Goodbye Gmail

I made the same switch a couple years ago (GMail -> Fastmail) and have had the exact same (pleasant) experience. Fastmail is fast and has sane defaults, a powerful filtering system, and good spam detection. As a bonus, I don't have to worry about Google reading my email to show me relevant ads. I've gladly spent the money to have reliable, fast, standards-friendly email. The only thing they lack is two-step authentication.

According to the Fastmail webpage, they do support (optional) two-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

I've always found Gmail reliable, but I've seen plenty of performance issues in the last year.

I now have personal email on Fastmail and work on Google Apps. The difference is quite striking. It'll take a good 20 seconds before all of Gmail is loaded, Fastmail loads in under one second. Gmail will easily take 300-400 MB of RAM in Chrome after a few hours, Fastmail is around 40-50MB.

Then there's clicking on emails. Once you've browsed for emails in Fastmail you'll understand why I thing Gmail is slow these days.

Also Fastmail's IMAP implementation is much more reliable.

I have about 12.5k messages in my inbox at FastMail, and another 26k in separate folder. Both inboxes load instantly, and the infinite scrolling is seamless. Jumping back-and-forth between message and list view is equally quick. While they currently lack features like a calendar, they do have a lot of powerful tools -- I have several domains and email accounts conditionally filing mail into several folders, with custom personalities/signatures when replying from each folder. Very happy with it, and the devs take bugs seriously whenever I message them. (To be fair, it's usually just UI edge cases.)

Edit: Just to quickly elaborate on the infinite scrolling: FastMail takes the total number of messages in a given folder and uses that to calculate the size of the viewport. When you scroll to a given position, it fires off a small AJAX request for just the messages that are in view. Since each message is a fixed height, it gives them a lot of flexibility for calculating what to show.

Also, FWIW, they do support message threading.

Having made the switch to Fastmail a while ago, I agree with the comments - mostly.

While Fastmail is fantastic, it lacks the implementation polish of Gmail. Two-factor authentication is there, but not via a popup like on gmail. You have to enter it in the web-form. This is a hassle, because I use LastPass and it's a bit fiddly. Further, under Fastmail you create new logins in addition to the master account password. The new logins can have two-factor, but the master can't. So there is a small vulnerability in that at least one password without the protection of two-factor.

Secondly, the spam filters on Gmail are far better. Fastmail has got a bit better, but it's still worse when compared with Google's offering.

Thirdly, Fastmail costs. While I'm more than happy to pay, I doubt many people would switch services from a free to paid, just because it appeared to be slightly slower.

That said, I really love Fastmail. I'm more than happy to pay and I'm a very satisfied customer. I can't wait for the promised features of a calendar and I hope - one day - there'll be the ability to sync address books.