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Fastmail – 20 Years Old

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Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#61

Post by xwowsersx »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #57
xwowsersx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.) When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address a…

Good idea, thanks for sharing. So I set up an MX record (on Route 53) to point to Fastmail and also set up DKIM by adding several CNAME records for fm1._domainkey.mydomain.com. FM confirmed pretty quick that those changes were made. The last bit is SPF config. I added a TXT record as per the instructions, but I keep rechecking with FM and it's not verified. Emails from FM currently show up as being sent "via messagingengine.com". Any ideas - do I just need to wait?

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#62

Post by stilisstuk »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #25
jhrmnn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering: why don't you use your phone's native email app and IMAP?

Android 10 (at least on my Pixel 2) doesn't have a native email app (other than Gmail), though of course there are lots of options.

Fairemail let's you specify different reply from addresses (if allowed on the server). I use this with mailfence.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#63

Post by bachmeier »

It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage, which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#64

Post by xwowsersx »

xwowsersx wrote: post #61
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got inbox@firstlastname.com set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.) When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address a…

Good idea, thanks for sharing. So I set up an MX record (on Route 53) to point to Fastmail and also set up DKIM by adding several CNAME records for fm1._domainkey.mydomain.com. FM confirmed pretty quick that those changes were made. The last bit is SPF config. I added a TXT record as per the instructions, but I keep rechecking with FM and it's not verified. Emails from FM currently show up as being sent "via messagin…

Scratch that, seems to be working now. Not showing up as "via messagingengine.com" anymore in spite of the fact that it still hasn't verified SPF. Looking forward to cleaning up my email by switching to FM!

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#65

Post by outworlder »

xwowsersx wrote: post #51
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds. The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the FastMail web UI.) No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate. And I get customer support from real live…

Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

On day zero, you can also tell GMail to start forwarding all mail to Fastmail.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#66

Post by pheug »

ScottFree wrote: post #38
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the singular reason I have chosen their primary competitors over them. In this day & age you need to be aware of these details.

Which primary competitors would those be? Asking for a friend...

Protonmail probably the most hyped, but personally I switched to Tutanota. I like their commitment to open source - you can build their webmail client yourself. They support full text search (unlike Protonmail) and also 4-5x cheaper than Protonmail/Fastmail, if you're fine with their cheapest 1GB storage plan.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#67

Post by x2f10 »

sdan wrote: post #7

Been with Fastmail for a half year now and loving it. I can send emails from 10+ different domains and host files there super easily. Although I'd like to see some algorithm place important emails at the top (somewhat like Gmail) and have scheduled send, Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service!

>Fastmail is a pretty bare-bones service

This is a benefit, IMO. However, I do agree with the features you suggested sounding nice.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#68

Post by techntoke »

I personally would like to see more efforts going into open source self-host alternatives, and cloud providers enabling one-click distributed mail server deployments that enable all the functionality you'd expect from like Gmail. Such as virtual folders (labels), better mobile apps, and reliable email service. Too much effort lately has been going into cloud hosted solutions, when I know many users would gladly pay $5+ per month for quality self-hosted email service.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#69

Post by Skunkleton »

danShumway wrote: post #52
StavrosK wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, you don't need aliases for that. You can set up a catch-all at something like service@spam.yourdomain.com and have as many of those as you like, no 500 limit.

You're missing two important points. First (and most importantly), Fastmail aliases don't need to be linked to my domain. If the goal of this is to not have my identity/addresses tracked across services, it is important that I not have a single, unique identifier shared between those emails. If I sign up for Walmart with `walmart@danshumway.com`, I haven't gained any privacy. If I sign up with `walmart@fastmail.com`,…

> If I sign up for Walmart with `walmart@danshumway.com`, I haven't gained any privacy. If I sign up with `walmart@fastmail.com`, I've gained a great deal of privacy.

Depends on your thread model imo. Is it obvious to a human that "@danshumway.com" points to you? Yeah. Has anyone at walmart done the work to teach the computer about this? Probably not.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#70

Post by ocdtrekkie »

outworlder wrote: post #65
xwowsersx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

On day zero, you can also tell GMail to start forwarding all mail to Fastmail.

This is also viable, though I chose to never forward from Gmail to FastMail. In my case, my plan started long before I picked a replacement provider anyways. Second, forwarding breeds complacency: I wanted to make sure my emails never were seen by a Google server, so I didn't want to not notice that an email was sent at my Gmail, not my own address. (I still occasionally check my Gmail account for stragglers.)
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