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Fastmail – 20 Years Old

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Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#71

Post by cbsks »

hedgehog wrote: post #58
cbsks wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to use the FastMail app if you want to send from an email alias. That's the only reason I have for not using the native iOS mail app. Please let me know if you have a workaround!

You should just be able to add the other aliases in the settings for that account. I haven't personally used it but the option is there.

I don't see that option in the iOS Mail settings. Can you point me to it?

Edit: here it is: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone-aliases.html I'm going to give it a try now. Thanks!

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#73

Post by solatic »

danShumway wrote: post #33

I've been using Fastmail for a little while (I'm still migrating from Gmail), and I love their service. I've talked to support before and asked questions that got replies from a real person, which was refreshing coming out of Google's ecosystem. Their web UI is fast. Their support for custom domains is great, I can be receiving emails from a new domain in minutes. One of their most underrated features is aliases. You…

The problem with aliases is that it's effectively a way to ensure vendor lock-in even for people with custom email domains. If one of the reasons to use a custom email domain is to preserve flexibility in choosing an email provider, good luck switching providers when you have hundreds of aliases set up in the hands of hundreds if not thousands of third-parties and your strategy for managing your inbox depends on these aliases continuing to function.

It may not be nearly as strong of a lock-in as a @gmail.com address, but I'd be curious to hear how many heavy alias users are paying Fastmail on a month-to-month basis.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#74

Post by georgyo »

adimitrov wrote: post #41
kornakiewicz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I migrated about one year ago and this is a feature I really love. Every service has unique address and goes to separate folder via rules. Also, there are automatic aliases when you use your own domain. Say, you have name@domain.com, then all *@name.domain.com are also working aliases, like spotify@name.domain.com. Really neat feature.

That feature is basically the killer feature for me. I sign up for each service with a custom email and password, and save both in pass or any other pwd manager. It makes it super easy to see which service leaked your email when you get unrelated spam. I wonder whether such an occasion would be grounds for a court case against said company under GDPR.

Don't all mail service providers that allow a custom domain allow for creating a catch all email?

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#75

Post by joobus »

georgyo wrote: post #74
adimitrov wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feature is basically the killer feature for me. I sign up for each service with a custom email and password, and save both in pass or any other pwd manager. It makes it super easy to see which service leaked your email when you get unrelated spam. I wonder whether such an occasion would be grounds for a court case against said company under GDPR.

Don't all mail service providers that allow a custom domain allow for creating a catch all email?

It's not exactly a catchall; it's per user, and you can also set up rules to route to different folders based on receiving address. If there are 2 users 'joe' and 'bob' on the domain 'foo.com', joe can use any '* @joe.foo.com' address and bob can use any '* @bob.foo.com' address. Fastmail pricing is per user.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#76

Post by xeo84 »

cbsks wrote: post #44
Klonoar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The native iOS mail app is push notification enabled from FastMail; there’s no reason to not just use it.

You have to use the FastMail app if you want to send from an email alias. That's the only reason I have for not using the native iOS mail app. Please let me know if you have a workaround!

You can send email from your alias with the Mail app, I do it every day. You need to set it up manually (not use the certificate from fastmail). After you set up the email address, go to Settings -> Password and accounts -> Tap your account -> Tap you email -> tap the "Email" field and then you can add your aliases tapping the button "Add Another Email"

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#77

Post by ph4te »

cbsks wrote: post #71
hedgehog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should just be able to add the other aliases in the settings for that account. I haven't personally used it but the option is there.

I don't see that option in the iOS Mail settings. Can you point me to it? Edit: here it is: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone-aliases.html I'm going to give it a try now. Thanks!

Have been using it for years, it works great!

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#78

Post by danShumway »

Skunkleton wrote: post #69
danShumway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect you're correct right now, but people used to say the same thing about Gmail `+` addresses, and I believe some marketers have gotten smart enough to strip those.

Putting together a regex expression to strip out the domain and check to see if it's unique across a shared database of email addresses would be really easy, so I wouldn't count on this being ignored forever.

I'm a pretty boring person, so aside from general paranoia around keeping infrastructure secret I'm not particularly concerned with anyone finding out what accounts I have online. But, depending on your situation, it might also be prudent to include database leaks in that threat model as well, which are likely going to be searched through by actual humans.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#79

Post by rixed »

anuragsoni wrote: post #31
jhrmnn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My use case might not be too common, but I use fastmail with multiple aliases and the official app is the only way for me to send emails with these different aliases. Another reason is the lack of push notification (not sure if i'm using the right term) when using the built in gmail app for fastmail. It only gives me the option to poll every 15 minutes. The gmail app also doesn't support actions like snooze, swipe to…

> My use case might not be too common, but I use fastmail > with multiple aliases and the official app is the only > way for me to send emails with these different aliases.

I'm doing exactly this from Android with Aquamail.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#80

Post by radicalriddler »

Leace wrote: post #9
acheron wrote: post #3

Anyone have opinions comparing Fastmail with Protonmail? I know they're not going for the exact same market, but in the more generic market of "email services for people who don't want to use Gmail" I'd be interested in someone's comparison.

Fastmail is a direct competitor to Gmail. That is Fastmail is Gmail but different. Fastmail is opposed to E2E e-mail encryption as this makes some of their features impossible (e.g. full text e-mail search). Protonmail on the other hand has OpenPGP encryption that can be used even cross providers (on https://beta.protonmail.com composing an e-mail to Werner Koch will enable encryption). But they don't support all usu…

Wow I'm a fulltime user of protonmail for the past 12 months, but hadn't heard about the beta version. Thanks for linking that.
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