I use FastMail and love it, but I've noticed that if I use SMTP, it leaks my IP address in the email headers, whereas using the web client does not.
The FastMail Security Mindset
51–60 of 301 posts
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#52Wow what a coincidence — I switched from Gmail to Fastmail exactly 1 year ago today. I couldn't be happier. I mostly use native clients, but the Web client is a joy to use, and everything I've observed about Fastmail gives me confidence in their service. I never used the Gmail-exclusive features like labels, so switching was pretty easy. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. Keep up the good work, guys.
Interesting. I switched a little over a year ago too. I like not being the product but find the web client painful. Specifically:
1. No Send and Archive
2. Sending is slooow. E.g. compose email, hit Send, wait several seconds, go back to Inbox. Gmail is instantaneous.
3. Hitting Reply is SLOOOOW to bring up the Reply pane. Fastmail does a POST that takes from 500ms to 5000ms (usually on the lower end but even that is noticeable. On the rare occasion it's longer it's incredibly frustrating).
4. Replying to a message in a thread requires the mouse. In Gmail, the keyboard shortcuts will act on the highlighted message in-thread. In Fastmail the keyboard shortcuts only act on the most recent message in the thread.
5. When viewing an email that is a response to another email, Gmail collapses the initial email and lets you expand it with an ellipsis. Fastmail does no such thing, which means you need to scroll (and scroll and scroll...) when looking up through long threads
6. Search is just OK vs. Gmail, but that's not a huge surprise.
In general Fastmail hasn't impressed me with the pace of development on the web app at all - the issues I had with it a year ago are still exactly the same issue I have today. I don't know how anybody who works on it and dogfoods it can't notice the speed issues every time they send an email.
But it's still nice to not be the product.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do precisely this with Fastmail and it works a treat. Setting up Fastmail with a custom domain was a joy, I can easily filter based on the To address, and you can setup a wildcard identity so you can trivially send email from whatever name you like at your domain. To me the only downside is the mobile app isn't quite as polished as Gmail. It doesn't work offline, and I notice occasional bugs or awkwardnesses. But i…
> To me the only downside is the mobile app isn't quite as polished as Gmail. It doesn't work offline, and I notice occasional bugs or awkwardnesses. But it's still very usable, and I much prefer the Fastmail web interface to Gmail. But FastMail supports other clients, right? I don't want to be forced to use their web interface or their app; I'm happy with the Apple-written Mail apps.
This is the best part of a standards-compliant service like FastMail. Gmail is extremely challenging to use with third party clients because it's custom features aren't supported. I've long had Gmail randomly archive (in no folders) email I told it to delete via an IMAP client, or duplicate items in multiple folders (i.e. labels) or other weird behaviors.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#54Wow what a coincidence — I switched from Gmail to Fastmail exactly 1 year ago today. I couldn't be happier. I mostly use native clients, but the Web client is a joy to use, and everything I've observed about Fastmail gives me confidence in their service. I never used the Gmail-exclusive features like labels, so switching was pretty easy. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. Keep up the good work, guys.
The only thing that I complain about with Fastmail is the lack of ability to use the calendar outside of the web UI. The email side is fantastic.
CalDAV works great! I use their calendar on my Windows Mobile device without a problem[0]. FastMail even, when they had a change that might negatively affect some calendar clients last month, bothered to test large number and notify users who might be adversely affected. I got an email telling me how to resolve the issue with my Windows Mobile device, for example.
https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/11/04/shared-calendar-improve...
[0] Actually Windows 10 has a strange quirk of CalDAV/CardDAV support: It's only supported as part of iCloud account support. The solution is to create a fake iCloud account, and then change the advanced server settings to your CalDAV and CardDAV URLs instead of Apple's URLs. And then put in the correct credentials. This is true of desktop and phone Windows 10 alike.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#55Wow what a coincidence — I switched from Gmail to Fastmail exactly 1 year ago today. I couldn't be happier. I mostly use native clients, but the Web client is a joy to use, and everything I've observed about Fastmail gives me confidence in their service. I never used the Gmail-exclusive features like labels, so switching was pretty easy. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. Keep up the good work, guys.
The only thing that I complain about with Fastmail is the lack of ability to use the calendar outside of the web UI. The email side is fantastic.
Check out DAVdroid if you are on Android (there are other options too). Provides CalDAV/CardDAV to sync with Androids native calendars and contacts.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing that I complain about with Fastmail is the lack of ability to use the calendar outside of the web UI. The email side is fantastic.
I haven't had that experience — I have it hooked up as CalDAV to my mac and iphone's native clients.
Hmm, maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been using them for a few years now and they're great. Some things I like: - plays nice with mbsync - sane system: real folders, not labels - customer service with an IRL person - identities feature
Out of curiosity, why do you consider folders to be sane, and labels not? To me I always found labels to be the exact same as a folder, but not bound to a single instance. Ie, it is everything a folder has, and more. What am I missing?
Labels are one of the very few things I miss when I switched from Google Apps to Fastmail, but labels sometimes do not work well with IMAP. Google Mail exposes labels as IMAP folders, but in an IMAP client, you will have identical messages in different folders. And since traditional IMAP clients are not really equipped to deal with them, label management gets annoying.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deploying a browser Javascript application locally does not automatically protect you from serverside malicious Javascript; you have to know a lot more about how the application is structured to know whether it's even helpful.
Deploying any application locally puts you entirely at mercy of whoever wrote it, and those that know how to abuse it. That holds true for any type of application. However, in this context, deploying this particular self-contained application locally protects against the hypothetical attack where a genuine application is later modified to turn malicious. It is relatively easy to look for and identify any execution of…
No, it does not. You've missed my point. Deploying a browser JS application locally would help you if you could be sure that the application never loaded any additional Javascript from the server during execution. But browser JS applications can in fact do that, and so local deployment does not help as much as you think it does.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#59Wow what a coincidence — I switched from Gmail to Fastmail exactly 1 year ago today. I couldn't be happier. I mostly use native clients, but the Web client is a joy to use, and everything I've observed about Fastmail gives me confidence in their service. I never used the Gmail-exclusive features like labels, so switching was pretty easy. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. Keep up the good work, guys.
Are you happy with the FastMail native mobile apps? I've tried to use Android FastMail but it's quite clumsy compared to Google mail or apps like AquaMail.
I did switch to AquaMail and configured it to use FastMail through IMAP but there is no fast search. A good and fast search for mail is super critical.
Because of the lacking mobile app I'm unfortunately considering the move back to Google Apps.
Re: The FastMail Security Mindset
#60Wow what a coincidence — I switched from Gmail to Fastmail exactly 1 year ago today. I couldn't be happier. I mostly use native clients, but the Web client is a joy to use, and everything I've observed about Fastmail gives me confidence in their service. I never used the Gmail-exclusive features like labels, so switching was pretty easy. I highly recommend it to anyone considering it. Keep up the good work, guys.
How's the spam filter compared to Gmail?
It is worse than GMail. It tends to come in waves, there can be weeks where I barely get any spam in my inbox and then there is sometimes a couple of messages per day. I guess marking spam (Fastmail also uses a naive-bayes-based filter) and/or servers being added to a blacklist stops those waves.
I don't recall the opposite (false positives) ever happening.
I would say the numbers are generally small enough that it does not bother me.