our data or metadata in any way, for
| predications or other pseudo-features.
| eterevsky wrote:
| Why do you think Google does it in Gmail? I'm 100% sure it
| doesn't train any ML models on the user emails.
| [deleted]
| beshrkayali wrote:
| How are you a 100% sure?
| Karupan wrote:
| By default, custom suggestions are turned on when using
| smart compose [0] and:
|
| > Smart Compose personalized suggestions are tailored to
| the way you normally write, to maintain your writing style.
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9116836
| jvolkman wrote:
| > in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with
| GSuite Legacy.
|
| You can also just forward another email address to your free
| @gmail.com address and, after a quick verification process,
| send emails as that alias. Google Domains lets you forward
| email for no extra cost outside of the domain registration fee.
| Arcuru wrote:
| Recipients of mails you send through that system always see
| it as something like "sent by example@gmail.com on behalf of
| example@customdomain.com".
|
| It's not a big deal for many use cases, but it's not the same
| thing as having email on the domain.
| jokoon wrote:
| All I want is a free email, with 500mb of storage, and the
| ability to sort mails by domains.
|
| I don't need storage space to store attachments files.
|
| The only thing that matters to me in email is spam detection and
| the ability to sort and delete as much mail as possible.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >All I want is a free email
|
| And who's your patron?
| joshuawithers wrote:
| I want to lose 40kg, we can all dream
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Is JMAP actually used anywhere outside of fastmail? As far as I
| can tell everything is IMAP, and JMAP is not even on the radar.
| broodbucket wrote:
| Not yet, but that's how these things work. Gotta do a lot of
| showing off yourself before anyone else starts to care.
| Standards are hard to displace, at least with email there's the
| attractive motivation that everything else is ancient and
| awful. We're probably at least 5-10 years away from JMAP having
| some proliferation, if everything goes well.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Essentially the core problem is Gmail is most of the market,
| and they have a vested interest in keeping people interacting
| with their proprietary APIs (lock in) rather than switching to
| an open standard that supports labels, snooze, etc. Startups
| literally build custom clients entirely around the Gmail API,
| which means more data to Google.
|
| And if Gmail doesn't support JMAP, why would anyone else bother
| adding it to their app?
|
| Monopolies remain the primary blocker on innovation and until
| we get aggressive about forcing them to use open standards and
| interoperability, we are going to stay stuck in situations like
| this one.
| awinter-py wrote:
| I think fastmail is trying for an 'everyone supports this
| standard except for you' strategy
|
| could work, I feel like the bigger question is 'will email
| still be the standard' in 5 years -- it has iffy security,
| it's complex, nobody can self host it, it doesn't integrate
| well with other applications (i.e. 'push messaging' features)
| broodbucket wrote:
| If we haven't gotten rid of asking users for postal
| addresses when there is no chance they will ever be used,
| we are absolutely never getting rid of email. It's
| decentralised, there's a paper trail that doesn't disappear
| when a host goes down or gets compromised, and it's still a
| competent method of asynchronous communication. Plus, the
| whole world is never going to agree on the same new thing
| anyway.
| awinter-py wrote:
| yeah I'm not certain you're wrong
|
| _but_ I think your point about postal addresses is
| important
|
| part of the reason we still require snail mail for legal
| process is dumb legacy stuff, but the other part is that
| email isn't a good replacement
| nicoburns wrote:
| Not that widely I don't think, but there was a post about an
| open source JMAP implementation on HN a few days ago,
| Gigachad wrote:
| Everything is not IMAP. Everything is proprietary JSON APIs.
| Gmail, Outlook, etc are not using IMAP because IMAP is unusable
| these days. Fastmail is essentially the same thing but with an
| effort to share the work.
| vladharbuz wrote:
| Could you say a few more words about why IMAP is unusable
| these days? Thank you Gigachad!
| Gigachad wrote:
| There was a post I read a while ago detailing it but I
| forgot where. The gist of it is that it's a custom protocol
| and format that goes back decades. These days clients try
| to implement lots of features client side that were not
| imagined back when the protocol was created so it involves
| massively inefficient actions.
|
| I forget the exact action described but I believe it was
| renaming a folder requires downloading every email in the
| folder and then uploading them all in individual requests
| which takes minutes. Stuff like this plague the protocol
| and hold back email clients. Rather than spending dev time
| building the best client, they waste it wrestling a
| protocol that has long outlived its usefulness.
| Mailtemi wrote:
| JMAP is sane, performant and easy to implement. To check
| for new email and resync email state with IMAP should make
| separate call for each folder. Even if the app tries to
| sync multiple folders simultaneously, the server often has
| a limit of max 2 connection. With JMAP this can be done in
| a single call. Microsoft's MSGraph API is similar but
| riddled with inner HTTP (429) errors in batch calls. This
| needs extra logic to handle all cases.
| Avamander wrote:
| IMAP IDLE only allows you to monitor a single folder and
| it's bad for anything battery-powered - yet people want
| proper notifications about the mail they receive. Nobody
| implements IMAP NOTIFY which would fix this part for at
| least desktop PC's. There's also the silly notion that a
| single letter has to exist in a single folder (may only
| have a single label). Plus all the concurrency issues with
| multiple clients accessing the same mailbox.
| core-utility wrote:
| Technically yes, but functionally no.
| https://jmap.io/software.html
| outworlder wrote:
| I've been on Fastmail for many years. I didn't manage to _quite_
| get rid of my gmail address, but it's close. I don't have to open
| gmail at all - and any mail that still makes it that way is
| forwarded to Fastmail.
|
| I can use my own domain too. It's pretty great. The web interface
| is simple but it has improved immensely since I've started to use
| it.
|
| I guess this is the missing piece. One thing I miss from gmail is
| its ability to automatically sort incoming email into categories,
| even if you don't have filters. Fastmail has all the classic
| filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a
| major hassle. I've been using Sanebox to keep it less insane, but
| I don't like giving access to third parties.
|
| I guess I'll play with this thing and write something to organize
| my inbox.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| ... filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is
| a major hassle.
|
| I filed a bug report over just that, using their web form, a
| few months ago. No news since.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| thats my only gripe too, however setting one up in the search
| ui appears to let you run it on existing mail as a workaround
| nirvdrum wrote:
| You can apply the new-style filters against existing emails
| in the "preview" window. That won't help if you're heavily
| using custom Sieve scripts, but it does handle a lot of
| common scenarios for me.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| For many of us, we aren't trying to get rid of the gmail
| account (as you would still need it for the play store on
| android devices and so on), it is to break the dependency on
| google in the event that they nuke the account and being unable
| to recover from it. Example: I use my gmail account for my
| bank, municipality and even our tax authority. If am not able
| to access my email address (and mobile number for that matter),
| it could potentially have harmful consequences when interacting
| with those entities. The idea is to be able to put the gmail on
| the back-burner and only use it when needed, basically to
| become immune to the whims of google and their ban hammers.
| Flimm wrote:
| You can sign up for a Google account without signing up for a
| Gmail account.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| $9/mo for 100GB doesn't really compete with the $10/mo 2TB
| Google plan or the one I have now for $12 and get unlimited
| storat
| LVB wrote:
| 100GB is... a lot of email.
| Lio wrote:
| Yep, at some point it doesn't matter how much storage
| Google give you or at least that's the case for the
| majority.
|
| If Google increased their limits to 100TB it wouldn't
| really make them more attractive to my small business
| because I can already live within 100Gb without with
| virtually no administrative burden.
|
| 2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk for
| us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled data.
|
| It's much better to get that out of the email server and
| into something secure and time managed so that it can be
| deleted when not needed.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| >2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk
| for us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled
| data.
|
| You're suggesting 2TB is harder to manage with real
| enterprise management features and MDM functionality vs a
| provider who allows users to download a full copy of
| business emails to their personal devices? I like
| FastMail features, but if un-controllable data was the
| real concern then Google Workspace would be my go-to not
| FastMail.
| Lio wrote:
| No, I'm not suggesting that 2TB is harder to manage than
| 200GB ( _even though it clearly is because there 's more
| in it to keep tabs on_).
|
| What I'm saying is that we have a policy to not use email
| as long term storage because it's considered bad
| practice. As such we don't gain much from Google offering
| more storage space because we wouldn't use it anyway.
|
| We're a only a small business and I know that's different
| once you grow beyond a team you can fit in one room.
| cft wrote:
| Except hopefully they won't deplatform and take your emails
| unlike Google, if their AI doesn't like your email content
| deadbunny wrote:
| Go on give us just one example of Google killing someone's
| account due to email content.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google
| -cs...
| reificator wrote:
| You got 'em. Google rarely reveals why they killed
| someone's account.
|
| So we can't prove it was due to email content. For all we
| know it could just be a dude named Richard who throws
| darts at a board full of usernames all day.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It doesn't have to be limited to email. They will kill
| your whole account for a perceived violation on any
| service. There was a story recently where a father had
| his account terminated because he took a photo of his son
| to send to the doctor which auto uploaded to google
| photos and was flagged by the AI and reported to the
| police. The police check it and confirm its a false alarm
| but Google refuses to unban the account meaning the guy
| lost access to his email and phone number.
| emeril wrote:
| Same exact thing happened to me but thankfully it was a
| throwaway account (on my domain in fact) since I knew
| there was risk - thankfully they didn't cancel the whole
| domain for it...
|
| I've been using gmail for my domain (free gsuite legacy)
| for 10+ years though I'm careful to not do anything that
| could be misinterpreted on the service particularly
| through google photos or youtube
|
| I actually used fastmail for 10 years prior to gmail but
| abandoned it in 2010 or so because imap/calendaring/etc.
| wouldn't meaningfully sync with my iphone but gmail had
| full free activesync (which I still miss a bit...)
|
| I still keep a basic inexpensive legacy fastmail account
| just for some sieve scripts and cleaner smtp than gmail
| offers...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| This comment _has_ to be missing a "/s".
| nirvdrum wrote:
| RSD Academy has been all sorts of messed up after Google
| flagged the guy's photos. He had the rsdacademy.net
| domain hosted with Google and lost access to that. He
| lost access to the YouTube account that handled all of
| the academy videos. He lost docs for his draft textbook.
| Granted, he probably should have not tied everything to a
| personal account. On the other hand, Google shouldn't be
| able to lock everything.
| ok_dad wrote:
| It's a good first step! I hope to someday see the ability to use
| an API to edit Fastmail DNS entries, add/remove/modify user
| accounts, access the calendar and notes, etc.
| math-dev wrote:
| Reading some of these comments, I wonder how much astroturfing
| goes on HN these days
| mongrol-smush wrote:
| I understand why you might be sceptical but your comment has
| motivated me to decloak and respond. Fastmail really do provide
| an excellent product. Like many of the other commentators I
| moved over to them from Gmail and am very glad I did so.
| Sometimes things truly are as good as they seem.
| math-dev wrote:
| Yes it's good to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism and I
| could (more than likely) be equally wrong, but I hope my
| comment encouraged others not to take comments online at face
| value always.
|
| For what it's worth, I signed up to fast mail yesterday,
| onboarding vs my cloudflare managed domain was a breeze and
| so far no issues (it's email hosting (and their iOS app isn't
| great), so there's not much to get excited about on a day to
| day basis - apart from a long term appreciation of privacy
| first email).
|
| I have just started using the Spark Mail App - now that I am
| excited about...if it lives up to its hype, it will be a
| great addition to my workflow.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| idk I'm a legit happy customer :\
| RockingGoodNite wrote:
| I was thinking every response is almost incredulously high.
| Also makes me wonder about the source of all the anti-self-host
| email posts.
| Karunamon wrote:
| The source of those posts are likely people who got burned
| trying.
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| There's a specific comment here that is especially suspicious
| to me, but I didn't want to pry.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I also appreciate that they allowed me to download all my info
| after cancelling their service.
| colordrops wrote:
| If privacy is your main focus, you probably still want to go with
| Protonmail, as it's based in Geneva rather than New Jersey.
| 12907835202 wrote:
| Can you sync Gmail and fastmail so that if you lose one you still
| have the other?
| aliasxneo wrote:
| I'd love to get out of the 10-year GMail account I own. It's so
| tightly integrated with other services that it feels like it
| would take a monumental effort to make happen. Someone send help.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| I did it. It was a project but it wasn't that bad. What really
| helped was:
|
| 1. Email forwarding. Set a filter to label anything incoming to
| the old address.
|
| 2. Using a password manager. This winds up bring a map to
| everything important.
| yosito wrote:
| I switched all of my accounts from my 15 year old gmail address
| to a custom domain over the course of a few months, during
| which I monitored both inboxes. I used my password manager to
| keep track of which accounts I had updated. After about three
| months of updating accounts, I set a permanent autoresponder in
| Gmail telling people that the inbox is no longer monitored and
| to please contact me via other means (I don't tell them the
| other means to avoid spammers getting my new email). Then after
| another three months, I stopped checking gmail completely. Now,
| over a year later, I don't check gmail except in rare cases
| where I come across an account I forgot to update, or am
| waiting for a specific email that doesn't arrive to my new
| address. The gmail account still gets about 15-20 messages a
| week, and they're all basically spam and marketing junk.
| abraae wrote:
| The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best
| time is now.
| amelius wrote:
| 10 years ago is still better than now.
| abraae wrote:
| Yeah, I've always had issues with that saying.
| Pedantically, any time in the past is better than now.
| Unless it was a drought at that time I guess.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I have fastmail pulling email from my gmail inbox. With those
| emails in the same inbox with email for my new address, I miss
| nothing.
|
| When I'm ready, I'll set a rule to move incoming gmail into a
| folder so I can easily see all the senders with my gmail
| address. That's when I can work on changing those accounts to
| use the new address. However ... procrastination.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| This seems like the best path forward. Have you been fairly
| happy with your migration?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Very happy! Fastmail has been very reliable, the web UI is
| good, and the native app is nice. I do admit that I haven't
| had the opportunity to put their spam filters to the test
| because my email comes primarily through gmail first.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Not OP, but I have the same setup and it has worked
| flawlessly since I made the switch several years ago.
| troydavis wrote:
| FastMail has solved that for you:
| https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058752414-Mig...
| (click Import, then Gmail)
|
| When I moved many years ago, I migrated well over 50,000 emails
| with FastMail's importer. Other than taking a few hours (all
| async), there's nothing to it. Enjoy!
|
| (I'm unaffiliated, just a paying customer. If you care about
| customer support, privacy, or entrepreneurship, then FastMail -
| or another paid service - is a better fit than a free service
| can ever be)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| WTF do you need to migrate 50,000 emails for.
|
| That's like my grandmother who used to save every letter she
| ever got. Never actually read them again, but god forbid you
| suggest throwing them out.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Maybe you use email very differently? I find myself
| occasionally needing years-old emails to find info I've
| long-since forgotten and it's a lot easier to have all of
| it in one place.
| int_19h wrote:
| Thing is, with abundant storage and good search, there's
| simply no reason to delete anything. Worst case, you'll
| never look at it again.
| troydavis wrote:
| This. There's zero cost to keeping them - including when
| migrating hosts! It wasn't all that intentional, I just
| didn't need to delete them.
|
| Also, I wrote a lot of those emails (over 25+ years...).
| Sometimes it's handy to refer to things I've written.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| How hard was it to move all your user accounts?
| kioleanu wrote:
| For me it was a couple of hours of work, going though the
| password manager, logging in and changing the e-mail
| address in the profile. I haven't migrated all and probably
| never will - the accounts I don't care about can stay on
| gmail
| troydavis wrote:
| My email address uses my own domain name, so I didn't need
| to do that.
| jmcphers wrote:
| Lots of advice for making the transition, here's some more: buy
| your own domain; don't use one of Fastmail's. That way you can
| just change the MX records if you ever want to switch away from
| Fastmail, and you will -- in theory -- never have to change
| your email address on another service again. I've kept the same
| email address for ~15 years now on this premise.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Started the transition from Gmail to FastMail at custom domain
| yesterday. Presence of an API was definitely important (though I
| probably should have tested it out during the free trial).
|
| Had some initial buyer's regret for no reason in particular (did
| the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices will go up
| over time), but already feeling really solid. The web client is
| very snappy, documentation is good, able to import my Gmail
| messages, contacts, calendars, and even filters in a snap (though
| imperfectly). Looking forward to seeing how the API compares with
| my Google API scripts. Definitely seems to be more knobs and
| buttons for power users (more powerful filters, regex, etc.).
|
| While not relevant to FastMail per se, also really glad to
| finally start the painful process of migrating decades of
| accounts to my custom domain email, where I hope it will stay
| forever. Growing concern about the (admittedly slim) possibility
| of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator, as was
| the recent move to force the Google Apps stuff to a paid plan.
|
| So far so good.
| girvo wrote:
| I've been a Fastmail customer for nearly a decade at this
| point. Its the one single subscription service I will never
| ever balk at: it's been absolutely fantastic.
| jon_adler wrote:
| This is my 20th year of continuous subscription. They were my
| first SaaS purchase! I have never once experienced a
| disruptive issue, and my mailbox is still spam free after all
| these years.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Same. Bulletproof, "it just works", and it has great perf and
| overall UX to boot. Couldn't be happier.
| justicz wrote:
| I know it's a meme that HN loves Fastmail, but it's a good
| meme. I've been using them for ~5 years and love it. I use
| their custom email alias feature all the time. The few times
| I've had to interact with their support it's been prompt +
| effective!
| jve wrote:
| > possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big
| motivator
|
| As a current user of Gmail and HN reader (where users blocked
| for seemingly no apparent reason and no realistic path of
| recovery), this possibility bugs my mind too.
| innocenat wrote:
| > (did the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices
| will go up over time),
|
| While they do go up, users on legacy plan still pay cheaper. I
| am still paying $45 for the basically same feature as the
| current $50 plan.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Wow, good to know.
| jakemauer wrote:
| I migrated from Google Workspaces to Fastmail earlier this year
| and their migration tools made for a smooth transition.
|
| My only big complaint is their woeful spam filtering. I get 1-2
| spam emails a day, and I mark each and every one as spam.
| They're all of the same format; The subject line is something
| like [Symantec Invoice #431343] with the body being empty and a
| single .jpg attachment of a fake invoice. The company name and
| design of the invoice changes but it's always the same pattern.
|
| I've contacted support but they shrugged their shoulders and
| suggested I just keep marking them as spam.
|
| It's annoying, but I pre-paid for 3 years so I don't quite feel
| like jumping back to Google.
|
| *Oh I just thought of another gripe that I didn't consider
| before switching: their calendaring system isn't really that
| useful for shared calendars unless the other people you want to
| share with are also Fastmail customers. This seems obvious when
| you think about it but I take for granted that literally
| everyone in my life has a Gmail account that I can share
| calendars with.
| hackmiester wrote:
| For what it's worth, I get the EXACT same format of spam, and
| I am also on Fastmail. It's a minor nuisance. One day I will
| write a sieve filter to try to catch them, because basically
| nobody sends invoices that look anything like this. But, no
| two of them really look the same...
| sethherr wrote:
| Thank you. I now will not consider switching to Fastmail.
|
| Also, I don't trust Australia on encryption.
| klibertp wrote:
| Scrolling from the top to this point in comments,
| Australia+encryption was mentioned 5 times already, and
| refuted every time... My take: if you want encrypted
| email, encrypt it yourself. It's less convenient, but at
| least you know it a) works; and b) will continue to work
| no matter the jurisdiction and your relationship with the
| authorities.
| jakemauer wrote:
| Updating to be more accurate, it's more like 2 spam messages
| a week on average make it through. It's a nuisance for sure
| and not a dealbreaker but does make me wonder if Gmail would
| be catching them.
|
| Also I do have to praise their web interface, it's
| startlingly fast.
| yosito wrote:
| Re: spam, this is why you should be using your own domain
| with wildcard alises. If an alias becomes a target of spam,
| you can block all mail coming to that alias.
|
| Re: calendars, with Fastmail you can use any calendar you
| want. I use iCloud for my calendars and just connect it to my
| Fastmail account.
| jakemauer wrote:
| I've been doing the wildcard/per-site email thing for a few
| years now, unfortunately these spam emails are coming to a
| more generic address that I used to use for everything that
| I can't quite ditch yet.
|
| Also regarding calendars, can you share that calendar with
| arbitrary people who don't have Fastmail accounts?
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yes, I can vouch for this, I have had several shared
| calendars using fastmail. I use the Mac/iOS calendars
| daily.
|
| One caveat is that Google calendar can't subscribe
| read+write to an iCalendar feed. That's their problem
| though. All other clients are fine, including outlook IIRC.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Fastmail's fast UI brings me joy every day!
|
| Setting up a custom domain lets me act on my anger every time I
| hear a story about google being shit to their customers: I pop
| open bitwarden, find something still on gmail, and move it
| over. I'm about half way through the alphabet. Feels good.
| nr2x wrote:
| "Alphabet" or "alphabet"?
|
| Both?
|
| ;-)
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I'm a staunch desktop guy and fastmails web UI has caused me
| to stop using desktop email clients slowly over the years.
|
| desktop clients are still better than web UI's, but fastmails
| web UI is the absolute epitome of 'good enough'.
| funride1 wrote:
| Serious question. How does this compare to purelymail.com?
| aembleton wrote:
| purelymail.com are in beta
| whatatita wrote:
| I always hear good things about Fastmail but I've not had a
| chance to use it yet. I set up a Proton / Protonmail accounts
| years ago and have been happy as a clam with them ever since.
|
| Work uses Gmail, though hopefully we can convince them to drop
| that in the future. May be a time to try fastmail then. It's a
| hard sell though; businesses get a lot out of the box with
| GSuite.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I checked my billing history with Fastmail, and it looks like
| I've been a customer since 2014. I've never regretted it. I have
| two emails with GB of space each. I love the web interface, I
| love the 2fa options, I love android app. All of its clients have
| easy account switching. Family set up is easy. Custom domain set
| up is easy. I couldn't see myself using any other service.
|
| I have to use gmail for work and it is not great. Confusing tabs,
| sidebar re-arranged, some kind of interest based twitter feed
| order for my email. And it's always bugging me to use Chrome,
| which I don't.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| daniel-grigg wrote:
| If you're using apple and just want a custom domain you can do so
| with an iCloud+ subscription. I switched away to it from Fastmail
| and have been happy since.
| jpeeler wrote:
| Does Fastmail support muting threads, both in the UI and their
| API? I've been waiting for Google to add muting to their API for
| years:
|
| https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36759067?pli=1
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I'll probably have to play with this soon. I'm using my shared
| hosting's email for an automated utility and I'm trying to move
| off of needing that shared hosting.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I have been seriously interested in migrating away from gmail for
| a long time, but it creates a lot of anxiety.
|
| 1. How to effectively migrate. Run dual email for a while?
|
| 2. How to effectively back up email all of my content so it is
| searchable. I've kind of used Google/GMAIL as a dumb filestore in
| that, I know random messages are there from 15 years ago that I
| can just use the google search for to bring up.
|
| These are things I need to spend time on in order to take it
| seriously. I'd like to take it seriously.
| marpstar wrote:
| When I left Gmail for FastMail, I imported my contacts and
| calendar from Gmail, started fresh with the email. Nothing is
| forcing you to delete your Gmail, you can always go back and
| reference it. You can export your mailbox from Gmail and import
| it into a local mail client, I just didn't bother.
|
| For each new service, I'd sign up with my new custom domain
| email instead of my Gmail. I'd continually check the Gmail for
| emails that I cared about and would update my email for those
| services/mailing lists as they came in. Over the period of a
| couple years.
|
| I maybe move one email over a month these days, so we're just
| about done. With a custom domain, I'll never have to do this
| again.
|
| The best time to start is a few years ago. The second best time
| is now.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| been on fastmail a long time but heres what i did:
|
| 1.i switched emails over as i logged in so it wasnt as
| daunting. i did move over biggies like banking and daily stuff
| immediately 2. later i setup gmail to forward all mail to
| <gmail at my domain> so i dont miss the stray actual email to
| old address
|
| thats it. 12 domains and zero problems later! i should mention,
| fastmails spam filter on the default settings is doing
| drastically better than gmail did for a publicly posted email
| commandersaki wrote:
| The other replies are pretty good.
|
| 1. To migrate I'd use their email import utility. I've never
| used it but I've heard good things. On the Fastmail side set up
| sender identities so you can compose (and reply) to emails
| using your @gmail.com address [if you're using gmail
| addresses]. On gmail side you can continue having a dual email
| setup by having gmail setup forwarding such that it forwards
| the email and keeps a copy in gmail. I have 4 gmail accounts
| setup this way, so I know that I can always fallback to gmail
| if there's an issue on Fastmail (haven't had one for over a
| decade with this setup though).
|
| 2. Fastmail indexes emails so they're searchable via their web
| UI. It's pretty good, I've not really had any issues.
|
| In my opinion, the best way to use Fastmail is to bring your
| own domain. One really cool thing about Fastmail Web UI is that
| it integrates well with catch-all email addresses, so you can
| have <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com and when you get emails to
| that address, when you click Reply it automatically sets your
| sending identity to <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com. This
| ensures your correspondence is consistent with the email
| aliases you use.
| pwpw wrote:
| I've been with Proton Mail for the past two years, but I recently
| switched to fastmail after switching from Android to iOS due to
| how locked down Proton Mail is.
|
| I know being locked down is part of Proton's schtick, and I could
| kind of put up with only using their app for email. However,
| being unable to use any app for my calendar and contacts was
| annoying. It would have made the switch to iOS much easier.
| Further, the proton mail app on android developed a bug related
| to alternative routing that I was unable to figure out that led
| to the app not working for me for over a month.
|
| I began realizing that I value being able to freely use my email,
| contacts, and calendars with whatever app I choose. The fact that
| I can also sync notes and reminders to my custom domain on
| fastmail from my iPhone is just a plus.
|
| For operating a custom domain and being able to freely move
| between front ends for those services, I'm really satisfied with
| fastmail so far, and I'm actually using their web UI for email
| and calendar because it works well enough for me.
|
| My only small gripe is the fastmail app on iOS doesn't support
| offline emails. The native Mail app does, but the reason I prefer
| the fastmail app is native integration with calendar invites.
| Perhaps if Mail ever supported the JMAP protocol being explained
| in the post, I could happily use the app, which has become much
| better with iOS 16.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| On desktop, Thunderbird works great as a client for accessing
| Protonmail, and it has those additional features like calendar
| and contacts and so-on. Not sure if there's a mobile option
| though, never looked.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| This is pretty cool -- it basically means we can use Fastmail for
| transactional emails like "Thanks for signing up" kind of emails
| along with our regular old emails right?
|
| I've been using Mailgun for that as a separate thing; Mailgun is
| great but the weird lack of API key management freaks me out.
| Exposing one key exposes EVERYTHING and you have to cycle through
| all the projects that use your account. So annoying.
|
| I wonder if this is going to cause spam headaches for Fastmail
| and lower their sendability though
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > it basically means we can use Fastmail for transactional
| emails like "Thanks for signing up" kind of emails along with
| our regular old emails right?
|
| I just use SMTP for this (with FastMail). FastMail is not
| really intended for this as the limits and the like don't
| really scale to large services, but overall it works well
| enough (you can create an "app password" which can only access
| SMTP).
| deadbunny wrote:
| Nice that they have a specific support email for jmap bugs.
|
| I recently found a calendar UI bug and it took about 6 back and
| fourths with the customer support first line over a week before
| they (said they) passed it to the devs.
|
| Not the best bug reporting experience. But then again I can't
| even fathom how I would have reported it to the Google or
| Microsoft/o365 equivalent.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Hah I had an interesting experience. I was trying to get Mutt
| to list the IMAP subscribed folders when there's nested folders
| but the behaviour was somehow inconsistent with what I
| expected/really odd.
|
| Initially I thought this was due to a feature in IMAP that
| Fastmail didn't support (well they use Cyrus IMAP so the
| problem would stem from there). A back and forth with their
| customer service and they immediately piped it to one of their
| developers because it was technical and was discussing low
| level IMAP commands with debug transcripts from Mutt.
|
| Turns out Mutt was using an outdated/legacy IMAP command that
| had been superseded by a new command with its own RFC.
|
| Was able to patch Mutt and everything started to work correctly
| and look consistent.
|
| It's not everyday you have a email provider service help you
| debug/troubleshoot your mail user agent which leads to actual
| improvements.
| exolymph wrote:
| Amazing to reflect on how much goodwill Fastmail has cultivated
| with me just by being a reasonably priced, full-featured,
| competent-support-having service. I'm unlikely to ever do
| anything with the Fastmail API, but I still upvoted mainly
| because I'm enthusiastic about the company.
| thom wrote:
| Yep. I spent the best part of a decade fretting and
| procrastinating over one day sorting out 3-4 Google domains.
| When they announced they'd start charging I finally decided to
| move to and was astonished at how easy the migration to
| Fastmail was. I was done in about an hour across my desktop,
| laptop and phone. Haven't had a single blip of any kind since
| then.
| AnonC wrote:
| > just by being a reasonably priced
|
| I'd disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who
| has two or three or four people at home who need their own
| mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such
| cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too.
| But there are services that are far cheaper that have been
| operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for
| those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Goes to show that even if there are a lot of competitors in a
| product space you can still do well simply by giving a shit.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| This is why I pay a little extra to my (comparatively) small
| ISP (Init7).
|
| They pick up the phone and answer your questions.
|
| They don't have you wait in a queue for 45min and affirm that
| your call is important to them.
|
| They don't give new customers better prices than loyal ones.
|
| If they update local bandwidth, you get that for the same
| price you paid before, without asking.
|
| That's it.
|
| I gladly pay less than $20 a month extra for all this peace
| of mind.
| [deleted]
| no-reply wrote:
| This takes me back. I remember reading a post on HN about how
| giving shit about customers actually makes a difference.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Goes to show that even if there are a lot of competitors in
| a product space you can still do well simply by giving a
| shit.
|
| The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday
| an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash.
| Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen.
| That's the society we've built and live in.
| danielheath wrote:
| Pretty sure they're employee owned since 2013, which limits
| how much BS can be brought in.
| jph00 wrote:
| Actually we sold FastMail to Opera, and since it didn't
| really work out, bought it back again. Based on that
| experience, I'd be surprised if FastMail got
| (re-)acquired...
| zinekeller wrote:
| > Actually we sold FastMail to Opera
|
| Can you elaborate what happened in the Opera era or are
| you under an NDA?
| [deleted]
| josephg wrote:
| Hopefully not for awhile.
|
| Fastmail is bootstrapped and profitable. They aren't
| beholden to outside investors trying to 10x their money.
| Fastmail also just doesn't have that sort of culture.
| (Source: I have friends there). They aren't looking to be a
| unicorn. They seem very happy to have a profitable business
| that they can nurture for decades.
|
| Culturally, they're growing a garden, not launching a
| rocket ship.
|
| Eventually the company will change hands. Knowing some of
| the people involved, I trust that when that happens,
| they'll find good stewards.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Everybody has their price though. They may not ever IPO
| or raise venture capital, but if Google came along and
| offered them $50b I doubt they'd say no.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I've come to embrace this as the business lifecycle. It's
| quite well-studied. Eventually, all businesses rest on
| their laurels; over-price, under-compete, and allow space
| for newer entrants. If we consider the positives here, this
| creates fantastic market and product dynamism, and (in
| theory) prevents companies becoming country-sized
| monopolies. I'm actually more concerned about companies
| which remain competitive and loved over generations. The
| kind of global power they could wield is scary.
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The key thing is, with Fastmail building on open standards
| and promoting using your own domain, they have very little
| lock-in here. That future MBA is going to have a hard time
| keeping people from just moving on.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Inertia is a killer.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Owning your mail domain reduces the inertia by a lot.
| selcuka wrote:
| It only takes a few "improvements" to the "export data"
| functionality. Here comes the inertia.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Exporting data over pop3 and Cal/Card/Web DAV is pretty
| easy, more than enough tools available. And without them
| supporting standards, they'd lose their customers.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| It always depends on whether you can make managers feel like
| they make a difference; or else they will invent their own
| ways to make a difference and get a raise.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| So I'm not experienced in hiring managers. But I would hope
| you could select hiring criteria that would avoid this.
| Don't hire people that fought to become a manager. Don't
| hire managers that are working to get paid (obviously work
| gets paid for - but the best workers care about the product
| more).
| jacooper wrote:
| The problem with Fastmail is its based in Australia. A big no
| no if you care about your privacy.
|
| They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian
| rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even
| if in an international company.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-data-i...
|
| https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill
| counttheforks wrote:
| iszomer wrote:
| Based/headquartered in Australia yet have servers hosted in
| multiple locations around the world? IIRC, some are in New
| Jersey and don't know how accurate it still is [1].
|
| - https://fastmail.blog/company/nyi-datacentre-move/
| zwily wrote:
| If the Australian laws are like the US's, where the servers
| are located does not matter.
| severino wrote:
| So, that's the worst of both worlds, right? Servers are
| in the US but still have to be subject to Australian
| laws, and also, they are subject to the US law for being
| in that country.
| rakoo wrote:
| Fastmail is a company providing email services. _No_ company
| doing that can every give you privacy against a government
| looking at who you 're talking to, when you're talking to
| them. Only a minority protect the content, and even then it's
| only when using a proprietary protocol.
|
| The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-
| wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
| [deleted]
| entropyie wrote:
| Fact is, 99% of your email exchanges will be with MS and
| google anyway, so that horse has bolted. In terms of the
| threat model facing 99% of people, getting auto banned from
| Gmail is a far bigger risk than big brother reading their
| email. I care about privacy and seriously considered
| protonmail, bit it was too hard to use effectively (no IMAP)
| and FastMail is still a huge step up from Gmail or self
| hosting, balancing ease of use and risk mitigation. Excited
| to try out the API!
| jacooper wrote:
| Personally I use Protonmail with no problems.
|
| The bridge on Desktop is OK, and their mobile app is better
| than every mobile open source android client I have seen.
| zen_1 wrote:
| You should check out FairEmail then. Great FOSS email
| client.
| jacooper wrote:
| I didn't like its crammed and old design.
|
| I'm currently using k9 for third party accounts, and its
| good.
|
| The proton app is great, it just needs conversation view.
| danesparza wrote:
| If this is your biggest concern, just use PGP.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
| masukomi wrote:
| pedantry: PGP hasn't been a product for many years. The
| product is "Semantec Encryption". GPG is still a thing.
|
| Separately "just use <public key encription>" implies it's
| easy to do. Even if we ignore the fact that software
| support is generally terrible, there's the much bigger
| problem of convincing the people you email with to use it
| too. If you're not doing super secret or illegal stuff
| that's generally not a thing that's going to happen.
| cmg wrote:
| This is fine if you're not concerned about metadata (date,
| recipients, subject).
| [deleted]
| danesparza wrote:
| If that's the case, you definitely shouldn't be using
| email. :-)
| bsder wrote:
| As opposed to, say, Gmail? Fastmail, even with Australian
| rules, is way better than having your stuff buried in Google
| or Microsoft.
|
| However, if you don't like fastmail, who would you recommend
| instead?
| beermonster wrote:
| Could just use ProtonMail
| anderspitman wrote:
| They still control your keys. I probably trust Proton more
| than the Australian government, but if my threat model
| includes caring about _any_ government accessing my data
| then e2ee is the only option.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It's really disappointing to see this comment second on a
| page despite the fact that yet again... _the law has no
| impact on Fastmail and never has_. This is the unfortunate
| impact of FUD, where clueless comments will carry forward
| wrong views for years, even in the face of overwhelming truth
| around it.
|
| _Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service._ There is
| no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other
| non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a
| legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do
| with nearly every other email service.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I dont view email has a "private" service in the first place,
| if you want privacy in communications use something other
| than email
| Intermernet wrote:
| This is correct. Fastmail have actually spoken about this,
| and their silence on any particular topic can possibly be
| seen as a canary. They're a great company trying to survive
| in a hostile environment. I really hope that the new
| Australian federal government will get around to winding back
| some of the draconian laws the previous mob brought in, but
| I'm not holding my breath.
| Kalanos wrote:
| I too have heard about many surprisingly draconian policies
| in australia
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It is not correct. In order to need a backdoor, the service
| would have to be E2E in the first place, which it is not.
| Uninformed HNers bring this up on every Fastmail thread
| like it's a big deal when it has zero actual impact on
| Fastmail at all.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| A government forcing backdoors into E2E is always a big
| deal, not with standing on if it impacts fast mail or not
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| But this is a Fastmail thread, so a government forcing
| backdoors into E2E is an off-topic comment, actually.
| NegativeK wrote:
| E2E isn't a requirement for something to be called a
| backdoor, even though governments are constantly
| demanding E2E backdoors.
|
| An attacker having shell access or a government getting
| plaintext dumps of whatever email conversations they want
| (when users don't expect it) are perfect examples of
| backdoors. AT&T giving the NSA a secret room for them to
| suck up all comms, encrypted are not, is also a classic
| example.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Probably a good thing I'm not planning to overturn the
| Australian government using a combat-trained herd of pissed
| off emus.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| For those unaware of the subtle wit above:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
| danielheath wrote:
| Did we collectively forget Echelon exists?
|
| Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no
| matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another
| protonmail account, but I doubt it).
| atmosx wrote:
| True, the fact they are based in Australia is the only reason
| I'm thinking about switching mail provider. Australian laws
| are scary.
| szundi wrote:
| Too bad that after a while they will be acquired too. Becoming
| slowly unreasonably priced and our data sold etc. Arbitrage
| opportunity.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| How is their spam detection?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I pretty much never see spam.
| klibertp wrote:
| Better than gmail recently. I have 4 different gmail accounts
| set to forward to a single FM account. In recent weeks some
| people here were saying they got spam in their inboxes on
| gmail, and I also did get a few. They were forwarded to FM
| which marked them as spam.
| c16 wrote:
| Actually really good. I've just checked my spam folder and
| it's full - nothing has made it through (I'd forgotten it was
| a thing, much like with Gmail).
|
| disclaimer: FM customer.
| abraae wrote:
| I switched my primary email to Fastmail a few months ago. My
| requirements were simply:
|
| - must work well
|
| - must be a paid service with proper support from a vendor
| focused on email (i.e. not consumer gmail)
|
| - must allow custom domains (so I can regain control over my
| email if the provider goes under by updating MX records)
|
| - must be the cheapest in the absence of compelling benefits
| (ruled out GSuite or protonmail)
|
| Fastmail fitted the bill and seems to be working as I would
| expect.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| For me, the primary concern are the horror stories of having
| everything in your life linked to a gmail account and then
| getting locked out with no recourse from google support. My
| secondary concern is to have a custom domain and email
| aliases. In my country the abuse of personal information is
| rampant and I would like to start pursuing companies who
| sells my information without consent.
|
| Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn
| aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can
| know who sells my number to spam callers.
| LouisContant wrote:
| I can understand ruling out GSuite but why did you rule out
| protonmail?
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I switched from protonmail to fastmail recently. Fastmail
| was a ton faster and didn't randomly forget my sessions.
| Night and day to use. It also let me use two custom domains
| without paying twice, which was nice.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I had a bad experience as well. Been a long time proton
| user. I had a CC incident where the proton mail annual
| charge was incorrectly, without my confirmation labeled
| unauthorized.
|
| PM cut off access to my account for 4 days as the issue was
| being resolved with them. Like, yeah I get it shitty
| situation and they probably have to deal with a bunch of
| scammers but I think it was way too extreme of a response
| given I explained what happened and have been a long term
| customer.
|
| I'm thinking about going back to Gmail now.... any ideas
| how to defend against this? For example, have a tested
| procedure to change MX records of the custom domain to
| another provider or even self hosted in order to restore
| email access while an issue is being resolved?
| abraae wrote:
| I believe it was cheaper back then. Doesn't seem to be now
| :)
| bloggie wrote:
| I cancelled protonmail and the subscription ended right
| away instead of at the end of the paid period, so there's
| that. Honestly it was just a bunch of little things that
| added up. I don't remember any one thing that was
| specifically distasteful except for the cancellation. I'm
| on fastmail now.
| saimiam wrote:
| What do you do about Google docs? Or do you pay separately
| for O365?
| abraae wrote:
| I was primarily concerned with losing access to email and
| getting locked out of all my downstream accounts. Not so
| much an aversion to all things Google. So I still have
| gmail and still use Google docs. But for any important
| signups or comms, I use my Fastmail address.
| bismark wrote:
| You can always create a personal Google account with your
| custom domain email address: still has access to everything
| except Gmail.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Used FastMail as part of my big DeGoogle initiative last
| winter. Very happy with it. However, one of the main
| considerations of Fastmail vs. other providers is that the
| domains they used are 'Visa-free' in terms of spam catchment
| - everything gets through!
|
| But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with
| some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes
| surveillance.
|
| For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the
| sensible prices of the service itself), because I really
| needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
| zamalek wrote:
| I'm extremely enthusiastic about the company, I loved their
| product. I just couldn't deal with the concept of both
| Australian and American jurisdictions.
|
| If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions,
| I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about
| privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
| lolinder wrote:
| It depends entirely on your threat model. Their claims about
| privacy are fine if what you're worried about is ads and
| tracking rather than government surveillance.
| zamalek wrote:
| Breaches happen, and backdoors can be exploited. Australia
| requires encryption backdoors. This isn't merely a state
| actor problem.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Fastmail isn't end-to-end encrypted, so there is no
| requirement for a backdoor applicable to Fastmail. The
| Australian law is completely irrelevant to Fastmail
| except for FUD comments online.
| kaboomshebang wrote:
| Totally agree on this, love the full-featured -- but still very
| clean and fast -- interface. Been happily giving them some of
| my money for almost 10-years.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I recently renewed my 3 year subscription with them and I've
| been a customer since 2017, before that I was on GSuite and
| O365. I still remember coming form GSuite and noticing just how
| easy it was to set everything up, pretty sure I had everything
| migrated over in ~1hr.
|
| Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no
| news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and
| predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm
| sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration
| and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since
| that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal
| email, nothing beats Fastmail.
|
| But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain
| aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something
| like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one
| inbox.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yea, after awhile of using Fastmail for my own needs, I found
| that I really liked the service so I decided to setup a
| reseller account with them and have been switching my
| att/yahoo/sbcglobal email customers over to this service as
| there have been some issues with login and resetting
| passwords due to the merging of att and yahoo.
|
| I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname
| domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a
| custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great
| experiences with the import tools and security features. The
| admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great,
| its built right into the normal settings interface, and they
| have good privacy features with the relationship between the
| reseller and the end user.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Same. About a month ago I only knew of them by name but went
| down the rabbit hole and read all of their docs & checked out
| their repo's. I'm basically on the edge of de-googling my life
| because they are the first bunch to give me confidence that
| there is a long-term path forward. I hope they stay true to
| their stated mission.
| vladak wrote:
| I contemplated the move from Google services and at one point
| I went ahead and was very pleasantly surprised how easy the
| move to Fastmail [1] was.
|
| [1] with the domain managed by Cloudflare
| bravura wrote:
| Is there a good tool to fuzzily merge and de-dup multiple
| inboxes? Because otherwise I'm going to have to write it myself.
|
| I currently have a gmail inbox and hey inbox with partial
| duplicates in each. I'd like to merge and de-dup my history as a
| one-time event and migrate to fastmail.
|
| The gmail inbox has longer history. The gmail forwards to hey so
| hey has responses that don't exist in gmail.
|
| I've already started with mbox exports and SQLite import, but I'd
| rather use something pre-existing. Any pointers?
| argulane wrote:
| Put everything into a single notmuchmail database. It wil
| deduplicate the emails and even provide a fast local search
| interface for all of your mails https://notmuchmail.org/
|
| For gmail you can use lieer to pull everything
| https://github.com/gauteh/lieer (tho it can take hours to pull
| everything). Fastmail has a similar tool
| https://github.com/elizagamedev/mujmap
|
| If you unpack tour mbox into maildir then you can import that
| too into notmuch
|
| After everything is in notmuch you can easily push your mail to
| fastmail with isync/mbsync https://isync.sourceforge.io/
|
| As a bonus point you now also have a easily updatable local
| backup of your e-mails.
| aendruk wrote:
| I'm curious to learn why fuzzy matching is needed--isn't
| Message-ID sufficient?
| kioleanu wrote:
| I too am a happy user of Fastmail, but I am plenty dissapointed
| with the file storage, which was one of the main reasons I
| switched to them 2 years ago (and not to a competitor). Their
| support in both cases was just awful and more or less ended in a
| "sucks to be you message":
|
| 1. I wanted to sync a folder from my Windows laptop to the
| storage through Webdav, using the Windows Explorer (which they
| list as a supported client). I would get speeds of maximum 5kb.
| Opened a ticket, went back and forth and the customer support
| person suggested that I try with another (paid) client to see if
| the speeds are better. I downloaded a trial, tried it out and it
| was indeed better. Reported back and the person says something
| summarized as: see? here you go, just use that client (that cost
| another 50 euros)
|
| 2. I find this one much worse: they disabled support for FTP
| access to the storage. I get an email 1 (ONE) day before saying
| something like: hey, there's no FTP starting tomorrow, we did
| send an e-mail but didn't include _you_, here's 15 dollars for
| your trouble. I was using FTP actively to back-up the website of
| my small business nightly. Of course I email support and tell
| them hey, c'mon, this is unnaceptable, you can't just tell me one
| day before, give me a solution, something. The reply came almost
| immediately and said: we sent an e-mail informing everybody 3
| months ago, deal with it (???).
| switch007 wrote:
| I've been a customer for years but never touched their file
| storage, calendar etc. I just don't feel they're big enough to
| have real quality focus on anything other than email.
|
| That's just the impression I get. Happy to be corrected
| nicky0 wrote:
| Sounds
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