I have been using fastmail for a few years (not coming from gmail) and the service is good indeed (I don't need much tbh). I'm considering switching at some point anyway as I'm trying to move the last parts of my digital life back to Europe, but I have not found an alternative I liked so far
An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
201–210 of 220 posts
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#202Do not recommend to rely on Fastmail for important accounts anymore! Had an issue where I needed help from customer support to regain access, and they kept dragging me along and never resolved the issue. Glad I had a backup account, otherwise I'd have been in real trouble without email access for weeks.
I canceled and left Fastmail for that reason.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped reading their privacy policy at "Fastmail is an Australian company" - Australia is a five eyes jurisdiction. That said, I'm a happy customer of almost a decade with them, but my email correspondence is pretty boring and not politically sensitive.
Interesting. Should any email provider based in any of the 5 Eyes (or even 14) be avoided? But I feel, particularly for everyday folk, we have reached the point at which avoiding some level of surveillance is now virtually impossible.
Sadly true. Even if your provider takes privacy seriously, chances are the other side is using US big tech who'd happily give away their copy of your data to any sufficiently credentialed authority.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#204Do not recommend to rely on Fastmail for important accounts anymore! Had an issue where I needed help from customer support to regain access, and they kept dragging me along and never resolved the issue. Glad I had a backup account, otherwise I'd have been in real trouble without email access for weeks. I canceled and left Fastmail for that reason.
Sorry to hear you had that experience.
There are a lot of delays and cross-checks built into our process for re-enabling access to your account, because it would be catastrophic to let the wrong person into an account because they claimed to be that person and to have "lost their password". So a "don't give access" failure is generally less costly than a "give access incorrectly" failure.
It sure sucks to be on the wrong side of one of those failures though. If you ever do give us another try, I hope it goes much more smoothly for you.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#205A shout out to the fastmail management who acquired pobox.com and kept the domain going, leveraging the fastmail infra. I was really pleased my decades long investment in @short.name paid off, and I have been able to keep a short @pobox.com instance, which I undoubtedly would lose in the migration into @fastmail.com Aside from the vanity aspect, the distinction between a real mail provider and a stable forwarding ser…
On behalf of all of us here, you're welcome!
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#206I’ve been with FastMail for probably over 25 years. The only downside is that search is not as effective as Gmail. Other than that, they have everything I would want an email provider to provide. On the last renewal I checked the competition. ProtonMail is nice but they are expensive and the end to end encryption comes at the price of breaking basic email standards. Will I keep using fastmail? If they keep their pric…
I'd be interested in knowing what kind of searches aren't working for you. Rebuilding our search infrastructure is on the roadmap (from the current Xapian to something which is easier to duplicate as tags into the client's local search database as well so online and offline searches don't have as many differences).
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to ... Yes. But like most forms of discrimination, it's probably 100% legal. Same as Chuck's Pizza Parlor refusing to deliver outside an X mile radius, and 1st National Bank refusing to use the full legal name of anyone who's name exceeds the size of their DB's 'CustomerName' field.
"Not illegal" doesn't mean we should passively accept it whether we encounter it professionally at work or personally as a customer.
True. Vote your wallet as you will. Beyond that - discretion is the better part of valor, the low-level employees you can easily complain to are very unlikely to have any say in the policy, and Chuck is free to ask you to drive 40-mile pizza deliveries for the same pay and mileage as he gives at his 10-mile limit.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#208I was a long-time Fastmail customer for probably about 10 years. I had all my family members using it, but just finished migrating everyone away.
They changed their pricing plans several years back, but kept me on the grandfathered pricing, which was very reasonable. Then earlier this year, they more than doubled my annual price, at which point I felt it was no longer worth it. At a certain point, e-mail is e-mail.
For those who just want simple IMAP e-mail hosting, I can recommend mxroute.com and purelymail.com - I've used both, and both work well, and are very reasonably priced. The owner of mxroute.com can be a bit abrasive to uh, put it politely, but to his credit he is very dedicated and responsive. The community surrounding purelymail.com is also responsive and helpful.
I'd encourage everyone to take it a step further and self-host your own IMAP server. Doing this is very simple; use a script like getmail[1] to pull your new messages from your e-mail host and deliver them to your local IMAP server. If you have a VPN set up on your phone and laptops, you can access your e-mail everywhere. Been doing this for years, and it has been wonderful knowing that I have full sovereignty over my entire e-mail history.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#209I love Fastmail. They're built on top of open source software, Cyrus IMAP, and they've more or less become the steward of that project.