Interesting to see how many of the HN crowd use the web interface. I would've thought that this would be the one place on the internet where web interface usage would be the lowest and IMAP clients the highest. Personally I just use Apple Mail, it's good enough at what it does.
When I switched over to Fastmail, my intent was to use clients for reading and composing. As soon as I started using the web interface, I realized it was better than running a separate mail application.
On iOS is still use the default Mail app, but on my two desktops the web app is fantastic.
I haven't found any clients that can handle replying with wildcard aliases, which is a feature I use several times a day. If anyone has a recommendation, I'd be very grateful!
Thunderbird has had it for ages - you do need to pick it from the menu (“customize from address”) for completely free form. You can also set up multiple identities to pick from for the more frequent addresses you use; I set up the 6 most used, and now only need to use the “customize..l option about once a week (compared to several a day before, like you)
I've been using Fastmail for well over a decade (first signed up as xxx@fastmail.fm). I use the web interface for the very simple reason that it's just as good as any desktop app I've used and it's available without installation on whatever machine I'm on - even across Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's not sexy at all, but it does what it's supposed to do consistently and without slowing me down. IMO there should be something to justify installing an app, and there just isn't in this case.
I do use the Android app, though. It has exactly the same "not sexy but works" feel for a platform where making a decent web app is even harder.
I use fastmail because of their webui. Though I'm considering moving to O365 EO1 since their contact sync is first party, I want to get rid of Google.
I'd have to front it with something like "forwardemail" for catch-all though, but it'd still be cheaper per month. And O365 is quite nice, used to work with it.
@fastmail team: please make contact sync a thing in your app, I don't want to use $megacorp, but nothing else does it well (davx doesn't cut it)
I started using their app/web when I got into snoozing messages and inbox zero. Third party apps tend to do snoozes in their own unique ways that only work in their app (or backend saas thingy in some cases)
I'm annoyed by one thing: the font weights of the read email titles are a bit too heavy and black in the list of emails, making it unnecessarily hard to distinguish them from unread emails with a quick glance. The blue dot doesn't really help much IMO. Gmail with all of its faults still nails this.
This is one reason I switched to Apple's mail services. Apple's client is 100% offline and it all just sort of works without having to fuck around with IMAP settings.
Sadly outside of me, and a few colleagues/friends who actually have heard of Hacker News, I know of nobody who has email through anything other than gmail (and the occasional yahoo or AOL holdout who just has an email address from the 'old days').
I think on HN it's front page news, but those of us who browse here (and even fewer, those who comment and upvote) are a tiny sliver of the Internet.
There are a few people who have corporate email addresses that aren't @gmail.com, but probably 30% is through GSuite, and the other 70% is through Office 365 or Exchange.
It’s been hit and miss all morning. Sometimes it will retrieve and send mail, other times the the progress bar pulses along like it’s trying without success. The status page says everything is ok. If any of their engineers are listening and the problem is geolocated, I’m in the St. Louis, MO USA area.
The web interface seems down, however using pop/smtp with Claws Mail worked: I just did a send/receive test from and to my Fastmail account succesfully.
Edit: it appears now the web interface works as well.
It is... although I regularly hit performance problems when email chains get a bit long - even not extraordinarily-busy ones less than a month or so long.
Based on their status page the only issues in the past 7 months were regular "some routing issue on the internet" related issues, which are not really avoidable.
Personally I never had an issue and definitly don't have a "more and more issues recently" feeling.
