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

FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

blog.fastmail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 124 posts

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#81

Post by robn_fastmail »

latch wrote: post #73
robn_fastmail wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more that this is a thread about the new apps, not about our privacy policies. If you want to start a new thread somewhere I'd be happy to comment on it.

Fastmail customer here. This is a perfect place to answer the question: it's visible, it's the right audience, and it's relevant. Talking about whether we should be using Fastmail at all is, to me at least, related to the question of whether I should install the app. Besides, this is an internet forum. It has threads. This is how these things work. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096768/Woody-Harrel...

At this point, there are no new laws. Its still being debated in Parliament and submissions are still being reviewed, so its not clear what the final act is going to look like, assuming it passes. So we can't really comment on its impact until we know what's actually in it. We just don't know yet how this is going to play out.

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#82

Post by ForFreedom »

robn_fastmail wrote: post #76
bruce_one wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I live in Australia, so things are very fast) I'm pretty certain the Fastmail servers are in New York; so that's a bit of a funny reason ;-)

Haha. Yeah, they're in New York. Our offices are in Australia though, so its in our best interests to make sure things go fast! I can only imagine what it must be like for people actually in the US :)

1. Does your app have a passcode to open? 2. Can I move mails from spam to inbox and from inbox to Spam?

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#83

Post by Osmium »

Really really glad to see this. Lack of push notifications on iOS has long been a sore point for me with FastMail. Still don't understand the technical or legal issues behind not offering Exchange compatibility as many of their competitors do though. That would allow push notifications with the native Mail app.

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#84

Post by grault »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #29

I would love FastMail to add tags or labels. That is the one primary feature making me still forward my FastMail email to Gmail. I love having email in my inbox already labeled (or tagged) so I can have context. For example, one of the companies I work for uses purple in their logo. So I tag all emails from them with their company name, and add make it purple.

In FastMail you could already search based on some of the email headers, like from:thatpurplecompany.com (or has:attachment, https://www.fastmail.fm/help/receive/search.html) and then you could save the search.. It's visually not that rich, but it solves your problem.

Tagging (for me) is more about ad-hoc grouping. As giving it a thought right now it's even hard for me to come up with a realistic use case.

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#85

Post by brongondwana »

rufugee wrote: post #40
lancewiggs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually - I'd really like an answer to that as well. A public answer.

Totally agree. Things like that should be discussed in public, not buried in individual emails.

I agree with this as well, though it will be buried deep in an individual thread. We don't like making knee-jerk responses to the political posturing by our politicians, because they don't influence what we see.

Here's what I can tell you:

* while in theory the new laws allow law enforcement to request information from a broad set of computers instead of a single computer, that actually makes sense as a representation of reality. The information for a single user on our system is already spread over multiple machines - 3 separate IMAP servers in a replica set, 4 different database servers in a replica set, plus at least one backup server. Requiring law enforcement to get 8 separate warrants for "all the data about user X on those 8 machines" would be patently stupid.

* we haven't seen any change in the nature of requests coming from law enforcement, and we have no reason to expect them to change.

* our position of fully cooperating with the Australian authorities if they present a lawful warrant for the data on an individual user, having obtained due cause, has not changed. We do not place ourselves above the courts. We do not implement dragnets, but we have provided data on individual users in response to warrants, and will continue to do so. This is quite clearly spelled out in our privacy policy.

(edited: just formatting)

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#86

Post by unicornporn »

FastMail looks tempting. But, excusez-moi, it seems quite expensive for what (you seem to) get. I have an email archive that's around 20GB on server. That would cost me $120 a year. Right now I'm paying for a Dreamhost account. For around $100 a year I get "unlimited" storage, IMAP access, Roundcube access and support for domains. And this is only besides all the shared hosting features has never let me down so far.

I know FastMail is dedicated to delivering email/calendar only and that they are famous for an elegant service. But seriously, how fancy can email be?

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#88

Post by danchristian »

vincentkriek wrote: post #61
sasas wrote: post #57

Please be aware FastMail is subject to Australian law. [1] The government is scrambling to pass laws for mass surveillance [2] and controversial data retention laws. [3] [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/australian-government-... [2] http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/oct/16/privac...

What other email host would you advice that is on better law?

https://runbox.com

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#89

Post by pluma »

unicornporn wrote: post #86

FastMail looks tempting. But, excusez-moi, it seems quite expensive for what (you seem to) get. I have an email archive that's around 20GB on server. That would cost me $120 a year. Right now I'm paying for a Dreamhost account. For around $100 a year I get "unlimited" storage, IMAP access, Roundcube access and support for domains. And this is only besides all the shared hosting features has never let me down so far.…

I'm not sure what Dreamhost's e-mail offering is like, but I chose FastMail over running my own e-mail server because I'm not enough of a sysadmin to be confident in setting up and maintaining my own e-mail server without opening it up to abuse (there are enough involuntary spam relays already).

When I compared the major e-mail providers at the time, FastMail won because it was the closest to running your own server in terms of configurability (but much easier), it provided a great web UI (not as important for me personally, but some people don't use native clients), it was somewhat open about its technical infrastructure and it was doing one thing and one thing only (i.e. providing e-mail/calendar/contacts services).

Re: FastMail app for iOS and Android now available

#90

Post by e12e »

robn_fastmail wrote: post #66
e12e wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JMAP does indeed look very interesting. In my (very, very slow) path towards writing my own email client, I've also come to expect that a new, simpler protocol is probably a better bet than imap. Partly this belief is bolstered by the fact that the creator of sup went on to make heliotrope: https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/heliotrope [ed: I suppose the canonical repo is https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope -- but a…

> Is the code on: http://jmap.io/server.html actual code? No, just pseudo-code. Right now we don't have a lot of real JMAP code. FastMail's implementation technically isn't JMAP. To write JMAP we took our current protocol and filed off a lot of the pointy edges. We're working to update our own implementation, and we're also working on open-source reference servers and clients. There's a mailing list just starting her…

Thanks, and for those, like me, that want to sign up with a regular mail account (say, like a fastmail account;) -- one can do that via the web at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jmap-discuss/join (ie: group-url+/join), or by emailing +subscribe@googlegroups.com.

The [ed:first, doh!] I tried (make sure you log out of google's estates first) -- the second I haven't tried, but works according to: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/13508/how-can-i-s...

Note, that if you send a subscribe email, you'll be subscribing the from-email in the mail you send (I usually subscribe with unique addresses to lists and accounts, so that I can more easily see which are harvested/given away for spam abuse. So far linked-in, and adobe are top (the latter presumably due to the big account leak) -- and that's a bit of a hassle as all email clients suck ;-).

Post reply on HN