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

121–130 of 142 posts

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#121

Post by lozf »

james-skemp wrote: post #95
ssorc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yay 2002 Club! (December for me.)

I'd heard good things so recommended them to a quite non-technical client, and was impressed by how much simpler life got afterwards!

Still no complaints. Thanks Fastmail.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#122

Post by manuelmagic »

I'm a customer since 2011. I love all the features they added during these years (new UI, 2-step auth, mobile App, etc.) and the fact they actively develop their product is reassuring. The two or three times I contacted the customer support the assistance was excellent, once I even got a response from one of the founders.

Since they switched to the new interface a few years ago they gradually turned off features from the classic interface and then they completely switched it off. I rarely used it since the new UI was introduced, but I liked to have the option for slow connections while traveling abroad.

I enjoy reading their blog and I appreciate the open source contributions.

Offline access to e-mails and calendars with official app would be nice, but I understand it's developed as a "mobile GUI" for the webmail.

The only complain I have is that they stopped offering family plans. Once a second account was +5$ [1], now I have to pay 50$ + VAT for a second e-mail address.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing-legacy.html

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#123

Post by cotelletta »

y4mi wrote: post #56
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

But the smallest sync interval is 15 minutes and it won't sync sub folders until you open them.

It's not usable for real work, and I'm pretty sure that's how Google likes it.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#124

Post by cotelletta »

mkskm wrote: post #43
ScottFree wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ProtonMail is the most promising.

Protonmail has a huge gap between promises and what's delivered. Their IMAP bridge is slow and buggy, their mobile app hasn't been meaningfully updated in a year, and even as a paying user they put upsell ads in the sidebar, above your own folders.

If PM is not a honeypot, they are incompetent.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#125

Post by Youden »

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/…

> The A&A bill doesn't affect them

You can basically sum that up as "we weren't able to protect your privacy in the first place, so you don't have to worry about this bill compromising it".

The quote also misses that Australia has silent and warrantless access to data and that Fastmail's servers are in the US, so subject to America's three-letter agencies as well.

> I'm just some boob on the internet that doesn't speak legalese but a quick Google suggests that Gmail [0] and Outlook [1] are subject to similar laws.

The competition isn't American megacorps, it's small European companies like ProtonMail (Switzerland, as far as I can see usually requires a court order and Swiss law requires notifying the subject) or Mailbox.org (Germany, only allows disclosure with a warrant or imminent danger to life). Even if your email is left unencrypted, these countries have much stronger data protection and privacy laws.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#126

Post by noisy_boy »

The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts.

One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#127

Post by eatwater123 »

brongondwana wrote: post #101
mikece wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi! Thanks for the great service/product. Is there any possible roadmap for offline mail access on mobile in the future? I really can't be the only one that needs to access my email at various times without cell reception/wifi.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#128

Post by Grimm665 »

LilBytes wrote: post #109
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…

I've been using Edison on Android for a while now. It is pretty clean and basic. I had been using BlueMail before and agree with your complaints. Edison seems to have solved most of my problems, it's a good basic client without much nonsense.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#129

Post by kup0 »

In a very slow migration process off as many Google properties as possible, including Gmail- and Fastmail is where I've landed for email. Will be using it with a custom domain to permanently avoid any kind of "lock in".

I have a free-tier protonmail account for any instance where I think a higher level of privacy is necessary (or any email/registration that I just want to separate into its own special zone).

But for regular standard daily email, Fastmail seems to be the sweet spot for me.

Once you've had an email address for so, so long, you realize how "locked-in" you become. I once had a hotmail address as a main email, and I closed it too early, without migrating some online accounts that still used it. As a result, I completely lost access to those accounts because the companies involved said that I had to use that no-longer-existing account to confirm account deletion (or email change). I'm avoiding that mistake this time around.

Re: Fastmail – 20 Years Old

#130

Post by detritus »

noisy_boy wrote: post #126

The best thing I like about Fastmail is the keyboard shortcuts. Super fast to go through a bunch of emails and move them into their folders. Gmail has them too but for some reason I feel more comfortable with Fastmail's shortcuts. One feature I would like from their Android apps is to be able to "Mark as read" in addition to Reply/Archive/Delete from the notification drawer.

For some reason every once in a while Fastmail decides to interpret the shortcut for paste, Ctrl + V, as 'Send Mail' which has led to some curious exchanges (particularly early-on before i clicked what was happening (if not why)).
Post reply on HN