Amazing to reflect on how much goodwill Fastmail has cultivated with me just by being a reasonably priced, full-featured, competent-support-having service. I'm unlikely to ever do anything with the Fastmail API, but I still upvoted mainly because I'm enthusiastic about the company.
The problem with Fastmail is its based in Australia.
A big no no if you care about your privacy.
They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
It's really disappointing to see this comment second on a page despite the fact that yet again... the law has no impact on Fastmail and never has. This is the unfortunate impact of FUD, where clueless comments will carry forward wrong views for years, even in the face of overwhelming truth around it.
Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service. There is no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do with nearly every other email service.
Fastmail is a company providing email services. No company doing that can every give you privacy against a government looking at who you're talking to, when you're talking to them. Only a minority protect the content, and even then it's only when using a proprietary protocol.
The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
This is correct. Fastmail have actually spoken about this, and their silence on any particular topic can possibly be seen as a canary. They're a great company trying to survive in a hostile environment. I really hope that the new Australian federal government will get around to winding back some of the draconian laws the previous mob brought in, but I'm not holding my breath.
It is not correct. In order to need a backdoor, the service would have to be E2E in the first place, which it is not. Uninformed HNers bring this up on every Fastmail thread like it's a big deal when it has zero actual impact on Fastmail at all.
E2E isn't a requirement for something to be called a backdoor, even though governments are constantly demanding E2E backdoors.
An attacker having shell access or a government getting plaintext dumps of whatever email conversations they want (when users don't expect it) are perfect examples of backdoors. AT&T giving the NSA a secret room for them to suck up all comms, encrypted are not, is also a classic example.
Fact is, 99% of your email exchanges will be with MS and google anyway, so that horse has bolted. In terms of the threat model facing 99% of people, getting auto banned from Gmail is a far bigger risk than big brother reading their email. I care about privacy and seriously considered protonmail, bit it was too hard to use effectively (no IMAP) and FastMail is still a huge step up from Gmail or self hosting, balancing ease of use and risk mitigation. Excited to try out the API!
There's no point in being paranoid about "privacy". Where's the perfect privacy? I have been with Fastmail for over 14 years now, and I didn't feel the need to abandon them for other "privacy toting email service providers like Proton and Tutanota". I welcome the Australian government to check my filter rules on how to manage inbox zero and an excellent spam filter. While they are at it, I would welcome if they have a tutorial on sieve filter rules. I'd be delighted if their technocrat helps me with managing my MX records a pain-free experience.
Based/headquartered in Australia yet have servers hosted in multiple locations around the world? IIRC, some are in New Jersey and don't know how accurate it still is [1].
So, that's the worst of both worlds, right? Servers are in the US but still have to be subject to Australian laws, and also, they are subject to the US law for being in that country.
> They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
pedantry: PGP hasn't been a product for many years. The product is "Semantec Encryption". GPG is still a thing.
Separately "just use <public key encription>" implies it's easy to do. Even if we ignore the fact that software support is generally terrible, there's the much bigger problem of convincing the people you email with to use it too. If you're not doing super secret or illegal stuff that's generally not a thing that's going to happen.
I don't need encrypted email and all the hassle that goes along with that. That's not my threat model (and it wouldn't help since 50%+ of my email goes to Google and Microsoft anyway ...).
All I want is an email provider somewhere that will actually force someone to show up in person with a subpoena rather than turn over all my emails to a random bureaucrat who waggles some electrons suggestively.
Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another protonmail account, but I doubt it).
They still control your keys. I probably trust Proton more than the Australian government, but if my threat model includes caring about any government accessing my data then e2ee is the only option.
> Goes to show that even if there are a lot of competitors in a product space you can still do well simply by giving a shit.
The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash. Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen. That's the society we've built and live in.
Actually we sold FastMail to Opera, and since it didn't really work out, bought it back again. Based on that experience, I'd be surprised if FastMail got (re-)acquired...
Fastmail is bootstrapped and profitable. They aren't beholden to outside investors trying to 10x their money. Fastmail also just doesn't have that sort of culture. (Source: I have friends there). They aren't looking to be a unicorn. They seem very happy to have a profitable business that they can nurture for decades.
Culturally, they're growing a garden, not launching a rocket ship.
Eventually the company will change hands. Knowing some of the people involved, I trust that when that happens, they'll find good stewards.
Everybody has their price though. They may not ever IPO or raise venture capital, but if Google came along and offered them $50b I doubt they'd say no.
The key thing is, with Fastmail building on open standards and promoting using your own domain, they have very little lock-in here. That future MBA is going to have a hard time keeping people from just moving on.
Exporting data over pop3 and Cal/Card/Web DAV is pretty easy, more than enough tools available. And without them supporting standards, they’d lose their customers.
I've come to embrace this as the business lifecycle. It's quite well-studied. Eventually, all businesses rest on their laurels; over-price, under-compete, and allow space for newer entrants. If we consider the positives here, this creates fantastic market and product dynamism, and (in theory) prevents companies becoming country-sized monopolies. I'm actually more concerned about companies which remain competitive and loved over generations. The kind of global power they could wield is scary.
It always depends on whether you can make managers feel like they make a difference; or else they will invent their own ways to make a difference and get a raise.
So I'm not experienced in hiring managers. But I would hope you could select hiring criteria that would avoid this. Don't hire people that fought to become a manager. Don't hire managers that are working to get paid (obviously work gets paid for - but the best workers care about the product more).
For me, the primary concern are the horror stories of having everything in your life linked to a gmail account and then getting locked out with no recourse from google support. My secondary concern is to have a custom domain and email aliases. In my country the abuse of personal information is rampant and I would like to start pursuing companies who sells my information without consent.
Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.
Used FastMail as part of my big DeGoogle initiative last winter. Very happy with it. However, one of the main considerations of Fastmail vs. other providers is that the domains they used are 'Visa-free' in terms of spam catchment - everything gets through!
But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.
For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
I cancelled protonmail and the subscription ended right away instead of at the end of the paid period, so there’s that. Honestly it was just a bunch of little things that added up. I don’t remember any one thing that was specifically distasteful except for the cancellation. I’m on fastmail now.
I switched from protonmail to fastmail recently. Fastmail was a ton faster and didn't randomly forget my sessions. Night and day to use. It also let me use two custom domains without paying twice, which was nice.
I had a bad experience as well. Been a long time proton user. I had a CC incident where the proton mail annual charge was incorrectly, without my confirmation labeled unauthorized.
PM cut off access to my account for 4 days as the issue was being resolved with them. Like, yeah I get it shitty situation and they probably have to deal with a bunch of scammers but I think it was way too extreme of a response given I explained what happened and have been a long term customer.
I'm thinking about going back to Gmail now.... any ideas how to defend against this? For example, have a tested procedure to change MX records of the custom domain to another provider or even self hosted in order to restore email access while an issue is being resolved?
I was primarily concerned with losing access to email and getting locked out of all my downstream accounts. Not so much an aversion to all things Google. So I still have gmail and still use Google docs. But for any important signups or comms, I use my Fastmail address.
I recently renewed my 3 year subscription with them and I've been a customer since 2017, before that I was on GSuite and O365. I still remember coming form GSuite and noticing just how easy it was to set everything up, pretty sure I had everything migrated over in ~1hr.
Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal email, nothing beats Fastmail.
But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one inbox.
Yea, after awhile of using Fastmail for my own needs, I found that I really liked the service so I decided to setup a reseller account with them and have been switching my att/yahoo/sbcglobal email customers over to this service as there have been some issues with login and resetting passwords due to the merging of att and yahoo.
I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great experiences with the import tools and security features. The admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great, its built right into the normal settings interface, and they have good privacy features with the relationship between the reseller and the end user.
Same. About a month ago I only knew of them by name but went down the rabbit hole and read all of their docs & checked out their repo's. I'm basically on the edge of de-googling my life because they are the first bunch to give me confidence that there is a long-term path forward. I hope they stay true to their stated mission.
I'm extremely enthusiastic about the company, I loved their product. I just couldn't deal with the concept of both Australian and American jurisdictions.
If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions, I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
It depends entirely on your threat model. Their claims about privacy are fine if what you're worried about is ads and tracking rather than government surveillance.
Fastmail isn't end-to-end encrypted, so there is no requirement for a backdoor applicable to Fastmail. The Australian law is completely irrelevant to Fastmail except for FUD comments online.
The Australian law allows the government to order telecommunications providers to assist in intercepting telecommunications and assist in implementing the technical capability to intercept communications (aka backdooring stuff).
Practically for email there is no need or reason to back door anything to do this though.
If asked they’d just pull the content straight from the server, same as Google/MS assuredly do for the US government. So I don’t think the threat model or risk of back doors is increased.
I’d disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who has two or three or four people at home who need their own mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too. But there are services that are far cheaper that have been operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
Yep. I spent the best part of a decade fretting and procrastinating over one day sorting out 3-4 Google domains. When they announced they’d start charging I finally decided to move to and was astonished at how easy the migration to Fastmail was. I was done in about an hour across my desktop, laptop and phone. Haven’t had a single blip of any kind since then.
Totally agree on this, love the full-featured -- but still very clean and fast -- interface. Been happily giving them some of my money for almost 10-years.
Better than gmail recently. I have 4 different gmail accounts set to forward to a single FM account. In recent weeks some people here were saying they got spam in their inboxes on gmail, and I also did get a few. They were forwarded to FM which marked them as spam.
Actually really good. I've just checked my spam folder and it's full - nothing has made it through (I'd forgotten it was a thing, much like with Gmail).
Started the transition from Gmail to FastMail at custom domain yesterday. Presence of an API was definitely important (though I probably should have tested it out during the free trial).
Had some initial buyer's regret for no reason in particular (did the 3-year plan for the best price and assuming prices will go up over time), but already feeling really solid. The web client is very snappy, documentation is good, able to import my Gmail messages, contacts, calendars, and even filters in a snap (though imperfectly). Looking forward to seeing how the API compares with my Google API scripts. Definitely seems to be more knobs and buttons for power users (more powerful filters, regex, etc.).
While not relevant to FastMail per se, also really glad to finally start the painful process of migrating decades of accounts to my custom domain email, where I hope it will stay forever. Growing concern about the (admittedly slim) possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator, as was the recent move to force the Google Apps stuff to a paid plan.
Setting up a custom domain lets me act on my anger every time I hear a story about google being shit to their customers: I pop open bitwarden, find something still on gmail, and move it over. I'm about half way through the alphabet. Feels good.
I know it's a meme that HN loves Fastmail, but it's a good meme. I've been using them for ~5 years and love it. I use their custom email alias feature all the time. The few times I've had to interact with their support it's been prompt + effective!
I migrated from Google Workspaces to Fastmail earlier this year and their migration tools made for a smooth transition.
My only big complaint is their woeful spam filtering. I get 1-2 spam emails a day, and I mark each and every one as spam. They're all of the same format; The subject line is something like [Symantec Invoice #431343] with the body being empty and a single .jpg attachment of a fake invoice. The company name and design of the invoice changes but it's always the same pattern.
I've contacted support but they shrugged their shoulders and suggested I just keep marking them as spam.
It's annoying, but I pre-paid for 3 years so I don't quite feel like jumping back to Google.
*Oh I just thought of another gripe that I didn't consider before switching: their calendaring system isn't really that useful for shared calendars unless the other people you want to share with are also Fastmail customers. This seems obvious when you think about it but I take for granted that literally everyone in my life has a Gmail account that I can share calendars with.
For what it's worth, I get the EXACT same format of spam, and I am also on Fastmail. It's a minor nuisance. One day I will write a sieve filter to try to catch them, because basically nobody sends invoices that look anything like this. But, no two of them really look the same...
Scrolling from the top to this point in comments, Australia+encryption was mentioned 5 times already, and refuted every time... My take: if you want encrypted email, encrypt it yourself. It's less convenient, but at least you know it a) works; and b) will continue to work no matter the jurisdiction and your relationship with the authorities.
Re: spam, this is why you should be using your own domain with wildcard alises. If an alias becomes a target of spam, you can block all mail coming to that alias.
Re: calendars, with Fastmail you can use any calendar you want. I use iCloud for my calendars and just connect it to my Fastmail account.
Yes, I can vouch for this, I have had several shared calendars using fastmail. I use the Mac/iOS calendars daily.
One caveat is that Google calendar can’t subscribe read+write to an iCalendar feed. That’s their problem though. All other clients are fine, including outlook IIRC.
I've been doing the wildcard/per-site email thing for a few years now, unfortunately these spam emails are coming to a more generic address that I used to use for everything that I can't quite ditch yet.
Also regarding calendars, can you share that calendar with arbitrary people who don't have Fastmail accounts?
Updating to be more accurate, it's more like 2 spam messages a week on average make it through. It's a nuisance for sure and not a dealbreaker but does make me wonder if Gmail would be catching them.
Also I do have to praise their web interface, it's startlingly fast.
I've been a Fastmail customer for nearly a decade at this point. Its the one single subscription service I will never ever balk at: it's been absolutely fantastic.
This is my 20th year of continuous subscription. They were my first SaaS purchase! I have never once experienced a disruptive issue, and my mailbox is still spam free after all these years.
> possibility of losing access to my Gmail account was a big motivator
As a current user of Gmail and HN reader (where users blocked for seemingly no apparent reason and no realistic path of recovery), this possibility bugs my mind too.
Apart from Fastmail being amazing for email, they’ve been a great source of customer service to me in several ways. I like to point it out in case people are on the fence and considering a switch. My most appreciated instance was this:
Many years ago I was broke and going through rough financial strains. My yearly contract with Fastmail was up and I asked for a grace period. They did it, no questions asked, for 2 months.
It wasn’t a thing. When I renewed my contract we settled up and it was all good. It’s been quite a while now and I’m still glad to support them.
The best thing Fastmail could do (IMO obviously) for JMAP adoption is to open up their own clients to other servers.
(i.e. if I'm developing a JMAP server, let me use the Fastmail app to test. If Protonmail wants to focus on server & security, let them recommend 'a JMAP client such as Fastmail' to their customers.)
Unfortunately though I tweeted (something snappier to that effect towards) the CTO a while ago; it's 'not on the cards' was the phrasing as I recall.
(I'm a former happy customer - I was doing something a bit weird receiving via SES, but no reason to think it wouldn't work, and indeed it did work for years as a paying customer until it broke overnight. Response was no sorry deliberate configuration change. I raced (no access to email!) to get something workable without Fastmail before my renewal that weekend; suddenly it started working again, no further contact from support, but by then I'd got my own solution almost working which I'd always intended on anyway. The JMAP part's still early WIP though, so I really would like to be able to use their client app as a solid reference.)
mailtemi looks like it's the only native JMAP app for iOS, which is great, even the fastmail app isn't native. It's a free app but isn't open source either. Is this a hobby project, or what's the long term plan for mailtemi?
It's not a hobby project. The app will remain free as it is now.
But some extra features like push notification will require subscription (probably a few $ a year).
Mail temi looks promising, but it's been around for a long time and only has two reviews, and no reputation. It's also not open source. How can I know that the app is trustworthy?
Honestly not sure how to answer this.
Mailtemi is just like any other iOS email app.
Actually it doesn't include even crash logging, just avoid sending anything to 3th party service.
Just curious , is there any iOS open source email app?
Proton-mail is not really an email client ,it's more like a viewer for their service.
I have a related question. What is the business model for mailtemi? Since it looks like a free app with no subscriptions or in-app purchases, how well is it going to be supported in the future? If it’s always going to be free, then why not open source it?
I’m not saying that paid apps always receive great support at all times, but it’s about incentives.
The questions about business model should be answered on your website in an FAQ page or on the homepage.
Yes , I guess I need to update the site to include this info , as this question emerges too often.
Some extra features like push notification will require subscription (probably a few $ a year).
Right now it works (only in a dev environment) with MSGraph and Gmail.
Just waiting for JMAP push notifications to be enabled by Fastmail , to release support for the tree protocols.
Would that require giving up the access credentials to app-supporting servers or there’s a way to avoid this and make two servers meet “in the middle” with client orchestrating the initial setup (at least with JMAP)?
I self-host and don’t like how way too many client apps deal with credentials in the name of convenience, many without even announcing that they do send them somewhere outside the device. I don’t currently have JMAP but I’m interested in replacing IMAPv4 as soon as something better is ready aka has all the features I use and mobile and desktop clients (I don’t really care about the webapps).
The only credentials which will flow is OAuth/API token.
Mailtemi (future)server would not store it, only ephemeral (http + cert check) connection to advice for push notification.JMAP and MSGraph protocols are fine by design.
Gmail needs a bit of tweaking to hash email addresses , because in their API the key is email.
There are edge cases like non ascii email addresses.
For IMAP there is no push protocol without a password knowledge.
No plan/wish to deal/know/store it.
But still I think of small open source AWS golang/nodejs code(+markeplace bridge).
Just the password possession should be only of the owner.
IMAP IDLE needs an open connection.
When the phone is locked all apps are suspended(connection closed) except if they are VOIP.
So this makes IDLE unusable. Moreover an open connection takes more energy.
So here comes push notification and from open protocols only JMAP has it.
I've been looking for an alternative to Spark (Readdle) for iOS and MacOS for years, and have yet to find anything that even comes close. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of things Spark does and it's missing some nice features, but the unified look and feel across both platforms is fantastic.
The real integration services like Fastmail need is for DNS. It's crazy that I need to understand DNS records and copy/paste them in order to have someone else host email on my behalf. When I sign up for Fastmail, there should be a quick OAuth flow out to my domain registrar for me to delegate a [sub]domain for Fastmail to control, which returns a token they can use to set all the A, AAAA, CNAME, SPF, DKIM, etc up for me. There is a protocol[0] for such a thing, but adoption has been slow, and I found it a bad fit for open source projects.
Yes, yes, yes! We've wanted to build a connector for them for a while now, but so far, there's no API to pull the appropriate DNS records to automate setup of DKIM.
IMO this is an API that should be implemented on your end (dnsimple), not theirs. There are a relatively small number of DNS providers which all provide essentially the same interface (CRUD operations on records), but there are a huge number of services that need to set up DNS records, including open source projects self-hosted by many individuals. It's not realistic for DNS providers to implement integration with every possible service, but the opposite is totally doable.
If dnsimple implemented something like DomainConnect, Fastmail could easily integrate. And it's a win-win because it sends traffic your way.
As I said, I found[0] DomainConnect to not be a good fit for open source projects in its current form. I've done some work on a new protocol which you can learn more about here[1]. Would be interested to hear your thoughts from the perspective of a DNS provider.
A quick dnsimple / fastmail question, what is the purpose of the _client._smtp SRV record in you fastmail template? The only thing I can find about it seems like a draft rfc standard that was never finalized. FastMail definitely doesn't have any info on it in their support pages.
I cannot recommend fastmail to anyone for the simple reason that if your account expires and gets deleted, anyone can create an account with the same email address and take over your identity. This seems like a massive security flaw.
You should always own the domain your email is sent to. If this is the case then the solution to this problem is trivial with DKIM/SPF, if this is not the case then it does not matter what third-party provider you are using because this can always happen. Your complaint has nothing to do with fastmail.
Other email providers don't allow recycling of account names - once they're gone, they're gone.
That said, I do agree that using a domain you own is better practice. However, I have been burned there before - I used a .eu domain for pretty much all of my email sign-ups for over a decade, then had the domain yanked away because of Brexit. Yes, my fault for not realising that this would happen (I lay some of the blame with my domain provider for not mentioning it to me at all).
Well it can expire if you let it expire. There is nothing that can absolutely guarantee you keep you email address, but owning a domain name (say with a 10 year prepayment) is damned close.
But on the flip side, good luck making any kind of sensible Gmail account for example, which means either fastmail needs multiple domains or their service will see new customers reducing over the years as people can't get sensible email addresses.
The same thing is true of phone numbers, but it's more obvious that there's a finite number of... numbers... So they need to be reused eventually.
I've been on Fastmail for many years. I didn't manage to _quite_ get rid of my gmail address, but it's close. I don't have to open gmail at all - and any mail that still makes it that way is forwarded to Fastmail.
I can use my own domain too. It's pretty great. The web interface is simple but it has improved immensely since I've started to use it.
I guess this is the missing piece. One thing I miss from gmail is its ability to automatically sort incoming email into categories, even if you don't have filters. Fastmail has all the classic filters, but they do not apply to existing emails, which is a major hassle. I've been using Sanebox to keep it less insane, but I don't like giving access to third parties.
I guess I'll play with this thing and write something to organize my inbox.
For many of us, we aren't trying to get rid of the gmail account (as you would still need it for the play store on android devices and so on), it is to break the dependency on google in the event that they nuke the account and being unable to recover from it. Example: I use my gmail account for my bank, municipality and even our tax authority. If am not able to access my email address (and mobile number for that matter), it could potentially have harmful consequences when interacting with those entities. The idea is to be able to put the gmail on the back-burner and only use it when needed, basically to become immune to the whims of google and their ban hammers.
You can apply the new-style filters against existing emails in the "preview" window. That won't help if you're heavily using custom Sieve scripts, but it does handle a lot of common scenarios for me.
You got 'em. Google rarely reveals why they killed someone's account.
So we can't prove it was due to email content. For all we know it could just be a dude named Richard who throws darts at a board full of usernames all day.
It doesn't have to be limited to email. They will kill your whole account for a perceived violation on any service. There was a story recently where a father had his account terminated because he took a photo of his son to send to the doctor which auto uploaded to google photos and was flagged by the AI and reported to the police. The police check it and confirm its a false alarm but Google refuses to unban the account meaning the guy lost access to his email and phone number.
Same exact thing happened to me but thankfully it was a throwaway account (on my domain in fact) since I knew there was risk - thankfully they didn't cancel the whole domain for it...
I've been using gmail for my domain (free gsuite legacy) for 10+ years though I'm careful to not do anything that could be misinterpreted on the service particularly through google photos or youtube
I actually used fastmail for 10 years prior to gmail but abandoned it in 2010 or so because imap/calendaring/etc. wouldn't meaningfully sync with my iphone but gmail had full free activesync (which I still miss a bit...)
I still keep a basic inexpensive legacy fastmail account just for some sieve scripts and cleaner smtp than gmail offers...
RSD Academy has been all sorts of messed up after Google flagged the guy's photos. He had the rsdacademy.net domain hosted with Google and lost access to that. He lost access to the YouTube account that handled all of the academy videos. He lost docs for his draft textbook. Granted, he probably should have not tied everything to a personal account. On the other hand, Google shouldn't be able to lock everything.
Yep, at some point it doesn't matter how much storage Google give you or at least that's the case for the majority.
If Google increased their limits to 100TB it wouldn't really make them more attractive to my small business because I can already live within 100Gb without with virtually no administrative burden.
2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk for us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled data.
It's much better to get that out of the email server and into something secure and time managed so that it can be deleted when not needed.
>2TB of mail storage represents an extra security risk for us and the chance to accumulate more un-controlled data.
You're suggesting 2TB is harder to manage with real enterprise management features and MDM functionality vs a provider who allows users to download a full copy of business emails to their personal devices? I like FastMail features, but if un-controllable data was the real concern then Google Workspace would be my go-to not FastMail.
No, I'm not suggesting that 2TB is harder to manage than 200GB (even though it clearly is because there's more in it to keep tabs on).
What I'm saying is that we have a policy to not use email as long term storage because it's considered bad practice. As such we don't gain much from Google offering more storage space because we wouldn't use it anyway.
We're a only a small business and I know that's different once you grow beyond a team you can fit in one room.
Everything is not IMAP. Everything is proprietary JSON APIs. Gmail, Outlook, etc are not using IMAP because IMAP is unusable these days. Fastmail is essentially the same thing but with an effort to share the work.
There was a post I read a while ago detailing it but I forgot where. The gist of it is that it’s a custom protocol and format that goes back decades. These days clients try to implement lots of features client side that were not imagined back when the protocol was created so it involves massively inefficient actions.
I forget the exact action described but I believe it was renaming a folder requires downloading every email in the folder and then uploading them all in individual requests which takes minutes. Stuff like this plague the protocol and hold back email clients. Rather than spending dev time building the best client, they waste it wrestling a protocol that has long outlived its usefulness.
IMAP IDLE only allows you to monitor a single folder and it's bad for anything battery-powered - yet people want proper notifications about the mail they receive. Nobody implements IMAP NOTIFY which would fix this part for at least desktop PC's. There's also the silly notion that a single letter has to exist in a single folder (may only have a single label). Plus all the concurrency issues with multiple clients accessing the same mailbox.
JMAP is sane, performant and easy to implement.
To check for new email and resync email state with IMAP should make separate call for each folder.
Even if the app tries to sync multiple folders simultaneously, the server often has a limit of max 2 connection.
With JMAP this can be done in a single call.
Microsoft's MSGraph API is similar but riddled with inner HTTP (429) errors in batch calls.
This needs extra logic to handle all cases.
Essentially the core problem is Gmail is most of the market, and they have a vested interest in keeping people interacting with their proprietary APIs (lock in) rather than switching to an open standard that supports labels, snooze, etc. Startups literally build custom clients entirely around the Gmail API, which means more data to Google.
And if Gmail doesn't support JMAP, why would anyone else bother adding it to their app?
Monopolies remain the primary blocker on innovation and until we get aggressive about forcing them to use open standards and interoperability, we are going to stay stuck in situations like this one.
I think fastmail is trying for an 'everyone supports this standard except for you' strategy
could work, I feel like the bigger question is 'will email still be the standard' in 5 years -- it has iffy security, it's complex, nobody can self host it, it doesn't integrate well with other applications (i.e. 'push messaging' features)
If we haven't gotten rid of asking users for postal addresses when there is no chance they will ever be used, we are absolutely never getting rid of email. It's decentralised, there's a paper trail that doesn't disappear when a host goes down or gets compromised, and it's still a competent method of asynchronous communication. Plus, the whole world is never going to agree on the same new thing anyway.
Not yet, but that's how these things work. Gotta do a lot of showing off yourself before anyone else starts to care. Standards are hard to displace, at least with email there's the attractive motivation that everything else is ancient and awful. We're probably at least 5-10 years away from JMAP having some proliferation, if everything goes well.
I checked my billing history with Fastmail, and it looks like I've been a customer since 2014. I've never regretted it. I have two emails with GB of space each. I love the web interface, I love the 2fa options, I love android app. All of its clients have easy account switching. Family set up is easy. Custom domain set up is easy. I couldn't see myself using any other service.
I have to use gmail for work and it is not great. Confusing tabs, sidebar re-arranged, some kind of interest based twitter feed order for my email. And it's always bugging me to use Chrome, which I don't.
I'd love to switch over to Fastmail from Gmail with my custom domain email, but I face two hurdles before being able to move over:
1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..
2) I have a ton of documents in Google docs. Will those continue to work, and if not, what's the alternative? Google is terrible for privacy, but at least my sensitive documents aren't going to get stolen. I'm not sure I'll trust a startup to my personal docs. Self-hosting is such a massive pain, so not something I want to do.
Would love advice on transitioning away from the big G.
For (1): consider that your entire digital life is bound to your email address. In a sense, Google owns you. $50/yr is a small price to pay for truly owning your digital life. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
(I recently renewed my Fastmail subscription for an additional two years)
I left Gmail for that exact reason. I just didn’t want to wake up one day to find my digital life had been locked out because Google Photos has thought my picture of a funny tree was somehow an object that violates their terms of service. Fastmail has been great, and I also prepaid for multiple years. No complaints.
> 1) Going from $0 to $50/year is such a tough pill to swallow ..
If you’re in a first-world country and knowledgeable enough to be reading HN: how can that be? It’s one coffee a month. If needed, think of it as charity to support an indie developer.
#2 is not an issue. Your Google account and associated files and services continue to work. Email moves, nothing else.
No, they seem trustworthy. I meant I don't trust a startup to host my documents (Google drive alternative) because Fastmail doesn't have a google docs alternative as far as I'm aware.
>Didn't google already solve this problem for you? They removed the free tier for custom domains in ~GApps~ Google Workspaces.
FWIW, I have a custom domain with GMail for free. All incoming email to *@thedomain land in my GMail inbox, though replying is more of a faff since I have to individually add each one with its own app password pointing to GMail's own SMTP server.
I too am a happy user of Fastmail, but I am plenty dissapointed with the file storage, which was one of the main reasons I switched to them 2 years ago (and not to a competitor). Their support in both cases was just awful and more or less ended in a "sucks to be you message":
1. I wanted to sync a folder from my Windows laptop to the storage through Webdav, using the Windows Explorer (which they list as a supported client). I would get speeds of maximum 5kb. Opened a ticket, went back and forth and the customer support person suggested that I try with another (paid) client to see if the speeds are better. I downloaded a trial, tried it out and it was indeed better. Reported back and the person says something summarized as: see? here you go, just use that client (that cost another 50 euros)
2. I find this one much worse: they disabled support for FTP access to the storage. I get an email 1 (ONE) day before saying something like: hey, there's no FTP starting tomorrow, we did send an e-mail but didn't include _you_, here's 15 dollars for your trouble. I was using FTP actively to back-up the website of my small business nightly. Of course I email support and tell them hey, c'mon, this is unnaceptable, you can't just tell me one day before, give me a solution, something. The reply came almost immediately and said: we sent an e-mail informing everybody 3 months ago, deal with it (???).
I’ve been a customer for years but never touched their file storage, calendar etc. I just don’t feel they’re big enough to have real quality focus on anything other than email.
That’s just the impression I get. Happy to be corrected
An advance gentle warning to people moving to Fastmail: never use the email address on their domain “fastmail.<tld>. Just don’t.
Pretend it doesn’t exist. It’ll be difficult to move away from Fastmail if you have to. Because they don’t have any free tier for that which is fine.
I regret using it on mailbox.org and I have used it at so many places in last many years that moving away seems tedious and I give up on it even before I start.
I'd love to get out of the 10-year GMail account I own. It's so tightly integrated with other services that it feels like it would take a monumental effort to make happen. Someone send help.
When I moved many years ago, I migrated well over 50,000 emails with FastMail’s importer. Other than taking a few hours (all async), there’s nothing to it. Enjoy!
(I’m unaffiliated, just a paying customer. If you care about customer support, privacy, or entrepreneurship, then FastMail - or another paid service - is a better fit than a free service can ever be)
For me it was a couple of hours of work, going though the password manager, logging in and changing the e-mail address in the profile. I haven't migrated all and probably never will - the accounts I don't care about can stay on gmail
Maybe you use email very differently? I find myself occasionally needing years-old emails to find info I've long-since forgotten and it's a lot easier to have all of it in one place.
Lots of advice for making the transition, here's some more: buy your own domain; don't use one of Fastmail's. That way you can just change the MX records if you ever want to switch away from Fastmail, and you will -- in theory -- never have to change your email address on another service again. I've kept the same email address for ~15 years now on this premise.
I have fastmail pulling email from my gmail inbox. With those emails in the same inbox with email for my new address, I miss nothing.
When I’m ready, I’ll set a rule to move incoming gmail into a folder so I can easily see all the senders with my gmail address. That’s when I can work on changing those accounts to use the new address. However … procrastination.
Very happy! Fastmail has been very reliable, the web UI is good, and the native app is nice. I do admit that I haven’t had the opportunity to put their spam filters to the test because my email comes primarily through gmail first.
I switched all of my accounts from my 15 year old gmail address to a custom domain over the course of a few months, during which I monitored both inboxes. I used my password manager to keep track of which accounts I had updated. After about three months of updating accounts, I set a permanent autoresponder in Gmail telling people that the inbox is no longer monitored and to please contact me via other means (I don't tell them the other means to avoid spammers getting my new email). Then after another three months, I stopped checking gmail completely. Now, over a year later, I don't check gmail except in rare cases where I come across an account I forgot to update, or am waiting for a specific email that doesn't arrive to my new address. The gmail account still gets about 15-20 messages a week, and they're all basically spam and marketing junk.
From time to time I'm thinking about switching to Fastmail. I just had a look at Fastmail vs Gmail page (https://www.fastmail.com/gmail-alternative/), and I find some of the comparisons inaccurate, and others just plain funny:
"No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage
"Use your own domain (you@yourname)" - marked as missing on Gmail. On Fastmail you're paying $5/month to have your own account, while in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with GSuite Legacy.
"No ads" - ads are also missing in paid Gmails accounts
"Notification settings that respect your attention" - Google makes a big deal of detecting the importance of a particular email threads. I doubt Fastmail is better at this than Gmail.
Also Fastmail claims better privacy, but I'm not sure what it is based on.
I think you might be preaching to the wrong crowd. Fastmail users (which I am one of) are mainly interested in Fastmail because email (and co) is the only thing they do.
> "No creepy typing predictions" - Fastmail just advertises a missing feature as an advantage
To the privacy conscious, that’s a feature. I and other users pay them enough not to have to harvest, collect, train ml models on, or use our data or metadata in any way, for predications or other pseudo-features.
> You know what data Fastmail sells about me to advertisers? Nothing.
Why do you think so? Specifically what are the reasons that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?
> Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.
I mean, technically I probably shouldn't be writing anything about Google products. But my area of work is so far from Gmail, that I only interact with it as a customer.
I don't know whether it will convince you that I'm not very biased about Gmail, but I do want to point out that I find at least one argument in favor of Fastmail pretty convincing and it's human support. Google has a pretty abysmal track record of handling accounts that they think are suspicious and if ever I change company I don't want to be in a position where my account is blocked without any recourse.
Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.
Conversely here's a reason why I think Google is _less_ likely to invade Gmail users' privacy: It's already one of the most scrutinized companies in the world. If it were doing something shady with emails, it would likely to be picked up. Furthermore, it's a big company. More employees would know about that and it's more likely that someone would whistle-blow.
> Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.
Correct, but 80.78% of Alphabet’s revenues were from advertising related income last year. See Note 2 to their financial statements[0]. Alphabet is through-and-through an advertising company at its core. It’s a fair assumption that their other ventures are potentially used to generate more advertising revenue in one way or another.
Also as a former auditor, I’m glad we’ve disclosed your conflict of interest working for the company. Unfortunately that means others cannot take you as seriously as you’d like.
That does not mean they don't train all sorts of models on the data, or harvest it to fill out their profiles of users, or any number of other things Google exists to do that are user-hostile.
> in Gmail it's $6 or free if you're grandfathered in with GSuite Legacy.
You can also just forward another email address to your free @gmail.com address and, after a quick verification process, send emails as that alias. Google Domains lets you forward email for no extra cost outside of the domain registration fee.
Further, at a technical level, a Markov chain can hardly be described as "creepy". Sadly, a lot of folks are not impervious to marketing snake-oil, such as the one you pointed above.
Google certainly doesn't use emails as training data. Source: I work for Google and know that there are strict policies regarding what can and can't be used as training data.
My top comment just points out inaccurate comparisons. Also, as you can notice I'm not hiding that I work for Google, though I do consider myself just a customer in this situation.
I made the switch to Fastmail from Gmail (which I used since it launched) about three years ago and haven't looked back. What a fantastic service at a reasonable price. Their mobile app is also great.
About this API in particular, who is it targeting or what type of apps are expected to come out of this? Email clients that leverage Fastmail-specific features?
Have to disagree about the mobile app, while it looks nice and is full-featured and responsive, it is a glorified webview and is totally useless offline -- you can't search emails or even view them without an active mobile data connection.
The android app doesn't always notify me of new email - and if it doesn't notify me for one email, it won't notify me again until I get another email (which might be a day or two apart). That's my only complaint. I have a support ticket open for it; I'm hoping they can figure out what is going on.
For me as an American, $5 a month (or less with longer terms) is pretty damn good! Who has cheaper prices that actually competes on features, performance, reliability, goodwill, etc.?
Yeah, while I like their service in general having (mostly) switched in 2018, their mobile app really isn't that great in my experience due to the lack of offline mode, and every so often it seems to forget my login (maybe the session expires, but I never remember that happening with GMail app).
I am generally a happy user of Fastmail, but there are a few improvements I'd like:
1. The "report spam" button doesn't also delete the message on the web version. You have to select "report phishing" instead to do both at once.
2. The UI for updating mail filter rules was buried under several layers of options last time I tried using it, and I don't think there was an easy way to update a filter and re-apply it to existing messages without going through several menus.
3. The UI on Android is sluggish when opening messages at times.
I still prefer Fastmail over Gmail, however. A minimal version of the UI like old Gmail's HTML-only view would be nice.
I’ve been with Proton Mail for the past two years, but I recently switched to fastmail after switching from Android to iOS due to how locked down Proton Mail is.
I know being locked down is part of Proton’s schtick, and I could kind of put up with only using their app for email. However, being unable to use any app for my calendar and contacts was annoying. It would have made the switch to iOS much easier. Further, the proton mail app on android developed a bug related to alternative routing that I was unable to figure out that led to the app not working for me for over a month.
I began realizing that I value being able to freely use my email, contacts, and calendars with whatever app I choose. The fact that I can also sync notes and reminders to my custom domain on fastmail from my iPhone is just a plus.
For operating a custom domain and being able to freely move between front ends for those services, I’m really satisfied with fastmail so far, and I’m actually using their web UI for email and calendar because it works well enough for me.
My only small gripe is the fastmail app on iOS doesn’t support offline emails. The native Mail app does, but the reason I prefer the fastmail app is native integration with calendar invites. Perhaps if Mail ever supported the JMAP protocol being explained in the post, I could happily use the app, which has become much better with iOS 16.
On desktop, Thunderbird works great as a client for accessing Protonmail, and it has those additional features like calendar and contacts and so-on. Not sure if there's a mobile option though, never looked.
Fastmail [updated: allowed] customers to spoof email as From: other customers, unless you manage your custom domain's DNS DMARC p=reject. This is a social engineer's dream come true!
> We are quite aware that users can set arbitrary From addresses on emails, that our SPF records allow arbitrary hosts to send email as our domains, and that our DMARC policy is not enforcing passes. These policy decisions are by design, and we track the actual sender in a separate header.
Is there a good tool to fuzzily merge and de-dup multiple inboxes? Because otherwise I'm going to have to write it myself.
I currently have a gmail inbox and hey inbox with partial duplicates in each. I'd like to merge and de-dup my history as a one-time event and migrate to fastmail.
The gmail inbox has longer history. The gmail forwards to hey so hey has responses that don't exist in gmail.
I've already started with mbox exports and SQLite import, but I'd rather use something pre-existing. Any pointers?
Put everything into a single notmuchmail database. It wil deduplicate the emails and even provide a fast local search interface for all of your mails https://notmuchmail.org/
I have been seriously interested in migrating away from gmail for a long time, but it creates a lot of anxiety.
1. How to effectively migrate. Run dual email for a while?
2. How to effectively back up email all of my content so it is searchable. I've kind of used Google/GMAIL as a dumb filestore in that, I know random messages are there from 15 years ago that I can just use the google search for to bring up.
These are things I need to spend time on in order to take it seriously. I'd like to take it seriously.
1. To migrate I'd use their email import utility. I've never used it but I've heard good things. On the Fastmail side set up sender identities so you can compose (and reply) to emails using your @gmail.com address [if you're using gmail addresses]. On gmail side you can continue having a dual email setup by having gmail setup forwarding such that it forwards the email and keeps a copy in gmail. I have 4 gmail accounts setup this way, so I know that I can always fallback to gmail if there's an issue on Fastmail (haven't had one for over a decade with this setup though).
2. Fastmail indexes emails so they're searchable via their web UI. It's pretty good, I've not really had any issues.
In my opinion, the best way to use Fastmail is to bring your own domain. One really cool thing about Fastmail Web UI is that it integrates well with catch-all email addresses, so you can have <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com and when you get emails to that address, when you click Reply it automatically sets your sending identity to <catch-all-alias>@mydomain.com. This ensures your correspondence is consistent with the email aliases you use.
When I left Gmail for FastMail, I imported my contacts and calendar from Gmail, started fresh with the email. Nothing is forcing you to delete your Gmail, you can always go back and reference it. You can export your mailbox from Gmail and import it into a local mail client, I just didn't bother.
For each new service, I'd sign up with my new custom domain email instead of my Gmail. I'd continually check the Gmail for emails that I cared about and would update my email for those services/mailing lists as they came in. Over the period of a couple years.
I maybe move one email over a month these days, so we're just about done. With a custom domain, I'll never have to do this again.
The best time to start is a few years ago. The second best time is now.
been on fastmail a long time but heres what i did:
1.i switched emails over as i logged in so it wasnt as daunting. i did move over biggies like banking and daily stuff immediately
2. later i setup gmail to forward all mail to <gmail at my domain> so i dont miss the stray actual email to old address
thats it. 12 domains and zero problems later! i should mention, fastmails spam filter on the default settings is doing drastically better than gmail did for a publicly posted email
If you’re using apple and just want a custom domain you can do so with an iCloud+ subscription. I switched away to it from Fastmail and have been happy since.
I understand why you might be sceptical but your comment has motivated me to decloak and respond. Fastmail really do provide an excellent product. Like many of the other commentators I moved over to them from Gmail and am very glad I did so. Sometimes things truly are as good as they seem.
Yes it’s good to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism and I could (more than likely) be equally wrong, but I hope my comment encouraged others not to take comments online at face value always.
For what it’s worth, I signed up to fast mail yesterday, onboarding vs my cloudflare managed domain was a breeze and so far no issues (it’s email hosting (and their iOS app isn’t great), so there’s not much to get excited about on a day to day basis - apart from a long term appreciation of privacy first email).
I have just started using the Spark Mail App - now that I am excited about…if it lives up to its hype, it will be a great addition to my workflow.
Nice that they have a specific support email for jmap bugs.
I recently found a calendar UI bug and it took about 6 back and fourths with the customer support first line over a week before they (said they) passed it to the devs.
Not the best bug reporting experience. But then again I can't even fathom how I would have reported it to the Google or Microsoft/o365 equivalent.
Hah I had an interesting experience. I was trying to get Mutt to list the IMAP subscribed folders when there's nested folders but the behaviour was somehow inconsistent with what I expected/really odd.
Initially I thought this was due to a feature in IMAP that Fastmail didn't support (well they use Cyrus IMAP so the problem would stem from there). A back and forth with their customer service and they immediately piped it to one of their developers because it was technical and was discussing low level IMAP commands with debug transcripts from Mutt.
Turns out Mutt was using an outdated/legacy IMAP command that had been superseded by a new command with its own RFC.
Was able to patch Mutt and everything started to work correctly and look consistent.
It's not everyday you have a email provider service help you debug/troubleshoot your mail user agent which leads to actual improvements.
Is there a service like fastmail with pw-encrypted inbox like posteo.de (not pgp based like mailbox.org), bulk mail import/export, custom domain and imap support (as in: no special app required unlike protonmail/tutanota)?
This is pretty cool — it basically means we can use Fastmail for transactional emails like "Thanks for signing up" kind of emails along with our regular old emails right?
I've been using Mailgun for that as a separate thing; Mailgun is great but the weird lack of API key management freaks me out. Exposing one key exposes EVERYTHING and you have to cycle through all the projects that use your account. So annoying.
I wonder if this is going to cause spam headaches for Fastmail and lower their sendability though
> it basically means we can use Fastmail for transactional emails like "Thanks for signing up" kind of emails along with our regular old emails right?
I just use SMTP for this (with FastMail). FastMail is not really intended for this as the limits and the like don't really scale to large services, but overall it works well enough (you can create an "app password" which can only access SMTP).
I always hear good things about Fastmail but I've not had a chance to use it yet. I set up a Proton / Protonmail accounts years ago and have been happy as a clam with them ever since.
Work uses Gmail, though hopefully we can convince them to drop that in the future. May be a time to try fastmail then. It's a hard sell though; businesses get a lot out of the box with GSuite.
Question for people with fastmail and a .net custom domain: Do you usually get blocked sometimes? I wanted to send an email to my therapist and one email to my insurance but both had blocked me. A mailbox.org address worked just fine.
Is it because of the domain or because of the .net ending?
+1 to their import tool. I was really surprised at how good an experience that was. So simple and effective. And idempotent - I had to restart it after re-enabling some of the labels and no dups.
My only issue is the spam filtering isn't nearly as good. I need to regularly check spam.
On that note, I've noticed that the Gmail spam filter has been less effective recently - I get spam coming through to my inbox almost every day now. I've also had some legitimate email going through to the spam box which has very rarely happened with me on Gmail.
If there's one thing that will finally push me to jump to something different it would be if spam filtering becomes ineffective.
Gmail catches more spam than Fastmail does. I almost never get actual spam in my Gmail inbox, though they sometime mark non-spam as spam. Having actual spam turn up in my Fastmail inbox roughly once a week is a little annoying.
I love fastmail and its REST api but also at the same time I love to use google stuff like google docs, calendar etc, google voice. Technically I can use all gmail service without using a gmail account but it's always less intuitive somehow and always something break here and there when people invite or tag you in drive or google docs.
So I ended up build an email forwarding service, it runs on my own domain, forward email[1] back to my personal gmail. So I still have full control at my own domain level, have the flexibility that gmail give me, and have a REST api to access email.
Having this access REST API[2] in hand, I have been thinking I maybe able to scrape bank alert email to build out a a read-only API for my own banking transaction.
Long time customer of fastmail. Great support. I once forgot to cancel sub, contacted them, and they refunded with no question. Really built the trust.
Now I have my personal and side business on fastmail.
UX is simple, service is reliable. Keep up the good work.
It's a good first step! I hope to someday see the ability to use an API to edit Fastmail DNS entries, add/remove/modify user accounts, access the calendar and notes, etc.
I'll probably have to play with this soon. I'm using my shared hosting's email for an automated utility and I'm trying to move off of needing that shared hosting.
It's appears free, but advertising companies pay Google so they don't have to charge you for the cost of running Gmail https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603. And clients of those advertisers charge their customers (mostly retail) for their ad expenses as a % of their sold goods and services. So we're all paying your Gmail, society is your patron and you're a free rider. That what "I don't care" mean.
I'm happy to pay my ESP so you don't have to and so they don't collect your email data (as sender or recipient). You're welcome.
- the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs
- the known and blatant indexing it does of your email content to power their profiles of users for ads
- the fact it records nearly every transaction and vendor I've used, is scary
- I recently sent a friend a one word subject with a link to a tweet and it was red flagged as dangerous sender and content in my friends Gmail, he sent me screenshot
- the fact Google is so deeply integrated to state now, in other verticals like YouTube and this disinformation hunt against free speech against anyone who doesn't agree with what you should see or read
Time to switch folks, $50 a year to me is worth it.
> the deep integration with accounts you accumulate over time, one click sign-on is easy but with its tradeoffs
I was lucky in that the first time I encountered one-click sign-on was in the early days when Facebook was aggressively pushing it. There was no way in hell I would give Facebook the discretion to allow me access to integrated services, so I created a login for the service. That lesson has stuck with me ever since and I'll never use these integrated logins. If you lose access to your Google account (which more and more people are experiencing for any and no reason at all), you also lose access to any integrated services. That's crazy. I wish more people would take that consideration seriously.
How does either of those example demonstrate email contents being used for ad targeting? What I see is just a more convenient UI for displaying what I've bought than searching for the individual receipts in the email archive.
There's just no ambiguity in Google's statements about email contents not being used for any kind of advertising purposes.
Google doesn't deny that it scans your email for information, it denies that it uses that data for ad targeting and profiling. Your links don't challenge that claim.
I actually trialed Office 365 when I decided to drop Gmail. Their IMAP import was broken so I couldn't transfer my content over, and the admin dashboard was actually throwing HTTP errors. Customer support was functionally illiterate in English and unable to comprehend the problem, let alone solve it. Disastrous.
Email is so foundational to online identity, that I would rather pay for the services of a smaller company that sees it as their main business, rather than an also ran arm of a massive big tech company who sees customer support as an outsourceable cost center to be cut to the bone.
Deliverability is the bigger concern in such cases. Especially for business emails. Gmail seems to have the best deliverability among all that is available.
Fastmail is great. I have used them for years. My only issue with them is their policy on recycling usernames https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277342-Ca.... Gmail and Proton do not allow for username recycling, for example. I hope Fastmail changes their policy for folks who use an @fastmail.com username.
