I've used fastmail for 19 years now. Way back in 2000 I was travelig India for 6 months. At that time I was reading email on my university through a telnet connection with the pine client. Quite a hardcore experience! So I decided to get with the program and get a webmail. Hotmail was the hottest those days, but I never liked it. So I picked up a computer magazine on the street in Delhi and came across a review of web based email providers. Guess what. The ranked fastmail as #1! Above all the others. Never looked back since then :)
Fastmail – 20 Years Old
91–100 of 142 posts
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#92I'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 thes…
It’s not an issue if your email is primarily for newsletters, bills and other one way updates (where you are not frequently conversing back). You’ll rarely have to create an actual functioning alias in those cases because a catch-all would do reasonably well.
If you are conversing with people it’s unlikely you are going to create an alias for each person specifically, that’ll come across as super shady TBH.
So it’s not a major issue for most people because most services support 30-50 aliases easily.
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#93I'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 thes…
not sure I follow,
the mail handling is set at domain DNS level - one may choose to handle their custom domain with another provider at any time
it is zero lock-in,
I can read my custom domain email with them with minimal fuss, or I could handle it myself in any other manner if I choose so.
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#94Fun seeing Fastmail on the front page of HN the day after I started trying it out. I setup a free trial with a domain I manage through Route53, had some hickups setting the correct DNS records and reached out to their support. They were quick to respond and provided awesome, detailed technical support/hand-holding and ultimately got me up and running. The experience convinced me the love I keep reading about on here…
If you decide to use Fastmail officially, here is the referal link you can grab to get 10% off for the 1st year:
https://ref.fm/u12211285
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#95I don't think the Fastmail UI tells me but I believe I joined Fastmail in 2002 and have been using them since then. (Before that I was using Spamcop's hosted mail.) There have been some minor annoyances over the years, but in general, no major complaints. Still sad about the loss of the XMPP service a few years ago though.
This will show you when you were first invoiced: Settings -> Billing & Plan -> View payment history and printable invoices 2002 as well and have been extremely happy with the service.
Thanks for detailing where to find this. Looks like 2002 (August) as well.
Use my Gmail far more, but my Fastmail is primary for accounts that matter.
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#96I'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…
+1 to migrated from Gmail. Will never look back. Fastmail rocks!
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#97Happy Fastmail user for 3.5 years so far. I particularly like (and am happy to support with my subscription fee) that they have active engineering staff building new technology and contributing it back -- in particular, their JMAP protocol work, which is an open standard [1], and behind the scenes their work to improve and contribute back to the Cyrus mail server [2]. Thanks and keep it up!
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2019/08/16/jmap-new-email-open-standar... [2] https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have to configure the individual alias in the app? If so I can see it getting really tedious to keep it in sync with the aliases inside fastmail.
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#99I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this is game over.
To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or you should just cut the ties even though it makes the shift more troublesome.
Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old
#100I have been thinking about moving to Fastmail from Gmail for a long time, as I'm worried that someday an algorithm will suddenly decide that my account should be closed, and as you can't get in contact with a human at Google, this is game over. To others that have changed provider from Gmail, did you enable forwarding to your new E-mail address? I can't decide if it's a good idea to give Google the new address, or yo…
1. Start now. But don't use @fastmail.com as your email address. Get a personal domain and email address (i.e. me@efiecho.com), and forward it to fastmail.
2. Setup fastmail as the host for me@efiecho.com
3. Have your gmail account forward to me@efiecho.com. When people ask for your email, or you setup a new account, start using me@efiecho.com
That way if you later switch away from fastmail (like I did), your email address stays the same, me@efiecho.com.