
Fastmail – 20 Years Old - vinw
https://fastmail.blog/2019/11/21/fastmail-20-years/
======
danShumway
I've been using Fastmail for a little while (I'm still migrating from Gmail),
and I love their service.

I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real
person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is
fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails
from a new domain in minutes.

One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email
addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a
different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-
parties.

With Gmail you can only use `+` and `.`, which makes it easy to derive the
base email. With Fastmail, my main email can be something like
`ilikecats@fastmail.com` and my Walmart account can be
`iheckinhatecats@fastmail.com`. I didn't realize how useful that would be
until I started using it, but it's quickly morphed into a killer feature.

~~~
solatic
The problem with aliases is that it's effectively a way to ensure vendor lock-
in even for people with custom email domains. If one of the reasons to use a
custom email domain is to preserve flexibility in choosing an email provider,
good luck switching providers when you have hundreds of aliases set up in the
hands of hundreds if not thousands of third-parties and your strategy for
managing your inbox depends on these aliases continuing to function.

It may not be nearly as strong of a lock-in as a @gmail.com address, but I'd
be curious to hear how many heavy alias users are paying Fastmail on a month-
to-month basis.

~~~
inapis
It’s not an issue if your email is primarily for newsletters, bills and other
one way updates (where you are not frequently conversing back). You’ll rarely
have to create an actual functioning alias in those cases because a catch-all
would do reasonably well.

If you are conversing with people it’s unlikely you are going to create an
alias for each person specifically, that’ll come across as super shady TBH.

So it’s not a major issue for most people because most services support 30-50
aliases easily.

------
eatwater123
Fastmail is fantastic, no complaints at all.... besides the mobile app.

I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain
about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone.

So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do
stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in)
that just sits there, likely hogging battery life, receiving emails and
storing them so that I can read them / access them while in an
airplane/foreign country/bad connection spot.

If they fix this I would be overjoyed.

~~~
jhrmnn
Just wondering: why don't you use your phone's native email app and IMAP?

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Android 10 (at least on my Pixel 2) doesn't have a native email app (other
than Gmail), though of course there are lots of options.

~~~
y4mi
last time i checked, gmail supports generic IMAP accounts as well.

~~~
SamBam
But then you're using gmail.

~~~
y4mi
we were talking about the android app, not the web service.

said android app supports generic IMAP accounts and doesnt need to be paired
to a google account to work with them.

------
fractalf
I've used fastmail for 19 years now. Way back in 2000 I was travelig India for
6 months. At that time I was reading email on my university through a telnet
connection with the pine client. Quite a hardcore experience! So I decided to
get with the program and get a webmail. Hotmail was the hottest those days,
but I never liked it. So I picked up a computer magazine on the street in
Delhi and came across a review of web based email providers. Guess what. The
ranked fastmail as #1! Above all the others. Never looked back since then :)

------
tenpies
I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought
they would have moved their operations by now.

~~~
dsissitka
Why would they move? The A&A bill doesn't affect them:

> Fastmail won’t be making changes to our technology or policies in response
> to this bill. Law enforcement has always been able to request information
> from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we
> have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that
> circumvent encryption.

Source: [https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-
aabi...](https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabill-
australia/)

I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick
Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.

[0]
[https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7381738...](https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7381738?hl=en)

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-
responsibility/law...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-
responsibility/law-enforcement-requests-report)

~~~
Youden
> The A&A bill doesn't affect them

You can basically sum that up as "we weren't able to protect your privacy in
the first place, so you don't have to worry about this bill compromising it".

The quote also misses that Australia has silent and warrantless access to data
and that Fastmail's servers are in the US, so subject to America's three-
letter agencies as well.

> I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick
> Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.

The competition isn't American megacorps, it's small European companies like
ProtonMail (Switzerland, as far as I can see usually requires a court order
and Swiss law requires notifying the subject) or Mailbox.org (Germany, only
allows disclosure with a warrant or imminent danger to life). Even if your
email is left unencrypted, these countries have much stronger data protection
and privacy laws.

------
alexcnwy
A lot of people probably don’t know that Fastmail was started by Jeremy
Howard, one of the creators of [https://www.fast.ai](https://www.fast.ai)
which is by far the best way to learn deep learning IMHO :)

~~~
jph00
Thanks! I haven't been involved involved with Fastmail for the last 10 years,
so I can take no credit for how amazing they've been throughout that time -
but I'm thrilled to see that they're still doing well. I'm still a very happy
Fastmail user :)

So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.

~~~
brongondwana
Thanks Jeremy! Glad to hear you're still enjoying the service.

I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail
infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom
back in 2004. Such a long time ago.

------
efiecho
I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as
I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account
should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this
is game over.

To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to
your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the
new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift
more troublesome.

~~~
tito
1\. Start now. But don't use @fastmail.com as your email address. Get a
personal domain and email address (i.e. me@efiecho.com), and forward it to
fastmail.

2\. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com

3\. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for
your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com

That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email
address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.

------
par
I just left gmail for Fastmail this past month, and I have to say I've been
really pleased with it. Their web interface has less frills but somehow feels
a lot easier to get organized than gmails bloat of features. I use the Mail
app on my phone for mobile support, and all the syncing is really seamless.

------
manuelmagic
I'm a customer since 2011. I love all the features they added during these
years (new UI, 2-step auth, mobile App, etc.) and the fact they actively
develop their product is reassuring. The two or three times I contacted the
customer support the assistance was excellent, once I even got a response from
one of the founders.

Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned
off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it
off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the
option for slow connections while traveling abroad.

I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions.

Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I
understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail.

The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a
second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail
address.

[1] [https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-
legacy.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html)

------
j-me
Fun seeing Fastmail on the front page of HN the day after I started trying it
out. I setup a free trial with a domain I manage through Route53, had some
hickups setting the correct DNS records and reached out to their support. They
were quick to respond and provided awesome, detailed technical support/hand-
holding and ultimately got me up and running. The experience convinced me the
love I keep reading about on here is real -- highly recommend em!

~~~
aladine
If you decide to use Fastmail officially, here is the referal link you can
grab to get 10% off for the 1st year:
[https://ref.fm/u12211285](https://ref.fm/u12211285)

------
jml7c5
While Fastmail will not save us from the slow, declining viability of self-
hosted individual and small business mail servers, their positive effect on
the e-mail ecosystem is wonderful. My decision to use their service (even
though it is quite pricey, and a cheaper host would do the job for my meager
needs) is because of that societally beneficial work.

A hearty thank you to all the Fastmail devs who read this; thank you for your
good work!

------
dsalzman
Awesome. You get what you pay for. And with FastMail you get an awesome email
experience. Worth paying money for something we all depend on everyday.

------
deadcast
Yay very cool! Been using them for 5+ years now and I love it. Happy to pay.
Their web interface has stayed very fast and well organized I think. Love the
fact that you get a huge list of domains to choose for your email(s)! imap.cc
is one of my favorites. ^_^

------
jacobr
I love Fastmail for email, but moving all my contacts there was also awesome.
I can now easily sync a subset of my contacts to my work phone without having
to log in to my personal Google or Apple accounts. Feels like as soon as you
add a Google connection somewhere you never know what else will be synced.

------
bachmeier
It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep
for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you
get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set
it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage,
which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)

------
acheron
Anyone have opinions comparing Fastmail with Protonmail? I know they're not
going for the exact same market, but in the more generic market of "email
services for people who don't want to use Gmail" I'd be interested in
someone's comparison.

~~~
Leace
Fastmail is a direct competitor to Gmail. That is Fastmail is Gmail but
different. Fastmail is opposed to E2E e-mail encryption as this makes some of
their features impossible (e.g. full text e-mail search).

Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even
cross providers (on [https://beta.protonmail.com](https://beta.protonmail.com)
composing an e-mail to Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> will enable encryption).
But they don't support all usual e-mail features like IMAP and SMTP (there are
bridges but...).

~~~
radicalriddler
Wow I'm a fulltime user of protonmail for the past 12 months, but hadn't heard
about the beta version. Thanks for linking that.

~~~
Leace
That's really surprising as the beta link is on the login page:
[https://mail.protonmail.com/login](https://mail.protonmail.com/login) :)

~~~
radicalriddler
Holy. I just missed it completely for the last 12 months then :(.

------
sdan
Been with Fastmail for a half year now and loving it.

I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super
easily.

Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top
(somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones
service!

~~~
x2f10
>Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service

This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested
sounding nice.

~~~
sdan
I go to gmail once a while because my gmail spam doesn't forward to fastmail
(there's some important emails that still go to gmail so I have to check) and
I see a lot more useful emails at the top than with Fastmail where I
completely forget about certain emails because they're buried down. This is
partially my fault, but it'd be beneficial to add this as a opt-in feature.

------
alibert
I wanted to give a genuine praise for Fastmail in this post but upon looking
up my signup year at Fastmail service (2014), I have noticed that they have
increased the yearly price of my old (not available anymore) Family plan from
$25 to $30. I guess it was not sustainable but I would have liked an
notification about it ...

Now that I think about it, I have kind of rolled my eye when they announced
that their new "snooze" feature was only available to their latest plans or
big legacy account [1]. Not a move I was expecting for Fastmail.

[1]
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/snooze.html)

------
kup0
In a very slow migration process off as many Google properties as possible,
including Gmail- and Fastmail is where I've landed for email. Will be using it
with a custom domain to permanently avoid any kind of "lock in".

I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher
level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to
separate into its own special zone).

But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for
me.

Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in"
you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too
early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result,
I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said
that I _had to_ use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account
deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.

------
mikece
If only they could implement labels in the same way that ProtonMail and Gmail
have! I want incoming emails to show in my inbox while being tagged with a
certain label or category; this ins't possible in FastMail, only the ability
to move the message to another folder entirely which raises the chance of
missing messages altogether.

------
cfallin
Happy Fastmail user for 3.5 years so far. I particularly like (and am happy to
support with my subscription fee) that they have active engineering staff
building new technology and contributing it back -- in particular, their JMAP
protocol work, which is an open standard [1], and behind the scenes their work
to improve and contribute back to the Cyrus mail server [2]. Thanks and keep
it up!

[1] [https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-
standar...](https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standard/)
[2] [https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-
contribute/](https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/)

------
LeoPanthera
I don't think the Fastmail UI tells me but I believe I joined Fastmail in 2002
and have been using them since then. (Before that I was using Spamcop's hosted
mail.)

There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major
complaints.

Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.

~~~
ssorc
This will show you when you were first invoiced:

Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices

2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.

~~~
james-skemp
Thanks for detailing where to find this. Looks like 2002 (August) as well.

Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.

~~~
lozf
Yay 2002 Club! (December for me.)

I'd heard good things so recommended them to a quite non-technical client, and
was impressed by how much simpler life got afterwards!

Still no complaints. Thanks Fastmail.

------
AhtiK
Everyone who is happy with Fastmail, what is your "mobile strategy"? As a
Fastmail customer, I find Web app wonderful but mobile app on Android severely
lacking UX. Switched to Aquamail for client over IMAP but search is
unusable/slow. Suggestions/success stories?

~~~
LilBytes
I've been using BlueMail for a while, but search is poor and it's quite slow.
I imagine my frustrations will be similar to yours with Aquamail.

I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any
good yet. I paid for TouchDown
([https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html](https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html))
but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was
like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor
search, sluggish.

I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I
don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(

~~~
Grimm665
I've been using Edison on Android for a while now. It is pretty clean and
basic. I had been using BlueMail before and agree with your complaints. Edison
seems to have solved most of my problems, it's a good basic client without
much nonsense.

------
tasty_freeze
I've been using fastmail for a few years now and their reliability has been
great, prices reasonable, and their web client is fast and convenient.

But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say
me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection
service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail
web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, and I cannot figure out how to
make it accept me@mydomain.com.

There is a help page on setting up identities, but it doesn't work for me. :-(
Other than than I'm 100% happy with fastmail.

~~~
reificator
Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your
MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?

~~~
tasty_freeze
My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg

me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com

Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone
knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail
accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years
after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using
mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched.

As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail,
but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.

~~~
nmjenkins
You can set up aliases in your Fastmail account to forward mail for these
addresses elsewhere:
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target](https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target)

------
jagger27
I just switched to Fastmail from GSuite this year and also have no complaints.

------
techntoke
I personally would like to see more efforts going into open source self-host
alternatives, and cloud providers enabling one-click distributed mail server
deployments that enable all the functionality you'd expect from like Gmail.
Such as virtual folders (labels), better mobile apps, and reliable email
service. Too much effort lately has been going into cloud hosted solutions,
when I know many users would gladly pay $5+ per month for quality self-hosted
email service.

------
noisy_boy
The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to
go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them
too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts.

One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as
read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.

~~~
detritus
For some reason every once in a while Fastmail decides to interpret the
shortcut for paste, Ctrl + V, as 'Send Mail' which has led to some curious
exchanges (particularly early-on before i clicked what was happening (if not
why)).

------
chappi42
Congratulation! And thanks for a stellar service!

------
gmb2k1
Their Android app has no option to logout automatically after a set amount of
time. You're logged in indefinitely. I consider that a security risk. Everyone
who manages to unlock my phone can completely take over my digital identity.

I contacted their support and made a feature request for auto-logout. Their
answer was basically: Just lock your phones screen.

Not good!

------
oil25
Sincere question - why is JavaScript required to sign up for Fastmail? Is it
for browser fingerprinting? If so, what data is collected, how is it used and
how long is it retained? No specific mention of it in the privacy policy. If I
sign up in a virtual machine, can I later use Fastmail without running
scripts?

~~~
brongondwana
You can use IMAP to access Fastmail without running Javascript (or I guess
your own JMAP client if you wanted to write one - there isn't one that doesn't
use Javascript yet) - but no, you can't use our interface without running
Javascript - the client is written entirely in Javascript.

~~~
oil25
That's too bad, looks like I'll have to stick with GSuite Gmail to have
browser-based, non-Javascript access to my email.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
@brongondwana

Great service. I use all features to their potential And appreciate the work
and thought you and your team give.

~~~
brongondwana
Thanks! Pleased to hear you've enjoying it.

------
xwowsersx
I use Gmail. Don't love it, don't hate it. What's the pitch for switching to
Fastmail?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds.
The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big
folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the
FastMail web UI.)

No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better
than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate.

And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.

~~~
xwowsersx
Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true
to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM
when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this
problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it
to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account
settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But
it all still ended up in the same inbox.)

When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address at
FastMail and the vast majority of stuff moved with me... instantly. FastMail
also has tools to import your mail archive using IMAP for what's already in
your Gmail account.

Now that all of my mail uses my own domain name, if I ever needed to leave
FastMail, it'd be painless... none of my mail is going to a FastMail address
to begin with.

My strong recommendation is that people do this even if they intend to stick
with Gmail for the time being, just to give themselves the future option.

~~~
xwowsersx
Good idea, thanks for sharing. So I set up an MX record (on Route 53) to point
to Fastmail and also set up DKIM by adding several CNAME records for
fm1._domainkey.mydomain.com. FM confirmed pretty quick that those changes were
made. The last bit is SPF config. I added a TXT record as per the
instructions, but I keep rechecking with FM and it's not verified. Emails from
FM currently show up as being sent "via messagingengine.com". Any ideas - do I
just need to wait?

~~~
xwowsersx
Scratch that, seems to be working now. Not showing up as "via
messagingengine.com" anymore in spite of the fact that it still hasn't
verified SPF. Looking forward to cleaning up my email by switching to FM!

------
chewz
Congratulations!!!

