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Fastmail – 20 Years Old

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Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#101

Post by brongondwana »

mikece wrote: post #53
eatwater123 wrote: post #8

Fastmail is fantastic, no complaints at all.... besides the mobile app. I don't care about the speed or glitches or whatever others may complain about, but I travel way too much to have no offline email access on my phone. So this turns into me having 2 email apps on my phone (Android); one to do stuff in (Fastmail) and another (K-9 which is not great to write/do stuff in) that just sits there, likely hogging battery…

The mobile app is just a native shell around a browser serving up the mobile website -- why can't they have an array of account credentials and allow switching accounts? It's the little things like this that have me annoyed that I'm not just paying cash but also in terms of time and efficiency because of the features Fastmail lacks.

We do have that and have had for quite a few months now. Multiple account support in the app works nicely.

The reason we didn't ship it earlier was around push notifications and the way our accounts are sharded - if you had two different accounts on different backends, merging the pushes into a single badge count and keeping track of the per-device push credentials across the multiple backends was buggy, so it would have provided a sub-standard experience for everybody.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#102

Post by brongondwana »

jph00 wrote: post #28
alexcnwy wrote: post #13

A lot of people probably don’t know that Fastmail was started by Jeremy Howard, one of the creators of https://www.fast.ai which is by far the best way to learn deep learning IMHO :)

Thanks! I haven't been involved involved with Fastmail for the last 10 years, so I can take no credit for how amazing they've been throughout that time - but I'm thrilled to see that they're still doing well. I'm still a very happy Fastmail user :) So many little things are done right, and all with open standards.

Thanks Jeremy! Glad to hear you're still enjoying the service.

I still have fond memories of learning my way around the Fastmail infrastructure while sitting on the couch in your Port Melbourne loungeroom back in 2004. Such a long time ago.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#103

Post by brongondwana »

oil25 wrote: post #86

Sincere question - why is JavaScript required to sign up for Fastmail? Is it for browser fingerprinting? If so, what data is collected, how is it used and how long is it retained? No specific mention of it in the privacy policy. If I sign up in a virtual machine, can I later use Fastmail without running scripts?

You can use IMAP to access Fastmail without running Javascript (or I guess your own JMAP client if you wanted to write one - there isn't one that doesn't use Javascript yet) - but no, you can't use our interface without running Javascript - the client is written entirely in Javascript.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#105

Post by ehPReth »

brlewis wrote: post #87
joobus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Side note: Both joe and bob would have trouble proving in court that their addresses were sold, not guessed.

what if each local part was something long & random?

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#106

Post by wrycoder »

xwowsersx wrote: post #35

I use Gmail. Don't love it, don't hate it. What's the pitch for switching to Fastmail?

Fastmail has a much nicer web interface, with many more features. It offers multiple email aliases and custom domain addresses. You can store files and images and so transfer them between computers. You can even set up simple websites. And, they aren't scanning your mail.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#107

Post by masukomi »

danShumway wrote: post #78
Skunkleton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fro…

to be clear "+" addresses aren't a Gmail thing. they work on all mail servers. they're part of the spec for how you define an email address. Any server that doesn't support them is, by definition, broken.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#108

Post by wp381640 »

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.

I use both - protonmail for personal email and fastmail for corporate/business

Both with custom domains and aliases on PM for throaway stuff

They're both very good - the upside with PM is privacy while the downside is compatability. Fastmail I just assume my email is archived and read.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#109

Post by LilBytes »

AhtiK wrote: post #81

Everyone who is happy with Fastmail, what is your "mobile strategy"? As a Fastmail customer, I find Web app wonderful but mobile app on Android severely lacking UX. Switched to Aquamail for client over IMAP but search is unusable/slow. Suggestions/success stories?

I've been using BlueMail for a while, but search is poor and it's quite slow. I imagine my frustrations will be similar to yours with Aquamail.

I honestly haven't been able to find an e-mail client for Android that's any good yet. I paid for TouchDown (https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc7488.html) but, they were bought out by Symantec. TouchDown wasn't cheap either it was like $30 if I recall and it had the same problems. Terrible indexing, poor search, sluggish.

I'm thinking I should remove them all and just go with the web UI but. Yeah. I don't know. E-mail clients on mobile phones suck. :(

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#110

Post by y4mi »

SamBam wrote: post #59
y4mi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

last time i checked, gmail supports generic IMAP accounts as well.

But then you're using gmail.

we were talking about the android app, not the web service.

said android app supports generic IMAP accounts and doesnt need to be paired to a google account to work with them.

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