Amazing to reflect on how much goodwill Fastmail has cultivated with me just by being a reasonably priced, full-featured, competent-support-having service. I'm unlikely to ever do anything with the Fastmail API, but I still upvoted mainly because I'm enthusiastic about the company.
The problem with Fastmail is its based in Australia.
A big no no if you care about your privacy.
They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
It's really disappointing to see this comment second on a page despite the fact that yet again... the law has no impact on Fastmail and never has. This is the unfortunate impact of FUD, where clueless comments will carry forward wrong views for years, even in the face of overwhelming truth around it.
Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service. There is no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do with nearly every other email service.
Fastmail is a company providing email services. No company doing that can every give you privacy against a government looking at who you're talking to, when you're talking to them. Only a minority protect the content, and even then it's only when using a proprietary protocol.
The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
This is correct. Fastmail have actually spoken about this, and their silence on any particular topic can possibly be seen as a canary. They're a great company trying to survive in a hostile environment. I really hope that the new Australian federal government will get around to winding back some of the draconian laws the previous mob brought in, but I'm not holding my breath.
Fact is, 99% of your email exchanges will be with MS and google anyway, so that horse has bolted. In terms of the threat model facing 99% of people, getting auto banned from Gmail is a far bigger risk than big brother reading their email. I care about privacy and seriously considered protonmail, bit it was too hard to use effectively (no IMAP) and FastMail is still a huge step up from Gmail or self hosting, balancing ease of use and risk mitigation. Excited to try out the API!
There's no point in being paranoid about "privacy". Where's the perfect privacy? I have been with Fastmail for over 14 years now, and I didn't feel the need to abandon them for other "privacy toting email service providers like Proton and Tutanota". I welcome the Australian government to check my filter rules on how to manage inbox zero and an excellent spam filter. While they are at it, I would welcome if they have a tutorial on sieve filter rules. I'd be delighted if their technocrat helps me with managing my MX records a pain-free experience.
Based/headquartered in Australia yet have servers hosted in multiple locations around the world? IIRC, some are in New Jersey and don't know how accurate it still is [1].
> They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another protonmail account, but I doubt it).
> Goes to show that even if there are a lot of competitors in a product space you can still do well simply by giving a shit.
The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash. Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen. That's the society we've built and live in.
It always depends on whether you can make managers feel like they make a difference; or else they will invent their own ways to make a difference and get a raise.
For me, the primary concern are the horror stories of having everything in your life linked to a gmail account and then getting locked out with no recourse from google support. My secondary concern is to have a custom domain and email aliases. In my country the abuse of personal information is rampant and I would like to start pursuing companies who sells my information without consent.
Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.
Used FastMail as part of my big DeGoogle initiative last winter. Very happy with it. However, one of the main considerations of Fastmail vs. other providers is that the domains they used are 'Visa-free' in terms of spam catchment - everything gets through!
But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.
For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
I recently renewed my 3 year subscription with them and I've been a customer since 2017, before that I was on GSuite and O365. I still remember coming form GSuite and noticing just how easy it was to set everything up, pretty sure I had everything migrated over in ~1hr.
Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal email, nothing beats Fastmail.
But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one inbox.
Yea, after awhile of using Fastmail for my own needs, I found that I really liked the service so I decided to setup a reseller account with them and have been switching my att/yahoo/sbcglobal email customers over to this service as there have been some issues with login and resetting passwords due to the merging of att and yahoo.
I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great experiences with the import tools and security features. The admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great, its built right into the normal settings interface, and they have good privacy features with the relationship between the reseller and the end user.
Same. About a month ago I only knew of them by name but went down the rabbit hole and read all of their docs & checked out their repo's. I'm basically on the edge of de-googling my life because they are the first bunch to give me confidence that there is a long-term path forward. I hope they stay true to their stated mission.
I'm extremely enthusiastic about the company, I loved their product. I just couldn't deal with the concept of both Australian and American jurisdictions.
If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions, I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
It depends entirely on your threat model. Their claims about privacy are fine if what you're worried about is ads and tracking rather than government surveillance.
I’d disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who has two or three or four people at home who need their own mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too. But there are services that are far cheaper that have been operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
Yep. I spent the best part of a decade fretting and procrastinating over one day sorting out 3-4 Google domains. When they announced they’d start charging I finally decided to move to and was astonished at how easy the migration to Fastmail was. I was done in about an hour across my desktop, laptop and phone. Haven’t had a single blip of any kind since then.
Totally agree on this, love the full-featured -- but still very clean and fast -- interface. Been happily giving them some of my money for almost 10-years.
Better than gmail recently. I have 4 different gmail accounts set to forward to a single FM account. In recent weeks some people here were saying they got spam in their inboxes on gmail, and I also did get a few. They were forwarded to FM which marked them as spam.
Actually really good. I've just checked my spam folder and it's full - nothing has made it through (I'd forgotten it was a thing, much like with Gmail).
Started the transition from Gmail to FastMail at custom domain yesterday. Presence of an API was definitely important (though I probably should have tested it out during the free trial).
Had some initial buyer's regret for no reason in particular (did the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices will go up over time), but already feeling really solid. The web client is very snappy, documentation is good, able to import my Gmail messages, contacts, calendars, and even filters in a snap (though imperfectly). Looking forward to seeing how the API compares with my Google API scripts. Definitely seems to be more knobs and buttons for power users (more powerful filters, regex, etc.).
While not relevant to FastMail per se, also really glad to finally start the painful process of migrating decades of accounts to my custom domain email, where I hope it will stay forever. Growing concern about the (admittedly slim) possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator, as was the recent move to force the Google Apps stuff to a paid plan.
Setting up a custom domain lets me act on my anger every time I hear a story about google being shit to their customers: I pop open bitwarden, find something still on gmail, and move it over. I'm about half way through the alphabet. Feels good.
I know it's a meme that HN loves Fastmail, but it's a good meme. I've been using them for ~5 years and love it. I use their custom email alias feature all the time. The few times I've had to interact with their support it's been prompt + effective!
I migrated from Google Workspaces to Fastmail earlier this year and their migration tools made for a smooth transition.
My only big complaint is their woeful spam filtering. I get 1-2 spam emails a day, and I mark each and every one as spam. They're all of the same format; The subject line is something like [Symantec Invoice #431343] with the body being empty and a single .jpg attachment of a fake invoice. The company name and design of the invoice changes but it's always the same pattern.
I've contacted support but they shrugged their shoulders and suggested I just keep marking them as spam.
It's annoying, but I pre-paid for 3 years so I don't quite feel like jumping back to Google.
*Oh I just thought of another gripe that I didn't consider before switching: their calendaring system isn't really that useful for shared calendars unless the other people you want to share with are also Fastmail customers. This seems obvious when you think about it but I take for granted that literally everyone in my life has a Gmail account that I can share calendars with.
For what it's worth, I get the EXACT same format of spam, and I am also on Fastmail. It's a minor nuisance. One day I will write a sieve filter to try to catch them, because basically nobody sends invoices that look anything like this. But, no two of them really look the same...
Re: spam, this is why you should be using your own domain with wildcard alises. If an alias becomes a target of spam, you can block all mail coming to that alias.
Re: calendars, with Fastmail you can use any calendar you want. I use iCloud for my calendars and just connect it to my Fastmail account.
Updating to be more accurate, it's more like 2 spam messages a week on average make it through. It's a nuisance for sure and not a dealbreaker but does make me wonder if Gmail would be catching them.
Also I do have to praise their web interface, it's startlingly fast.
I've been a Fastmail customer for nearly a decade at this point. Its the one single subscription service I will never ever balk at: it's been absolutely fantastic.
This is my 20th year of continuous subscription. They were my first SaaS purchase! I have never once experienced a disruptive issue, and my mailbox is still spam free after all these years.
> possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator
As a current user of Gmail and HN reader (where users blocked for seemingly no apparent reason and no realistic path of recovery), this possibility bugs my mind too.
Apart from Fastmail being amazing for email, they’ve been a great source of customer service to me in several ways. I like to point it out in case people are on the fence and considering a switch. My most appreciated instance was this:
Many years ago I was broke and going through rough financial strains. My yearly contract with Fastmail was up and I asked for a grace period. They did it, no questions asked, for 2 months.
It wasn’t a thing. When I renewed my contract we settled up and it was all good. It’s been quite a while now and I’m still glad to support them.
The best thing Fastmail could do (IMO obviously) for JMAP adoption is to open up their own clients to other servers.
(i.e. if I'm developing a JMAP server, let me use the Fastmail app to test. If Protonmail wants to focus on server & security, let them recommend 'a JMAP client such as Fastmail' to their customers.)
Unfortunately though I tweeted (something snappier to that effect towards) the CTO a while ago; it's 'not on the cards' was the phrasing as I recall.
(I'm a former happy customer - I was doing something a bit weird receiving via SES, but no reason to think it wouldn't work, and indeed it did work for years as a paying customer until it broke overnight. Response was no sorry deliberate configuration change. I raced (no access to email!) to get something workable without Fastmail before my renewal that weekend; suddenly it started working again, no further contact from support, but by then I'd got my own solution almost working which I'd always intended on anyway. The JMAP part's still early WIP though, so I really would like to be able to use their client app as a solid reference.)
Mail temi looks promising, but it's been around for a long time and only has two reviews, and no reputation. It's also not open source. How can I know that the app is trustworthy?
I've been looking for an alternative to Spark (Readdle) for iOS and MacOS for years, and have yet to find anything that even comes close. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of things Spark does and it's missing some nice features, but the unified look and feel across both platforms is fantastic.
The real integration services like Fastmail need is for DNS. It's crazy that I need to understand DNS records and copy/paste them in order to have someone else host email on my behalf. When I sign up for Fastmail, there should be a quick OAuth flow out to my domain registrar for me to delegate a [sub]domain for Fastmail to control, which returns a token they can use to set all the A, AAAA, CNAME, SPF, DKIM, etc up for me. There is a protocol[0] for such a thing, but adoption has been slow, and I found it a bad fit for open source projects.
Yes, yes, yes! We've wanted to build a connector for them for a while now, but so far, there's no API to pull the appropriate DNS records to automate setup of DKIM.
IMO this is an API that should be implemented on your end (dnsimple), not theirs. There are a relatively small number of DNS providers which all provide essentially the same interface (CRUD operations on records), but there are a huge number of services that need to set up DNS records, including open source projects self-hosted by many individuals. It's not realistic for DNS providers to implement integration with every possible service, but the opposite is totally doable.
If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect, Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because it sends traffic your way.
As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for open source projects in its current form. I've done some work on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1]. Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the perspective of a DNS provider.
A quick dnsimple / fastmail question, what is the purpose of the _client._smtp SRV record in you fastmail template? The only thing I can find about it seems like a draft rfc standard that was never finalized. FastMail definitely doesn't have any info on it in their support pages.
I cannot recommend fastmail to anyone for the simple reason that if your account expires and gets deleted, anyone can create an account with the same email address and take over your identity. This seems like a massive security flaw.
You should always own the domain your email is sent to. If this is the case then the solution to this problem is trivial with DKIM/SPF, if this is not the case then it does not matter what third-party provider you are using because this can always happen. Your complaint has nothing to do with fastmail.
Other email providers don't allow recycling of account names - once they're gone, they're gone.
That said, I do agree that using a domain you own is better practice. However, I have been burned there before - I used a .eu domain for pretty much all of my email sign-ups for over a decade, then had the domain yanked away because of Brexit. Yes, my fault for not realising that this would happen (I lay some of the blame with my domain provider for not mentioning it to me at all).
But on the flip side, good luck making any kind of sensible Gmail account for example, which means either fastmail needs multiple domains or their service will see new customers reducing over the years as people can't get sensible email addresses.
The same thing is true of phone numbers, but it's more obvious that there's a finite number of... numbers... So they need to be reused eventually.
I've been on Fastmail for many years. I didn't manage to _quite_ get rid of my gmail address, but it's close. I don't have to open gmail at all - and any mail that still makes it that way is forwarded to Fastmail.
I can use my own domain too. It's pretty great. The web interface is simple but it has improved immensely since I've started to use it.
I guess this is the missing piece. One thing I miss from gmail is its ability to automatically sort incoming email into categories, even if you don't have filters. Fastmail has all the classic filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a major hassle. I've been using Sanebox to keep it less insane, but I don't like giving access to third parties.
I guess I'll play with this thing and write something to organize my inbox.
For many of us, we aren't trying to get rid of the gmail account (as you would still need it for the play store on android devices and so on), it is to break the dependency on google in the event that they nuke the account and being unable to recover from it. Example: I use my gmail account for my bank, municipality and even our tax authority. If am not able to access my email address (and mobile number for that matter), it could potentially have harmful consequences when interacting with those entities. The idea is to be able to put the gmail on the back-burner and only use it when needed, basically to become immune to the whims of google and their ban hammers.
You can apply the new-style filters against existing emails in the "preview" window. That won't help if you're heavily using custom Sieve scripts, but it does handle a lot of common scenarios for me.
Readit News
They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-data-i...
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill
Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service. There is no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do with nearly every other email service.
The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
- https://fastmail.blog/company/nyi-datacentre-move/
No, they need a warrant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28410178
However, if you don't like fastmail, who would you recommend instead?
Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another protonmail account, but I doubt it).
Dead Comment
The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash. Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen. That's the society we've built and live in.
They pick up the phone and answer your questions.
They don't have you wait in a queue for 45min and affirm that your call is important to them.
They don't give new customers better prices than loyal ones.
If they update local bandwidth, you get that for the same price you paid before, without asking.
That's it.
I gladly pay less than $20 a month extra for all this peace of mind.
Deleted Comment
- must work well
- must be a paid service with proper support from a vendor focused on email (i.e. not consumer gmail)
- must allow custom domains (so I can regain control over my email if the provider goes under by updating MX records)
- must be the cheapest in the absence of compelling benefits (ruled out GSuite or protonmail)
Fastmail fitted the bill and seems to be working as I would expect.
Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.
But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.
For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal email, nothing beats Fastmail.
But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one inbox.
I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great experiences with the import tools and security features. The admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great, its built right into the normal settings interface, and they have good privacy features with the relationship between the reseller and the end user.
[1] with the domain managed by Cloudflare
If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions, I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
I’d disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who has two or three or four people at home who need their own mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too. But there are services that are far cheaper that have been operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
disclaimer: FM customer.
Had some initial buyer's regret for no reason in particular (did the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices will go up over time), but already feeling really solid. The web client is very snappy, documentation is good, able to import my Gmail messages, contacts, calendars, and even filters in a snap (though imperfectly). Looking forward to seeing how the API compares with my Google API scripts. Definitely seems to be more knobs and buttons for power users (more powerful filters, regex, etc.).
While not relevant to FastMail per se, also really glad to finally start the painful process of migrating decades of accounts to my custom domain email, where I hope it will stay forever. Growing concern about the (admittedly slim) possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator, as was the recent move to force the Google Apps stuff to a paid plan.
So far so good.
Setting up a custom domain lets me act on my anger every time I hear a story about google being shit to their customers: I pop open bitwarden, find something still on gmail, and move it over. I'm about half way through the alphabet. Feels good.
desktop clients are still better than web UI's, but fastmails web UI is the absolute epitome of 'good enough'.
Both?
;-)
My only big complaint is their woeful spam filtering. I get 1-2 spam emails a day, and I mark each and every one as spam. They're all of the same format; The subject line is something like [Symantec Invoice #431343] with the body being empty and a single .jpg attachment of a fake invoice. The company name and design of the invoice changes but it's always the same pattern.
I've contacted support but they shrugged their shoulders and suggested I just keep marking them as spam.
It's annoying, but I pre-paid for 3 years so I don't quite feel like jumping back to Google.
*Oh I just thought of another gripe that I didn't consider before switching: their calendaring system isn't really that useful for shared calendars unless the other people you want to share with are also Fastmail customers. This seems obvious when you think about it but I take for granted that literally everyone in my life has a Gmail account that I can share calendars with.
Re: calendars, with Fastmail you can use any calendar you want. I use iCloud for my calendars and just connect it to my Fastmail account.
Deleted Comment
Also I do have to praise their web interface, it's startlingly fast.
As a current user of Gmail and HN reader (where users blocked for seemingly no apparent reason and no realistic path of recovery), this possibility bugs my mind too.
While they do go up, users on legacy plan still pay cheaper. I am still paying $45 for the basically same feature as the current $50 plan.
Deleted Comment
Many years ago I was broke and going through rough financial strains. My yearly contract with Fastmail was up and I asked for a grace period. They did it, no questions asked, for 2 months.
It wasn’t a thing. When I renewed my contract we settled up and it was all good. It’s been quite a while now and I’m still glad to support them.
Thanks for sharing!
(i.e. if I'm developing a JMAP server, let me use the Fastmail app to test. If Protonmail wants to focus on server & security, let them recommend 'a JMAP client such as Fastmail' to their customers.)
Unfortunately though I tweeted (something snappier to that effect towards) the CTO a while ago; it's 'not on the cards' was the phrasing as I recall.
(I'm a former happy customer - I was doing something a bit weird receiving via SES, but no reason to think it wouldn't work, and indeed it did work for years as a paying customer until it broke overnight. Response was no sorry deliberate configuration change. I raced (no access to email!) to get something workable without Fastmail before my renewal that weekend; suddenly it started working again, no further contact from support, but by then I'd got my own solution almost working which I'd always intended on anyway. The JMAP part's still early WIP though, so I really would like to be able to use their client app as a solid reference.)
Other JMAP clients: https://jmap.io/software.html
[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/
If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect, Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because it sends traffic your way.
As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for open source projects in its current form. I've done some work on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1]. Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the perspective of a DNS provider.
[0]: https://github.com/Domain-Connect/spec/issues/64
[1]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io
If you're into domain/service-specific email addresses, give it a go!
That said, I do agree that using a domain you own is better practice. However, I have been burned there before - I used a .eu domain for pretty much all of my email sign-ups for over a decade, then had the domain yanked away because of Brexit. Yes, my fault for not realising that this would happen (I lay some of the blame with my domain provider for not mentioning it to me at all).
Can you own a domain name? I was under the impression that it can still expire, which makes this solution about just as bad.
The same thing is true of phone numbers, but it's more obvious that there's a finite number of... numbers... So they need to be reused eventually.
I can use my own domain too. It's pretty great. The web interface is simple but it has improved immensely since I've started to use it.
I guess this is the missing piece. One thing I miss from gmail is its ability to automatically sort incoming email into categories, even if you don't have filters. Fastmail has all the classic filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a major hassle. I've been using Sanebox to keep it less insane, but I don't like giving access to third parties.
I guess I'll play with this thing and write something to organize my inbox.
I filed a bug report over just that, using their web form, a few months ago. No news since.