Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fastmail – 20 Years Old

fastmail.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 142 posts

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#111

Post by tasty_freeze »

reificator wrote: post #85
tasty_freeze wrote: post #83

I've been using fastmail for a few years now and their reliability has been great, prices reasonable, and their web client is fast and convenient. But there is one thing I cannot figure out. I have my own domain, say me@mydomain.com. The host for mydomain.com really is just a mail reflection service which sends to me@fastmail.com. When I send an email from the fastmail web interface, my identity is me@fastmail.com, a…

Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?

My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg

me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com

Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the people using mychild@mydomain.com will never know she switched.

As I understand it, if I change my mx record, all of them will go to fastmail, but really I want only me@mydomain.com to go to fastmail.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#112

Post by nmjenkins »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #111
reificator wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why set up a mail reflection service rather than point your MX records at fastmail and actually use me@mydomain.com?

My domain host allows setting up multiple reflectors at my domain, eg me@mydomain.com mywife@mydomain.com mychild@mydomain.com Each redirects to a different real email account. The idea is that everyone knows us by our mydomain.com address, but reality we can change different mail accounts. Eg, my daughter has one with her university, but in a couple years after graduation, she can use a gmail account but all of the…

You can set up aliases in your Fastmail account to forward mail for these addresses elsewhere: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html#target

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#113

Post by sdan »

x2f10 wrote: post #67
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.

I go to gmail once a while because my gmail spam doesn't forward to fastmail (there's some important emails that still go to gmail so I have to check) and I see a lot more useful emails at the top than with Fastmail where I completely forget about certain emails because they're buried down. This is partially my fault, but it'd be beneficial to add this as a opt-in feature.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#114

Post by eitland »

masukomi wrote: post #107
danShumway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> they work on all mail servers.

Wrong AFAIK. Unless certain mail providers have been patched recently without me noticing.

> they're part of the spec for how you define an email address. Any server that doesn't support them is, by definition, broken.

Might very well be true, I haven't checked. In that case I guess a number of people get their mail from broken mail servers so they have to deal with it anyway.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#115

Post by esquire_900 »

dsissitka wrote: post #47
tenpies wrote: post #10

I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought they would have moved their operations by now.

Why would they move? The A&A bill doesn't affect them: > Fastmail won’t be making changes to our technology or policies in response to this bill. Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption. Source: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/…

> I'm just some boob on the internet

That's one beautiful quote

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#116

Post by Mayzie »

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…

> One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties.

This is an amazing feature that I utilise all the time. I just however wish I could easily reply from that alias, as opposed to my primary one.

Yes, I know you can have a wildcard send-from address like *@account.yourdomain.com, but it will default to account@yourdomain.com and you have to manually select and replace the wildcard with the email you want to send from. As opposed to just auto-filling out the From field with the address that initially received the email.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#117

Post by Leace »

radicalriddler wrote: post #80
Leace wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's really surprising as the beta link is on the login page: https://mail.protonmail.com/login :)

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#118

Post by commandersaki »

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…

Fastmail support are slow but excellent. I asked about an obscure IMAP oddity that I was seeing in Mutt. They escalated to an expert who said it was doing things the old way and cited relevant RFCs about how to do things the new way. I managed to patch Mutt default behaviour in handling IMAP the correct way - all thanks to FM support.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#119

Post by commandersaki »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #22
tenpies wrote: post #10

I love Fastmail, but they are ultimately based in Australia. I really thought they would have moved their operations by now.

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.

All these other companies are trying to sell you on the notion of email privacy and security.

The thing is - email isn't just sitting in your mailbox to only be viewed by you. The recipient has a copy which could leak it (or via hax). Copies of email can be saved by both incoming and outgoing systems.

If you need security & privacy - email is not the technology you want to use whatsoever.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#120

Post by lozf »

Mayzie wrote: post #116
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…

> One of their most underrated features is aliases. You have up to 500 email addresses on each account, which means all of your subscriptions can be a different email account, and those accounts can't be correlated by 3rd-parties. This is an amazing feature that I utilise all the time. I just however wish I could easily reply from that alias, as opposed to my primary one. Yes, I know you can have a wildcard send-from…

You can do this if you configure those addresses under Settings, Sending Identities (used to be called Personalities IIRC). It slightly annoying the first time, but once done, any hitting reply to a mail sent to one of those addresses will already have the appropriate From header set.
Post reply on HN