81–90 of 121 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite disappointing how skewed our perspective on software pricing is. I grew up in an era when compilers cost $1000; now people complain about $3 for an iPhone game. Given that a burger cost $5, I'm more than fine with sacrificing a burger each month for private email.
where are you getting a $5 burger??
Might 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.
Spam detection requires a few ingredients: 1. Lots of email that you can categorize. 2. Lots of users to label the email as spam or not spam. 3. Tons of code to identify classifiable features such as clickable links, the ASN from which the message originated, and so many other things. 4. Some kind of classifier that pulls all the above into a decision about each message. And make sure it’s really fast and doesn’t req…
If you have a spouse and/or kids, and you want them to use FastMail for the same reason you do, consider putting pressure on FastMail to offer a (reasonable) family plan. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade but they’ve raised their prices (which would affect new accounts) and do not offer a family plan so this year be my last year with them. Edit: typo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a big reason why I list cheaper alternatives to Fastmail whenever the topic of emails comes here. If your needs are more than one mailbox (not aliases), then Fastmail soon becomes prohibitively expensive. A few years ago, when asked about cheaper pricing plans, Fastmail replied that it has no plans (no pun intended) to go cheaper or offer cheaper plans. There are other alternatives that are cheaper and focus…
Basecamp is launching their email service soon — Hey.com — as well.
If you have a spouse and/or kids, and you want them to use FastMail for the same reason you do, consider putting pressure on FastMail to offer a (reasonable) family plan. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade but they’ve raised their prices (which would affect new accounts) and do not offer a family plan so this year be my last year with them. Edit: typo
100% agree. I look into it once a year at least (usually multiple times), make some transition plans... but I just can't drop hundreds, almost a grand a year, to fully transition myself and the family : I fully understand that there are costs, but I feel having a family plan would increase your revenue and profit.
It's not quite clear to me: Can these rules be applied to already existing mails at creation time? This is convenient in Gmail and when I last looked at fastmail in 2014 this wasn't possible. This was the support answer: "I am sorry, but our filters only work at email delivery time. You can't really use them on emails already delivered to your account. However, to work on already delivered emails, I would suggest you…
A subset of the new rules system can be applied to existing mails when the rule is created, at least when the rules are used with folders. I've not tried the new label system, but I think the folder/label processing comes after the rule matching so I'd expect it to be the same.
Once a rule is created, there does not appear to be any way to change whether it is in that subset or not.
Consider a rule that filters on who the mail is from. On the old rule creation screen, you could select whether to use the from email address or the from name in your condition. For email address you could check for containing, beginning with, or ending with a string, matching or not matching a glob pattern, or matching or not matching a regular expression. For a from name, you could check for exact match, contains, or glob pattern.
On the new rule creation screen, there are no longer separate from email address and from name options, and there is no choice in how it matches. You just enter a string--I'm not sure how exactly it uses it.
If you want the older, more flexible conditions you can get them by clicking "switch to no-preview rules". That gives, as far as I've seen, the same condition options that the old rules did. The cost, as the name "no-preview rules" suggests, is that you do not get a preview of what messages the rule matches.
When you hit "continue" on the rule creation screen for a "standard rule" (that's their name for non-no-preview rules), it brings you to a screen that shows all your existing mail that matches the rule, with a label showing what folder it is currently in. From there you can ask to further edit the selection criteria. Once you are happy with the messages it is selection, you can tell it to go ahead and create the rule.
That brings up the screen to specify the rule actions. On that screen there are check boxes to apply it to existing messages (the ones you saw in the preview) and to apply it to new messages.
When you create a no-preview rule, there is as you would expect no preview. There are also no check boxes for existing/incoming. It applie to incoming, and only incoming.
If you create a no-preview rule, and later edit that rule, there is no way that I've found to change it to a standard rule. If you create a standard rule, and later edit that rule, there is no way that I've found to change it to a no-preview rule.
Fastmail also lets you create rules by editing the sieve code text. The sieve code contains various rules generated by Fastmail internally and all the rules created from the rules you make in the Fastmail GUI. Between each section of such rules they have a text area where you can enter your own rules.
I don't know if there is any way to get it to do the preview and apply to existing thing with rules entered via those text areas. If there were I'd be tempted to stop using the rule making GUI and just do all my rules myself in sieve.
As 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.
Fastmail is the clear market leader for people who don't want to use gmail or outlook, and I'm pretty excited to try their labels. I would love to see them implement answers to some of the questions the basecamp (hey) folks raised here [1], but I'm pretty confident they'll implement some of them. I also suspect that many of the things basecamp/hey want to do break interop with other email clients for editing. That is, you can read them, but not use the hey features from other clients; Fastmail may not be willing to make that trade. Super excited to see what hey do though!
Either way, building a super-reliable email service that can handle 10s of gigs of emails and hundreds of thousands of messages is not easy and Fastmail does a good job.
I gave up and basically used the web interface until I switched to FastMail.
Will folders ever become mandatory? If so, maybe I should finally give in and host emails myself. It can't be more painful than being forced to use labels.
If you have a spouse and/or kids, and you want them to use FastMail for the same reason you do, consider putting pressure on FastMail to offer a (reasonable) family plan. I’ve been a happy customer for a decade but they’ve raised their prices (which would affect new accounts) and do not offer a family plan so this year be my last year with them. Edit: typo
This is a big reason why I list cheaper alternatives to Fastmail whenever the topic of emails comes here. If your needs are more than one mailbox (not aliases), then Fastmail soon becomes prohibitively expensive. A few years ago, when asked about cheaper pricing plans, Fastmail replied that it has no plans (no pun intended) to go cheaper or offer cheaper plans. There are other alternatives that are cheaper and focus…
Too expensive.
It's not for everyone, but it's worth it if you value your mail and time.