
FastMail app for iOS and Android now available - robn_fastmail
http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/11/12/fastmail-app-for-ios-and-android-now-available/
======
sasas
Please be aware FastMail is subject to Australian law. [1]

The government is scrambling to pass laws for mass surveillance [2] and
controversial data retention laws. [3]

[1]
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/australian-
government-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/australian-government-
scrambles-authorize-mass-surveillance)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2014/oct/16/privac...](http://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2014/oct/16/privacy-advocates-say-australia-is-breaking-new-ground-in-
data-retention)

~~~
bad_user
I find such warnings to be distasteful.

Especially given that most people are using Gmail, or Outlook / Office365, or
Yahoo! Mail, all of them coming from companies that can be and have been
coerced by the NSA, without the people finding out about it until those leaks.
In fact, as a European citizen, I would be more comfortable with an Australian
company, than with a US-based one, simply because the governmental agencies in
non-US countries are less competent than the US is at mass surveillance.

But the fact of the matter is ... if you do not encrypt your email on the
client-side, you can't expect privacy protections from a global enemy that has
the resources for MITM attacks. All the protection you can hope for is against
local enemies (organized crime syndicates, competition, etc.)

So here we have a smaller player that's competing against big companies such
as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and the first comment is about fear mongering
about some laws that haven't even passed yet and targeting a company that has
nothing to do with it. Don't take this the wrong way, but seeing this from a
community of entrepreneurs is disappointing.

~~~
sasas
I had hoped for no bias in my comment - just to increase awareness.

The changes in related laws in Australia are unprecedented [1] and are passing
as we speak [2][3]

The comments on their own privacy page is about to become outdated or
misleading -

 _Australia has strong privacy laws in relation to email, specified in the
Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979._ [4]

As an EU citizen you are offered more protection then many other regions of
the world, at least from a regulatory perspective -

 _Under EU law, personal data can only be gathered legally under strict
conditions, for a legitimate purpose. Furthermore, persons or organisations
which collect and manage your personal information must protect it from misuse
and must respect certain rights of the data owners which are guaranteed by EU
law._ [5]

Please watch the youtube like referenced below to get a feeling of the
insanity -

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4)

[2] [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-
news/australias-...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-
news/australias-expanded-anti-terror-laws/story-
fn3dxiwe-1227076460793?nk=5d5974c612ee016e329ea9417fea665e)

[3] [http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/antiterror-laws-
rob...](http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/antiterror-laws-rob-
australians-of-freedoms-isis-hate-security-expert-says/story-
fnjwmwrh-1227073688494)

[4]
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html)

[5] [http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-
protection/](http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/)

------
girvo
Well done! I love FastMail, and am very glad that I switch from GMail.
However, one of the best parts of FastMail is that it's just proper IMAP at
the end of the day, so while I'm sure some people are going to love this app,
I personally don't have much of a use for it.

~~~
robn_fastmail
Fair enough, we love IMAP too, and there's no way its going anywhere. We've
always cared about standards compliance and client choice, so use what you
like and be happy! :)

~~~
coned88
How does that new Australian law allowing manipulation of data effect
fastmail?

~~~
robn_fastmail
There are no new laws (yet). But lets not get into this discussion here.
Contact privacy@fastmail.com with your questions and we'll be happy to respond
to them.

~~~
lancewiggs
Actually - I'd really like an answer to that as well. A public answer.

~~~
rufugee
Totally agree. Things like that should be discussed in public, not buried in
individual emails.

~~~
robn_fastmail
My point was more that this is a thread about the new apps, not about our
privacy policies. If you want to start a new thread somewhere I'd be happy to
comment on it.

~~~
latch
Fastmail customer here. This is a perfect place to answer the question: it's
visible, it's the right audience, and it's relevant. Talking about whether we
should be using Fastmail at all is, to me at least, related to the question of
whether I should install the app.

Besides, this is an internet forum. It has threads. This is how these things
work.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096768/Woody-
Harrel...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096768/Woody-Harrelson-
falls-victim-Reddit-disastrous-Ask-interview.html)

~~~
robn_fastmail
At this point, there are no new laws. Its still being debated in Parliament
and submissions are still being reviewed, so its not clear what the final act
is going to look like, assuming it passes. So we can't really comment on its
impact until we know what's actually in it. We just don't know yet how this is
going to play out.

~~~
latch
Thank you.

By the way, I like the app. First load must be hitting the network, seems like
that could come from a stored cached and refreshed asap.

Also, it would be really nice if you could archive or delete a message from
the reading view. (a) there's plenty of room for 2 more icons and (b) I have
to believe people are _way_ more likely to archive a message than forward it,
yet somehow forward gets the spot.

~~~
robn_fastmail
The application gets cached but the data does not. We're looking at ways to
improve the initial load time.

If you tap the message area when reading, a row of action buttons will appear.
You can archive, delete, report spam, move to folder and mark from here.

~~~
annnnd
I am not a parent, but from UX perspective I think you just got a feedback
which says the action is either too hidden or not useful enough. :) (it's a
single complaint, though)

~~~
robn_fastmail
Yeah, I've answered that questions a few times in the last couple of days. It
was also asked a bit when first release the mobile web app a while back. It's
on my list to bring it up with the UI team soon :)

------
chimeracoder
I've been no waiting for this for so long! I have been using K9, and I love
using a FOSS email client, but having native Fastmail support is just so much
better.

The native AOSP email app, for example, doesn't even allow you to choose which
email address to send from when replying (that, or it's so hidden that I was
unable to find it.) Unfortunately, like most AOSP apps, it's been effectively
deprecated in favor of the Google alternative (Gmail) so it's unlikely to get
any better anytime soon.

I'm also so glad to see that they are releasing on both platforms
simultaneously. Having used both an iPhone and an Android, I find it very
frustrating when a product is released on one but not the other[0]

[0] Yes, I understand why startups choose to do this. We had to decide which
platform to support first at my startup, so I understand the tradeoff
involved. But as a user, it's still frustrating.

~~~
robn_fastmail
It was actually a really interesting development process. We already had the
web app, and our main UI developer is an Apple guy, so he took on the iOS
version. Meanwhile I'm primarily a Linux guy and work on FastMail's backend
services, but also an Android user, so I did the Android version.

What it meant is that the other guy could make supporting UI tweaks as he
needed, and I could make supporting backend tweaks as needed (eg push system
integration), but we had to come together a lot to find the similarities and
differences between the two platforms and do changes for each other.

It became a bit of a competition and we both were working very fast. We had
something we could use every day in less than a month and we each learned a
huge amount about the other person's area of speciality.

I'm fairly confident if we did just one app first we would have gone much
slower and made some bad architectural decisions that would have hurt when we
got onto the next platform. If we ever do a third platform client it'll be
really easy.

~~~
gohrt
Fastmail is part of the open web. So why a proprietary client, instead of
joining in with K9?

~~~
brongondwana
It's basically our existing web client, but hooked in to Google's notification
service.

What we are hoping to do (quite soon) is switch to pure JMAP for the app's
communication to the server - [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/)

At that point, k9 will be able to get the same great push notification system
and efficient updates by implementing a JMAP backend.

------
stormbrew
So, hosting email has two hard parts: \- Spam filtering incoming mail. \-
Sending mail in a way that the other end will accept.

The actual IMAP server part I'm happy to host myself, but these other two
parts take up too much time. Right now I use gmail to do these two things, but
it's imperfect for a lot of reasons.

Would FastMail be a better choice for this? Or are there better ways to
outsource these hard parts? I feel like there should be a reliable service
that does just those bits, but I've never found one.

------
swartkrans
I have been using fastmail for a month now after switching from gmail. I quite
like it, but the two drawbacks are that it's just a little bit more likely to
let spam in than gmail, even with aggressive spam options enabled, and with
fastmail I'm missing out on the growing gmail ecosystem (Streak, Dropbox
mailbox app, others).

It's fine though, I really am happy to be paying for an email service instead
of depending on Google. I am quite happy with everything else. Really easy to
set up and integrate. Works well with Android's email app and Mail.app. The
webmail isn't terrible but I just use it to report spam. Having an Android app
now is super exciting.

~~~
brongondwana
We're talking to Dropbox about mailbox app - hopefully it will support us
soon, as with everything it's a matter of engineering resources.

We're also talking to many companies about a better API for everyone - the
draft spec is at [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/) \- it's based on the API
that our app already uses.

~~~
swartkrans
That's great to hear. Regarding the Android app having just checked it out, my
first request, if you're taking them, is multiple account support. I can only
log into one fastmail.com account at a time with what is here now. The reason
I have two accounts is because I have two domains that get emails. Otherwise
seems like a solid app. I'll probably start using this as my calendar app. :)

[http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/) seems pretty awesome, I guess I can use
that to build my own fastmail app integration?

Thanks for all the hard work on fastmail!

~~~
robn_fastmail
> That's great to hear. Regarding the Android app having just checked it out,
> my first request, if you're taking them, is multiple account support. I can
> only log into one fastmail.com account at a time with what is here now. The
> reason I have two accounts is because I have two domains that get emails.

Yep, its high on the todo list for a future update.

> [http://jmap.io/](http://jmap.io/) seems pretty awesome, I guess I can use
> that to build my own fastmail app integration?

That's the intent, though we're not there yet.

~~~
e12e
JMAP does indeed look very interesting. In my (very, very slow) path towards
writing my own email client, I've also come to expect that a new, simpler
protocol is probably a better bet than imap. Partly this belief is bolstered
by the fact that the creator of sup went on to make heliotrope:
[https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/heliotrope](https://github.com/sup-
heliotrope/heliotrope) [ed: I suppose the canonical repo is
[https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope](https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope)
\-- but afaik they are the same (and both appear dead)]

Is the code on: [http://jmap.io/server.html](http://jmap.io/server.html)
actual code? If so what kind? Lua? It'd be great if you could publish some
test cases, even if you don't have implementations to go (open source) with it
at this time.

I'm sure fastmail can bring a lot of real-world testing and experience to the
table when/if designing a new protocol for email -- and I'd be very surprised
if we actually need more than one... (at least considering we already have
smtp, lmtp, pop3, imap and maildirsync over ssh, along with rsync/unison --
that cover a lot of use-cases already).

~~~
rakoo
Regarding heliotrope: wmorgan has left the field a long time ago to our great
despair. He did start heliotrope, which I hacked a bit because it looked cool.
I even started a heliotrope-to-imap bridge [0]. After a while the community
decided to create a common repository to host them, at which time I abandoned
heliotrope because its client was still too buggy and sup was already working
very well, and I needed a working MUA.

So the current state is: heliotrope kind of works, the client a little less,
we are now fully working on sup. If you want to hack on heliotrope though,
feel free to ask -- but there will most likely be no code from me.

Sup, on the other hand, works like a charm ! Visit us at supmua.org !

[0] [https://github.com/rakoo/imaptrope](https://github.com/rakoo/imaptrope)

~~~
e12e
I think I'd probably gravitate more towards notmuch and friends, if I were to
use a (in notmuch's case, almost) "ready to go" mua. However, I've yet to find
a mua that's simple enough, and also does what I want (Steve Kemp's lumail is
another interesting project[1]).

So far, the back of my envelope contains clojure, or possibly something
else[2] that is pleasant to code in and feasible to both get to run (well) on
Android and in the console, possibly web and/or desktop (GUI, that is -- not a
great priority for me, but "advanced" features such as displaying image
attachments in-line could be nice -- and is a natural fit for Android anyway),
and a sync (possibly push) solution.

It's in the sync part, that heliotrope and jmap come in -- mostly as an
alternative to either making my own, or just trying to shoe-horn everything
into couchdb/puchdb etc.

 _Personally_ I don't really _need_ IMAP (as I control both the server and the
client), and I'm unsure if it's worth the effort; maybe with some clever hacks
like sticking some meta-data in "special" mail-folders...

Other than that, I suppose caldav/carddav can handle contacts (or perhaps make
an embeddable ldap-thing... but like imap it sounds like overkill...) -- the
only remaining problem is quick search, which means good full-text search,
which means multi-lingual stemming etc... mostly I'm thinking the server
should do the indexing, and the client should be able to sync both index and
content. Tricky part is making it incremental, so I can keep X GB email with
full-text search on the server, and not need a significant % of X GB space on
the Android device to get off-line access to the last month (or whatever)
worth of email along with good search over that subsection...

[1] [http://lumail.org/](http://lumail.org/) [2] So far my short-list has
clojure (pleasant, start-up time and possibly resources seem to be a (real)
issue on Android), kawa scheme (try to keep the interesting stuff in somewhat
"standard" scheme, either use kawa scheme everywhere, or try to stradle two
scheme implementations...) and kotlin (it's a better java, but not sure if I'd
call it pleasant).

~~~
rakoo
You must be aware that notmuch is only the search backend, and for a full MUA
you need frontends. I believe the official one is the Emacs one, so it should
be fairly usable. There's also a web one [0] you should be able to play with.

Another contender in the space (label- and search-centric) is mu and its ui,
mu4e [1]. Something else to have in mind.

Now if you want something that works on desktop and mobile, something worth a
look would be using SQLite and its built-in full-text search... see how far
you can go with that. SQLite is available pretty much everywhere, Android even
allows full-text search. Now what you have to do is synchronize SQLite dbs. It
"shouldn't" be too hard to remove old emails from the db so you can keep X MB
worth of it. You can even shoehorn it into couchbase-lite [3][4] so that sync
is automagically taken care of.

JMAP looks cool (definitely more interesting to implement than IMAP) but it
seems to be more a query API than a sync API, although there are facilities to
"get changes since last time" (a HUGE improvement from IMAP as deployed
everywhere). OTOH if you can shoehorn it into couchbase-lite, you can use a
generic sync protocol that can be used for other things too (caldav/carddav).

Heck, you've piqued my curiosity, I see something doable here. I'd love to
hear more. I might even hack something just for fun.

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch-
web](https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/notmuch-web)

[1]
[http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html)

[2] [https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-
android](https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-android)

[3] [https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-
ios](https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios)

------
unicornporn
FastMail looks tempting. But, excusez-moi, it seems quite expensive for what
(you seem to) get. I have an email archive that's around 20GB on server. That
would cost me $120 a year. Right now I'm paying for a Dreamhost account. For
around $100 a year I get "unlimited" storage, IMAP access, Roundcube access
and support for domains. And this is only besides all the shared hosting
features has never let me down so far.

I know FastMail is dedicated to delivering email/calendar only and that they
are famous for an elegant service. But seriously, how fancy can email be?

~~~
pluma
I'm not sure what Dreamhost's e-mail offering is like, but I chose FastMail
over running my own e-mail server because I'm not enough of a sysadmin to be
confident in setting up and maintaining my own e-mail server without opening
it up to abuse (there are enough involuntary spam relays already).

When I compared the major e-mail providers at the time, FastMail won because
it was the closest to running your own server in terms of configurability (but
much easier), it provided a great web UI (not as important for me personally,
but some people don't use native clients), it was somewhat open about its
technical infrastructure and it was doing one thing and one thing only (i.e.
providing e-mail/calendar/contacts services).

~~~
e12e
Actually, with any reasonable smtp server, the defaults these days are pretty
good -- so email abuse/open relay isn't the problem it once was. The hurdle
(if any) these days is making sure email you send isn't flagged as spam, and
to a lesser extent to avoid receiving spam (I say lesser, but then I've been
running greylisting from day one, which is a minor nuisance, in and off
itself).

That said, using a good service (like fastmail) vs running your own will
always be a trade-off -- and it's perfectly reasonable to _not_ run your own
email.

~~~
pluma
Sure, but it can still be quite daunting if you're not much of a sysadmin. I'm
a web developer primarily and though I feel confident setting up a basic web
server and SSH, I'm not even entirely sure what software I need or should use
(when there are multiple alternatives) to set up a fully working e-mail
server.

Add to that messing with cryptic configuration files while reading about the
dangers of doing it wrong and the general impression is that you shouldn't be
touching any of it unless you fully understand it all. As far as beginner
friendliness goes, it's a bit like desktop Linux was ten years ago.

~~~
e12e
There is a bit of a documentation vacuum. We (Linux users, admins and
developers) could learn a lot from freebsd and openbsd here. Something like
[https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/task-mail-
server](https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/task-mail-server) gets you on your
way (maybe too far, actually -- you probably don't want/need all that for an
initial setup) -- but certificate requests, and certificates is still too
hard.

[https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/ssl-
cert](https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/ssl-cert) helps, but afaik, nothing
automagically does the right thing, yet (install certifate under /etc/ssl and
the private key under /etc/ssl/private and symlink under
/etc/exim/cert.{key|der or whatever} and ditto for other daemons that share
the same cert/key.

And then there is tuning to disable plain text for most of those services.

So, yeah, it's still too complex.

I really don't understand everyone that are panicked about getting your domain
blacklisted -- yes, if you send spam you'll be blacklisted. Yes, if you set up
an open relay, that's bad. But you really have to work pretty hard to set up
an open relay these days.

------
mirsadm
Is there any way to sync my contacts/calendar such that they are available
outside of the Fastmail app? For me that is the only reason I haven't
completely switched over to Fastmail. There doesn't appear to exist a nice
solution on Android to do that.

~~~
robn_fastmail
Any CalDAV connector for Android will do the job. We recommend CalDAV-Sync:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib)

Once we have CardDAV available, then we'll be recommending CardDAV-Sync.

~~~
joelrunyon
Any option for ios?

~~~
nmjenkins
iOS supports CalDAV natively. Just follow the instructions at
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone.html)
(scroll down for calendar section).

------
bruce_one
Have you got/had any thoughts about making the Android app available through
avenues other than the Play store?

(eg Aptoide or similar, or even just a link to the apk)

I have Fastmail and support for Android apps; but no Play store access...

(And if it was a concious decision not to, any particular reason? :-) )

~~~
robn_fastmail
The main feature of the Android app is push notifications, which requires
Google Play Services. A version of the app without push notifications is
pretty much identical to just using the regular web app in Chrome Android, so
there didn't seem to be a lot of point doing distribution via other means
(with the extra maintenance overhead that brings).

If there's enough demand for something else then we'll be happy to revisit
this.

~~~
bad_user
That's odd. I remember the K9 email client working on a phone with CyanogenMod
and without Google Play or the other Google services and I was getting
notifications on new emails.

Maybe my memory is failing me. But what are Android apps that are published on
Amazon's Appstore or on F-Droid doing for push notifications? Also, what about
offline access? Is the Android app functional in offline mode?

I don't know how many people are using Androids without Google Play on it, but
those of us that do use Android without Google Play would appreciate a version
installable from somewhere else. If you've got the resources that is, no
pressure :-)

And as a suggestion, given that this is just a packaged web interface, it
would be awesome to see it published for Firefox Mobile / Firefox OS. They
apparently do expose an API for push notifications for example -
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Simple_Push...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Simple_Push_API)

~~~
robn_fastmail
> That's odd. I remember the K9 email client working on a phone with
> CyanogenMod and without Google Play or the other Google services and I was
> getting notifications on new emails.

On Android platform notifications and push notifications are different things.
Any app can drop a notification into the notification area, and that's what
most mail clients do in response to IMAP traffic.

A push notification is a small chunk of data sent by a server to Google's push
channel with a target device/app identifier, which Google then sends on to the
device. The target application wakes up and receives the data, and can do
whatever it likes in response (or nothing at all). The FastMail app responds
to pushes by calling back to the FastMail servers to find out what changed and
update the platform notification accordingly).

Without the push channel, there's nothing that can trigger this, so you don't
get notifications. We could wake up and poll regularly, but that's going to be
pretty horrible for your battery.

There are other push channels around (eg Amazon have one) but they have
different interfaces and its not at all clear there's enough demand to make it
worth the time and effort to develop, test and maintain.

Until then, the app without notification support is almost identical to the
regular web app in Firefox or Chrome, so you might as well just use it that
way.

> And as a suggestion, given that this is just a packaged web interface, it
> would be awesome to see it published for Firefox Mobile / Firefox OS.

I did look into it briefly, mostly to make sure we weren't making any
architectural choices that would prevent it in the future. Right now though
there's basically no demand for Firefox OS. If it becomes worth the time and
effort to do it, we'll reconsider it.

------
pwnna
Is 2FA only sign in with app password (google like) support coming anytime
soon? This is the only reason why I haven't switched yet.

~~~
robn_fastmail
We're hoping to overhaul our authentication system next year. App-specific
passwords is on our list.

------
joneil
On Android I keep getting "Sorry, legacy Guest/Member accounts are not
supported. Please upgrade your account to use the FastMail app". I only signed
up a few months ago, and can't find any options for an upgrade. Help?

(p.s. Excited to try it out!)

Edit: I am using a custom domain (a few different business accounts) if that
is relevant.

~~~
robn_fastmail
Please contact support. That's definitely not right.

~~~
joneil
Done, thank you!

------
dsl
It seems to only be a slick wrapper around the website. No options, no unread
message count on the icon, no ability to easily switch between mail and
calendar...

I love FastMail, and can't wait to see where they go with a 2.0 release.

~~~
robn_fastmail
It _should_ have an unread message count on the icon. But yes, the iOS
version's only significant feature over the regular web app is the addition of
realtime push notifications.

The Android app has a lot more right now, mostly because the web app
experience has been pretty terrible in the stock Android browser so there was
a lot more work needed to get it up to scratch.

Of course we'll keep working on it; we've got loads more plans :)

~~~
dsl
Ah ha! It didn't update until I got a new email.

Let me know if you need beta testers!

~~~
robn_fastmail
Ahh yes, I can see why that would happen. I'll file an internal dev ticket,
thanks.

------
yfefyf
Can't wait for their `Device contacts integration`.

------
chrisblackwell
I would love FastMail to add tags or labels. That is the one primary feature
making me still forward my FastMail email to Gmail. I love having email in my
inbox already labeled (or tagged) so I can have context.

For example, one of the companies I work for uses purple in their logo. So I
tag all emails from them with their company name, and add make it purple.

~~~
swartkrans
What's the benefit of using fastmail if you just forward to gmail?

~~~
toomuchtodo
To drop Gmail in the future when Fastmail reaches feature parity.

------
bigphishy
What isn't there to love about fastmail?

~~~
moretrees
Bad Support? Australia based?

~~~
josteink
Bad support? Compared to _Google_? Come on. Nothing is worse than Google as
far as support goes.

The only humans I've ever talked to there was when they erroneously charged me
10-100x as much as they should for my adwords campaign.

Put enough money on the table and they are willing to talk, but that's about
it.

~~~
moretrees
Why are you comparing it to google? It's pretty obvious Google offers no
support.

Fastmail.fm provides bad support and that is a fact.. They themselves know it
and say so. They're trying to get the time down to 24h but as it is right now,
it's bad.

------
jpope
Awesome work fastmail team. I'll give it a try but, I doubt it'll replace K-9
for me.

Any plans on open sourcing the app(s)?

~~~
jpope
actually, nevermind. I see (at least on android) that all this bacially is a
webview of the default mobile interface. (which works quite nicely by the
way...)

~~~
robn_fastmail
There's more in there than just the webview: all the push channel and
notification stuff, a JMAP client, a Gravatar client and cache, sharing stuff,
smartwatch hooks, etc. That said, none of it is particularly interesting or
difficult.

No plans to open source it at the moment, but we might if there was sufficient
demand.

------
zw
Thrilled to see FastMail tastefully and respectfully grow their ecosystem. I
can see that, at least for the iOS app, it's pretty much a web view wrapper;
I'm willing to give it a pass for the most part because FastMail's webapp is
one of the best I've used… ever.

Even still, as a green-fields iOS app, I'd expect to see a little more in the
way of embracing features that are now native. We have notification actions,
extensibility, file sharing, and a Pebble SDK too, y'know.

Still, keep up the good work! You'll have my dollars as long as you're not
Gmail.

~~~
robn_fastmail
> We have notification actions, extensibility, file sharing, and a Pebble SDK
> too, y'know.

Apart from the Pebble SDK, most of those landed in iOS 8. We were already in
testing at the time it came out and our lead developer was preparing to
travel, so we decided it was better to release rather than wait a few more
months.

Of course there will be updates. We want to do lots more with the app; this is
just the beginning :)

------
mbesto
Does FastMail have push for native iOS Mail.app yet?

~~~
robn_fastmail
No, and it won't happen unless Apple open up their IMAP push channel.

Now that our app is released we're unlikely to pursue this further.

~~~
Osmium
There are free and open source implementations of Exchange ActiveSync that
would allow native push support on iOS. Any particular reason you haven't
pursued this?

~~~
robn_fastmail
Protocol and implementation complexity, the need for patent licensing and our
desire to use standard protocol wherever possible.

------
cvburgess
I really wish that Mailbox would accept any IMAP provider - I use Mail.app
solely for my FastMail at the moment.

------
hendry
Pity they can't just get contacts working with the IOS mail client.

Even more a shame since their Web app is pretty good.

~~~
brongondwana
We're working on that as well, it's just taking a little longer than the app
did, so we released the app first.

~~~
nichodges
That's awesome news. Now the app is here this was the final drawback of using
Fastmail.

------
pluma
Finally! I've been hoping for this for years now.

Let's hope it's as user friendly as their mobile website.

------
ForFreedom
Is there an app password protect as in CloudMagic? What is the one good reason
for me to opt fastmail?

~~~
girvo
> What is the one good reason for me to opt fastmail?

It's not Google.

For some people, that's not a good reason, but for me it is. The fact that
it's super fast, very powerful, and are an Australian company (I live in
Australia, so things are very fast) are merely bonuses :)

~~~
bruce_one
> (I live in Australia, so things are very fast)

I'm pretty certain the Fastmail servers are in New York; so that's a bit of a
funny reason ;-)

~~~
robn_fastmail
Haha. Yeah, they're in New York. Our offices are in Australia though, so its
in our best interests to make sure things go fast! I can only imagine what it
must be like for people actually in the US :)

~~~
ForFreedom
1\. Does your app have a passcode to open? 2\. Can I move mails from spam to
inbox and from inbox to Spam?

~~~
robn_fastmail
> 1\. Does your app have a passcode to open?

No. We'll look into it.

> 2\. Can I move mails from spam to inbox and from inbox to Spam?

Yes, tap the message while open and use the "report spam" or "not spam" button
(the shield icon).

~~~
ForFreedom
How fast can you include a passcode?

~~~
robn_fastmail
It won't be this year. We hadn't even considered this feature before so it
needs to be investigated and then if we want to do it, designed, implemented
and tested. That doesn't have to take a lot of time, but we have other
priorities first.

------
robert_h
I might give this a go. I'd probably want a passcode option like Boxer to use
permanently though.

~~~
ForFreedom
Boxer has a passcode to open the app? Cloudmagic has one

------
Osmium
Really really glad to see this. Lack of push notifications on iOS has long
been a sore point for me with FastMail. Still don't understand the technical
or legal issues behind not offering Exchange compatibility as many of their
competitors do though. That would allow push notifications with the native
Mail app.

------
eridius
I'm bummed that this is a brand new iOS app with no legacy history but it
still doesn't add a button to use extensions at the login page. I use
1Password to store my login information, and it's a much better first-run
experience if I can trigger the 1Password extension to login.

~~~
robn_fastmail
Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into it for a future update.

------
joelrunyon
Finally. The web app seemed to have pretty limited functionality.

------
aladine
Wonderful! I wait for it quite a long time. it has already have good interface
in safari iOS, but I prefer a handy app

------
yottah
Sure, Australian government will soon spy on you if you use Fastmail. But
every other mail provider is spied on by US government at least. And Australia
is an enlightened first world country so unless you're doing something
illegal, you might as well consider it better than being spied on by US
government.

