+1

When I migrated from Gmail to Fastmail years ago, I thought Fastmail felt... less featureful.

When I rarely visit my abandoned Gmail, I can't believe I put up with the clunkiness.

Lean software stands the test of time.

Fastmail hasn't had a noteworthy UI change ever.

Minor annoyances:

  - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email
  - It is difficult to unfold the full extended header section on iPhone
  - ...I can't think of more...

I might switch away for a solution that is more affordable when hosting emails for many family members and organisations. But for a handful, I really can't recommend it enough.

Just a small note about fastmail: Do not launch a trial with your planned username. Because I have opened up a trial account, it expired and when I decided to reactivate it (with payment in mind) I find myself unable to sign in. I cannot reset my password as it says "Sorry, we canʼt find an account with that username." and it does not let me log in.

Then again I also moved from gmail to mailbox.org and am a happy camper since. I don't know if we are a majority but I find myself cutting all ties with google services (youtube premium, drive, gemini etc.) as they try to force unwanted features and workflows in my daily life.

As a Fastmail user, every time I have to use Gmail for work I'm aggravated by the absolute stupid UX of it which seems to have been thoroughly ruined around the Material Design era; it also seems to be unable to handle basic operations such as mass mark read or delete, or search.

Fastmail handles the same things with aplomb and has much better screen real estate usage, for one.

The only thing I kind of want with Fastmail is if it had some EU-based datacenter.

I just have to add on about how great Fastmail is. They are completely focused on having a stable product, that is relatively simple and cheap. They are not ambitious as a company at all, in the best possible way. They haven't tried to build an office suite. They don't upsell me on any new features. They just deliver a solid, basic product that has been consistently good for more than a decade now. I wish more software and services were like this, I'm tired of everyone hiring an MBA and following the exact same "maximization" business model.

I'm not sure if it's still there, but for a long time Gmail offered a lightweight, simple HTML version of their site. Essentially the original UI for it.

It was astounding just how quick it was, which really shows you how little of a damn they seem to give about their users. That's especially weird, given that they dogfood their own products.

Whatever provider you switch to, do use the opportunity to get your own domain so that you won't be locked in in the future.

I was quite surprised how much better search and spam filters are on fastmail. Both things I did not believe a small company could do better than Google, but I think they did.

I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.

Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.

Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.

I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.

In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.

+1 for Fastmail.

I migrated from Gmail a few years ago. Setting up your own domain is peanuts. Migrating all your mail from Gmail is literally just clicking some buttons in the UI and then it all happens in the background. The interface is fast, robust, and can be configured to have pleasant early '00s levels of contrast.

I have no idea why people don't just use a standard imap mail client, Thunderbird being the most obvious choice here.

Thanks for your note. I’ve wanted to get off gmail for years and your description answered many nagging questions I had been too lazy to look up.

I switched my domain over to fastmail and have been using it for the past hour and seems promising. The interaction with the company is nice too and they seem very much “do one thing well” and doesn’t make me feel scummy like every time I interact with google’s products.

Interestingly I didn’t realize how slow gmail was until switching. Not just the web ui. I use the ios mail app and gmail didn’t support push, only fetch. And the app is 17.8MB (compared to gmail’s 716.7MB). Crazy that it’s 40x smaller.

If only it was based in europe. Every few weeks i look into detaching from gmail and wonder if proton is the way to go

Another happy Fastmail user here. They have great IMAP support (with app password) so I have a full local copy on my laptop that I can search instantly with notmuch or read/write from Emacs, but lately I've also started using their web UI a lot because it's just so fast and simple and well-thought-out. When they ship new features, it's stuff that makes you think "oh, that's actually a good idea – and they even made a very logical keyboard shortcut for it". And they've been very responsive to the few support requests I've made.

Moved to Fastmail from Gmail like 15 years ago and I couldn't be happier.

Fastmail is indeed great. It’s been a pleasure to use.

You can add multiple domains to your account without making it a feel like an enterprise.

All the features relating to the aliases is available on the ios app. One doesn’t need to jump between the web and the app to do basic things.

I've been very happy with Protonmail, you can even use your old Gmail address from within Protonmail [0]. Although arguable doing that is counter productive, you want receive gmails but reply with you new address -> Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life, so you can move again with little pain in the future ;)

[0] https://proton.me/blog/proton-mail-connect-gmail

One additional benefit of Fastmail is fast, helpful tech support. The few times i’ve needed them, they’ve answered quickly and given me what i needed in the first response.

Speaking about Gmail->FastMail migration, you might be interested in this ten-years old thread: Moving 12 years of email from GMail to FastMail ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12247401)

A big +1 for fastmail, but their official ios app is 0/10 the last time I used it. Not a big problem if you use mail.app or their website on desktop.

Something I've done and which has been a big quality of life improvement is to set up a folder with 30 day retention, then an email rule to move any emails with `+` or apple relay there. Those are legitimate emails I want to read such as online order status, but I don't need them in my every day email.

Fastmail is great. I also use (and really like) Fairemail https://email.faircode.eu/

I been using proton but the UI is just a little bit of a let down. missing things that just were natural on gmail and i never had to think about

dunno ok maybe I'll try fastmail

I use infomaniak. Works great, no complaints. The support is based on human beings as well. I like that, and they are polite and helpful too!

  > Looking for your alternative? Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.

I was curious about whether one could layer email-ids as an interface on top of ATProto, and get all the decentralization benefits of the latter while being easy to move on from the former. A bit of searching threw up Comail [1]. Curious to hear perspectives on Comail / the general idea.

[1] https://comail.at

The author literally mentioned they are in the process of migrating to Fastmail, but it sounds like you’re bringing it up as a new recommendation? Then you restated the reason they are moving away (overbearing AI features in your face) as if it wasn’t the crux of their argument? Then you touted how good Fastmail migration features are after the author stated they actually like the fact they are starting with a clean slate, and are undecided if they even want to migrate? Something smells fishy here my friend

I started migrating to FastMail years ago, but never got to switch in full yet, because in my case with a public email address, the level of unhandled spam is too high.

Did you meet that issue?

Plus one for Fastmail I’ve been using with a custom domain for years now and it’s great. I don’t use Google for anything at this point, though I’m sure they’re still tracking me somehow.

Fastmail is great, their android app is also great except one single thing. They for some obsure reason insist on opening attachments like pdfs inside the app instead of in the default app. But the problem is that they don't support opening password protected pdfs. And they shows an error that they dont support password protected files without providing an option to open in default app. I have to manually click on the file, read the stupid error, click the download button(this is available only in the error page), then use the notification bar to open the damn file on my phone. Everything else is fine. This one sketchy insistance to open every file themselves within the app even if they dont know how to do that is something that annoys me.

Fastmail seems good but there’s some comfort from tutanota/protonmail promising to store my emails e2e encrypted (though they obviously can read them on send/receive). Have you tried them? What was your opinion?

How is offline support in their mobile app? I am looking for a protonmail alternative, because it didn't open emails when I really needed while being offline.

Fastmail is fast enough and has rich enough keyboard shortcuts that I stopped using mutt for it. It's very good.

my only problem with fastmail is their spam filtering is so bad. they mistake legit emails quite often

How good are their spam filters? That's what keeps me coming back to Gmail every time I try something different.

+1 to Fastmail. Been their happy customer for 5+ years.

I agree, it's one of my best value subscriptions. It's especially good if you host a lot of domains, you can link 100 custom domains to a single Fastmail account.

Its eating AI pilled companies lunch o clock

> “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row.

Ah, the standard Silicon Valley permission request format:

"Would you like us to invade your privacy: 'Yes' Or 'Ask me again later'".

It's like being propositioned by a nutcase who won't take no for an answer.... the ethics and legality of which are obvious for all to see.

Just another +1 for fastmail, long time user, really pleased with the service. They do one thing and they do it well, and they charge a fair price for the value delivered.

Serious question (for me): How would you rate fastmail strictly in terms of perseverence over time, ie will it still be here a decade from now? Confidence in that alone would move me there.

Don’t try Fastmail’s family plan. It’s undercooked. Rest is all greatz

Google doesn't have app passwords anymore so plus one for fastmail.

Actually occasionally fastmail initially loading seems to hold up for a while for me for some reason

While GMail is horrible, FastMail is not great either. Their spam filtering is a joke - it was quite a decent on until they ruined it few years ago with some changes.

I have no alternatives to suggest besides doing your own email. It's way better than anything commercial, works the way you want it, and most importantly nowadays, it's not used to train a commercial AI.