Curious to hear how people use these!
As a fastmail user I was waiting for them, but now knowing its either labels OR folders, I will stick with folders. Labels tend to be much more disorganized for me. I consider them an extra on top, not essential
Fastmail Labels Beta
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Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#12So it looks like labels are like “multi-folders”, and unlike gmail, there is no mix of labels and folders. It’s either or.
All labels might actually be better.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#13So Mailmate should be compatible with those, can anyone confirm?
I was wondering the same. And other mail clients as well.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#14It wasn't super obvious to me, but you have to use beta.fastmail.com for this to work.
Confused me for a moment as you can complete the first step of enabling this (changing to New Rules) using the stable client.
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Oh, no, it's even more confusing than that. You enable the labels beta function on the beta website, but then it applies even on the main website.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#15Curious to hear how people use these!
As a fastmail user I was waiting for them, but now knowing its either labels OR folders, I will stick with folders. Labels tend to be much more disorganized for me. I consider them an extra on top, not essential
I have been looking for alternatives to gmail for quite some time but without luck so far aslabels are absolutely essential to me.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#16When I transitioned from Gmail to FastMail, I had to get used to using folders again instead of labels. While it was painful, I am glad I am no longer using labels, and I have no intention to start using them again. I vastly prefer being able to rely on the basic email client functionality in any given mail app, and using goofy nonstandard parts like snooze and labels makes that difficult.
I appreciate that with JMAP, FastMail has essentially become the first entity to do labels correctly, with a freaking standard behind it, but client support isn't going to be there for many years so I will avoid it. The big upside for me is it'll take away one reason people say they can't leave Gmail.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#17So Mailmate should be compatible with those, can anyone confirm?
I was wondering the same. And other mail clients as well.
Just tried it, it seems to only work one-way and tags behave like regular folders. So Mailmate shows your web-created tags as folders, but if you apply an existing tag in Mailmate nothing happens in the web version.
Edit: found that discussion on JMAP support in Mailmate: https://lists.freron.com/mailmate/2019-January/010799.html
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#18As a longtime Fastmail user, it's taken a long time to get to this point -- a labels beta. At this point, I'd like to see some truly unique native analytics on my storage rather than somewhat late attempts at market feature parity. I'd like to see a unique suite of management tools, like, say, an intelligent bulk unsubscriber. But sure, I'll test labels out.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#19Might as well put it here since Fastmail doesn’t come up often. Does anyone find Fastmail’s spam detection to be pretty mediocre? I usually get a few obviously spam emails a week in my inbox. The volume is low so I don’t mind it but that’s really the one thing I miss from Gmail.
Re: Fastmail Labels Beta
#20Interesting. Is there an IMAP attribute similar to Gmail's X-GM-LABELS?
Label support comes via JMAP. As for how this is exposed in imap.fastmail.com I'm not aware somebody checked yet. Here https://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=76159 is a feature discussion around this feature. It's bound to appear there at some point.
(I work for Fastmail, but am not really involved with the teams that have done most of the work on labels.)
In the backend, there is no difference between labels mode and folders mode; all of the changes are in the UI. There are no IMAP attributes or keywords (they're poorly supported by third-party clients); any email message can appear in more than one mailbox, where "mailbox" means "folder" or "label".
On disk, mailboxes are stored as UNIX directories: all copies of the message (i.e., in all folders/labels) are hard links to the same inode. Over IMAP, each can have its own metadata (\Seen and \Flagged, for example), and they'll probably appear as separate copies (depending on how your client decides to do things).
As you say, JMAP has this built in: each Email object has a MailboxIds property. When the web client (or your own bespoke JMAP client!) fetches emails for one folder/label, and then you click to a different folder/label, the client doesn't have to download that message again, because it already has it in its local cache.