
From Fastmail back to Gmail - pvinis
http://theinterstitial.net/2015/03/from-fastmail-back-to-googles-gmail/
======
jakobegger
I agree that Fastmail's default spam filter settings are a bit to lenient, I
also got around 3 spams a day. After increasing the spam settings I get about
1 spam a week, which is acceptable.

There are a few reasons why I'd never switch back to gmail:

1) Reliability: Gmail sometimes had issues with Apple Mail where messages
would show up twice, etc. Since switching to Fastmail I had no more problems.

2) Customer support. I once had an issue where all my mail disappeared from my
inbox in Gmail. There was noone I could contact, all I found was a user forum
with other people complaining about the problem. I never got my email back
from the archive to the inbox. When you have a problem with Fastmail, or can't
find what you are looking for in the docs, just contact customer support.

3) Backup: Fastmail allows you to restore email from backup (for a limited
time). Really nice when you accidentally delete an email.

4) Web interface. I assume that's a matter of taste, but I really prefer
Fastmail.

5) Folders instead of labels. I don't like Gmail's labels, and I'm glad
Fastmail has proper folders.

~~~
rtpg
what's the difference between gmail's labels and fastmail folders?

~~~
favadi
A mail can be in multiple labels, but can only in one folder (copy doesn't
count).

------
mkpankov
I have 4 virtual domains bound to same account. Why isn't it an option? You
can filter stuff based on "To:" address to put it in different "Inbox"
folders. And storage usage is more optimal since you don't pay for a lot of
nearly-empty inboxes.

~~~
lazyjones
Exactly, I don't really see the problem in the article. I have a $40/year
(15GB) account and apart from my fastmail and my forwarded pobox.com address,
I also receive mail for and host DNS records and web pages for 2 other virtual
domains. Also, I'm very happy with spam filtering and Fastmail's service
quality (they even post on Twitter things like 'mail is slow currently,
investigating...').

~~~
mkpankov
Well, I can't say I'm happy with spam filtering - I regularly get some stupid
spam to the inbox (not even something smart enough to bypass the filters,
IMO).

~~~
corobo
I'm at a point with Gmail where I'd be happy that I'm getting a bit of spam in
the inbox. Unfortunately I'm starting to see a lot of false positives
recently. I was actually looking to move out of Gmail myself

------
moystard
In terms of privacy, the issue is that most people out there use GMail, Yahoo
Mail or Outlook, so even if you self-host or use a privacy aware service, when
you'll send emails to others, or receive them, your privacy won't be fully
respected anyway...

------
mark_l_watson
A good article but I just made the opposite decision. I recently switched to
using GMail as a catch all email that I check about twice a day and use
FastMail with my own domain for email from people close to me. It is not as
much an issue of privacy as wanting to slow down the information firehose from
Google, Twitter, G+, etc. I would like to reduce the surface area of marketing
aimed at me.

------
ansgri
For me the killer feature of fastmail is their Calendar. Having recently used
Google Calendar I was astonished how totally unusable it is compared to
fastmail's. I'd be glad to hear what calendar do you use, what are considered
good nowadays.

~~~
x0x0
What did you find better? Thanks!

~~~
ansgri
* less context switches. In fastmail you do everything in popup windows where in Google you sometimes have to go to a separate task window.

* very easy to modify individual occurrences of repeating tasks. Just drag or resize, it'll detach automatically.

* the week view is sliding, ie you can view events from Wednesday to Wednesday.

* much less clutter in UI and interactions overall.

------
nly
I think good old POP and mailbox discipline needs to make a come back... at
least for Average Joe users.

I have a similar Fastmail setup to the OP. My parents get $10 Lite accounts
and I set them up to fetch all their mail via POP, so their mailbox never gets
full. I also downgraded my own account from Enhanced ($40) to Full ($20) some
time ago after I used Fastmails superior web interface and search to finally
prune my inbox (I imported something like 10,000 unread emails from Gmail).
All this is less than the cost of one GApps user.

I have all my important mail from the last 8 years or so and I'm only using
something like ~500MB.

~~~
chkuendig
he might (like me) still have a grandfathered-in account which is free (with
ads) for up to 10 users.

[edit: parent edited complete comment]

~~~
nly
Sorry about the edit... I decided refuting the arithmetic was a fairly blunt
way to deal with the debate.

I moved from an older (50 user) free GApps account to Fastmail. If I had been
paying I would have saved $150/year, but just saving my time, and avoiding the
now shitty experience of managing my mail via Gmail, was well worth the cost
to me. Early on Gmails web interface was a revelation, now it's just below
standard... and any momentum from their multi-GB storage giveaway doesn't cut
it anymore.

I think the final nail was one of principle... Google just aren't interested
in offering premium personal mail services, like own-domain hosting to
families or individuals. Using free GApps made me feel like an unwanted
freeloader... a second-class citizen.

------
bismark
I'm a happy Fastmail user but one thing I wish they would bring over from
Gmail is SASL OAuth. I understand it's still in a draft extension but any
improvement to the state of email authentication would be great (restricting
read/write access based on IMAP folder on a token by token basis would be even
better). The idea of handing out my email credentials in plain text to email
SaaS products just gives me the willies.

~~~
brongondwana
We're looking at making this easier, but you can already set up a separate
login token for the individual SaaS products - just create a regular password
alternative login with something from pwgen or your favourite line noise
source.

[https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/alternatelogin.html)

You can then revoke the individual token.

Per-folder permissions isn't something on our radar yet. You could hack it up
with a family/business and separate accounts with folder sharing, but it costs
money and is a right pain to administrate.

------
Uberphallus
Looks like it's a decision made for very personal reasons, but some of the
issues are not really issues.

> As of this writing, I'm up to 4 accounts.

They're not all yours, they're your family members'. And given the fact that
you have to pay for them, they probably won't really need Fastmail, they can
use Gmail and you set up aliases/forwards for their addresses.

> FastMail's spam filtering is good, but it's not as good as Google's.

My experience is the opposite, somehow. I very rarely get spam in Fastmail,
and 99% of the time it falls into spam folders (even having
*@myuser.fastmail.fm wildcard, catchall addresses!). I get very few false
positives, too. It might be not as heavily targeted by spammers.

Meanwhile I get 10-30 a day in Gmail, with roughly 20% of false positives,
with so many false positives that I had to switch my email account to Fastmail
on certain websites because I missed important emails (like notices of
cancelled flight reservations, Amazon refunds, work reminders). It doesn't
matter how many times I mark a sender's email as non-spam, Gmail thinks it
knows better.

> Mailbox being compatible with only Gmail and iCloud accounts.

Well, duh. I'm good with Aquamail, mutt and the web client, as Fastmail rules
do all the filtering I care about. I wanted to test Google Inbox and Dropbox
Mailbox, so I set a forward to my Gmail address. They didn't do anything
interesting to me, so I disabled it again, but if you want to use them, you
totally can.

I have to say, though, that Fastmail Android app is sluggish as hell and, last
time I checked, it didn't cache messages (deal breaker for me, I travel a lot
and want to have boarding passes and reservations handy).

> IFTTT integration

Forward to Gmail, enjoy IFTTT.

------
cssmoo
I use GMail. However remember if you pay for it via Apps, the terms are
different so that is worth bearing in mind.

~~~
brohoolio
Google Apps for work is $50 per account per year. The terms of service for
apps for work protects your privacy.

------
stefanve
To each there own I guess. I have been a happy fastmail user for many years, I
get some spam maybe 1 or 2 mails per month and I just use the default spam
settings. Seems like a personal choice not a tech or feature driven decision.
Not sure why this is on the front page

------
scrrr
Related to this, especially with regard to privacy, I recommend everyone to
check out the LEAP project and also this list of related projects:
[https://leap.se/email#related-projects](https://leap.se/email#related-
projects)

------
pan69
I would switch to Fastmail in a heartbeat if they let me pay for storage (say
in 5 gig intervals) and let me mount as many domains and create as many inbox
as I want. Other than that, I see no point in paying for email. Sorry. I'm a
snob.

~~~
evook
I don't see the problem to rent a small server and host open xchange, zimbra
or something similiar yourself? Even postfix isn't that hard to configure and
will likely run forever.

The same goes for the author. I don't get how gmail is even considered as a
mail provider for more than a spam oder mandatory account. The list of better
and serious mail providers is tremendous.

For my family and me, I am hosting a small exchange server, with a synchronous
replica in a datacenter, at home. It's safe, has nearly unlimited disk space
and I know where my backups are.

~~~
icebraining
Postfix will run forever, but other hosts won't accept your emails forever
unless you keep up with the latest spam techniques (DANE nowadays, isn't it?)

Personally, I just use a free smarthost, but that loses some of the privacy
advantages.

~~~
evook
Personally I don't use Postfix, I am going with Zimbra. Postfix was just an
example. As well as DANE would require exactly 4 commands to be enabled.

For myself I am going with a major commercial antispam solution, which is
hosted in two of our datacenters. Since I am working with the developers and
admins on regular basis there's no reason not to trust them.

------
bad_user
He mentions the availability of Mailbox as a useful third-party app.

However the fact that Mailbox only works with proprietary services, being
restricted to GMail and iCloud, should send red flags, because this app is not
provided by Google, but by Dropbox and personally I'm seeing a conflict of
interest and given that it isn't based on standards, you can bet that it won't
last. I also tried it out and I found it half-baked.

This point was weird. It's because of Google's poor support for standards that
I'm considering ditching Google Apps. Because GMail and Google Calendar are
all fine only as long as you're using the official apps.

------
manuelmagic
Regarding space upgrade, what you write is not true:
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a68...](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html?u=9a6841cb)

"Purchasing extra space.

Rather than upgrade to the next plan, it's possible to just purchase extra
mail or file storage. This is charged at:

    
    
        Lite: 100MB for $5 USD/year
        Full: 500MB for $5 USD/year
        Enhanced/Premier: 1GB for $5 USD/year"

------
jorams
I always wonder what people do with their email address to receive that much
spam. I have a Fastmail account with a catch-all that receives all mail sent
to a domain, and I rarely receive spam. I'm not exactly careful spreading my
email address around either.

I have noticed that almost all spam I do receive is sent to an address I
posted here on HN, so perhaps I just haven't posted any addresses on other
sites that are crawled by spammers a lot?

------
antihero
I'd switch back to Gmail if I could somehow change my Google account to
incorporate my real e-mail (and pay), as opposed to having a separate Google
Apps for Domains account for e-mail that was separate from my real e-mail and
is on my old Gmail address.

Does anyone know if this is remotely possible?

~~~
reustle
I simply stopped using my old gmail account. Switching email addresses is a
pain, absolutely, but at least leaving gmail is as easy as an MX record change
in the future.

~~~
antihero
Yeah but what about things like App purchases, calendar, Drive, etc?

------
bryanlarsen
3 to 5 false spam negatives a day is better than the 1 false positive a week
that I get with Gmail, IMO.

------
edwinyzh
Just in case it's relevant, I'm developing
[http://ownmycopy.com](http://ownmycopy.com) for cloud-to-PC backup, aiming at
for backing up cloud-only services.

------
brohoolio
Ahhhh the cost of privacy.

------
icebraining
Without arguing against OP's decision, IFTTT can be wired with any email
account, using the Email channel, you just need to set up a rule to forward
the emails to their address.

------
tdkl
I've been looking at Fastmail when switching from Gmail this year, but the
lack of flexibility in prices vs. storage size turned me off.

All I wanted was a fast IMAP host, with 5-10GB of storage, DAV for calendar
and contacts and a simple fast web interface. After some testing, I've found
ServerMX [1].

They're EU based (.nl, .de infrastructure) [2], have SOGo for DAV and webmail
(offers full size contact pictures, which is really neat for mobile phones),
IMAP sync is instant and seamless over all clients (Aquamail on Android, eM
Client on Windows desktop, SOGo on webmail) and all that for merely 18€ per
year. Their plans are well considered IMHO if you don't need much space [3].

Sorry if this feels like an ad, but I've been more then happy with their
service and like to recommend it to people. They have a 30 day free trial to
test the service.

[1]
[http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html](http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html)
[2]
[http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html](http://www.servermx.com/en/whyservermx.html)
[3]
[http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy](http://www.servermx.com/en/index.html#buy)

~~~
detaro
While we are recommending mail hosts,
[http://www.mailbox.org](http://www.mailbox.org) also is nice. From Germany,
privacy-minded (you can have totally anonymous accounts, they encrypt
everything with your PGP-key as soon as it arrives, ...), run by people who
are quite well-known when it comes to mail servers (author of books on
postfix, running conferences, ... so they hopefully know what they are doing)

Webinterface is ok, but not perfect.

~~~
tdkl
Oh yeah, I considered mailbox.org too, but was a bit more expensive for the
plan with ActiveSync (for mobile), but major argument was that I've found IMAP
sync faster (basically instant) then Exchange push in my testing.

~~~
detaro
IMAP sync? You mean IMAP push extensions? I only use IMAP and it is seconds
between me sending an e-mail to my mailbox address and my devices going
"pling".

~~~
tdkl
Maybe a poor expression on my part, I think it's the cause of IMAP IDLE. I
tested marking an email as read with putting all three mobile, web and desktop
client side by side and change was practically instant in a second. Too bad
iOS doesn't support IDLE and goes as low as 15 min only.

------
tiatia
I wanted to leave google due to privacy concerns. Fastmail is based in
Australia - not an option. I did not want anything EU based either. Got a
Proton mail account but without IMAP, what is it good for?

An email service that is based in Switzerland and that you can use with you
own domain: [https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-
messaging](https://www.infomaniak.com/en/workspace/webmail-messaging)

------
hmans
tl;dr author switches back to Gmail because it's convenient. I wish the
article would simply say that.

