I took their 60-day trial and switched from Gmail. I was initially cautious because I didn't think anyone had improved spam filtering and search as much as the Gmail team, but – for me – Fastmail is better at both. They have a pretty powerful search system like Gmail's: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/mailbox_searching.html and their spam filter is excellent.
The whole experience is faster than Gmail, you have much more space to write and read email, and there's no nagging feeling that, by using the service, a company is slowly building a profile on you.
Migration-wise, they have an IMAP importer which works great. You can tell it which labels/folders to import; their defaults for Gmail worked fine for me.
Their new mobile web app is very impressive too – it feels native (minus the notifications, which I've set up by forwarding mail headers only to an IFTTT recipe that sends notifications via Pushover on iOS). I now use Fastmail's mobile app instead of iOS Mail. http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/21/faster-than-native-introd...
The only things I missed from Gmail were the "Undo Send" feature, which I've learned to live without, and the automatic "Promotions" inbox filter; Fastmail has automatic filters for "Personal", "Notifications", and "Mailing lists", but not one for marketing HTML email. I've unsubscribed from most lists and resubscribed using plus addressing – just create a folder named 'News' and subscribe to any lists using you+news@example.com. Newsletters then skip your inbox and fill the news folder. This works with your custom domains too – not just the Fastmail-assigned domain.
Their documentation is _really_ thorough, so I haven't needed to bother their support team; hopefully I can keep it that way – at $40 a year for the Enhanced personal email service (which gives you multi-domain support and now 15GB of space), I would hate to be a burden on them.
I have been using Fastmail since January of 2005. It has been rock-solid for virtually all of that time, save for a single prolonged outage many years ago (they have since rearchitected).
The web user interface is clean, effective, and comes with a complete set of keyboard bindings. Searching is fast and flexible, as is folder manipulation.
I'd like to see some improvements in the spam filtering, but am otherwise very happy with my paid account.
Just wanted to add that the importance of a clean mail interface can't be overstated. It helps you to focus on the emails. Fastmail accomplishes this perfectly.
I switched and was very happy with it. The webmail felt much leaner and faster than anything Google has offered these last years.
That said, it's not a switch without cons:
1. Calendar/Contact management. Still not built in to the service (although fastmail say they are working on it), so until then you will need something to double for that in. I double up and use Baikal[1] for CardDAV and CalDAV and it works for me.
But even with that in place you need to import your contacts and they wont get auto-synched to your device when you start emailing new people.
Get on it, fastmail! ;)
2. Fastmail does not offer any proprietary Google/Gmail or MS/Exchange protocol-support. This means that you will need to use IMAP to hook up, and not all IMAP clients supports push-email. This includes the built in Android mail-client.
3. Not accessing mail over webservices and http/https, you may find some corporate firewalls blocking you from checking your email. This is super-easy to forget! In that case, OpenVPN mobile is your friend.
Apart from that, I made the switch and I'm very much happy about it.
Been using it since 2009, it's rock solid, enough so that I'm now buying 3 years of service at a time (the most discounted).
If you buy a high enough level, I'm at Enhanced (lets me use my own domain), you get "Priority support", and it's very real. I think I've only used it once, fairly recently when some new spamming scheme started frequently outwitting their very good spam system, and the response was personalized and detailed, the support person even appropriately adjusted my spam score threshold. Which I assume they do since many customers aren't that sort of sophisticated.
They support static web sites, which have provided everything I've needed to do stuff for my family, e.g. make pictures available with viewing support, even a choice of light and dark background schemes.
They also offer a nice window into their operations and development through their blog.
You probably would actually, because the other side effect is that they get a positive spam protection score which means they are unlikely to be detected as spammy.
I signed up last week because I wanted a way to send mail from anything@mydomain.com. GMail lets you receive anything@mydomain.com (like every other mail provider), but needs you to jump through verification hoops to send from anything.
With Fastmail's wildcard feature, you can just have a "from" input field that can be anything from your domain. And when replying, it's smart enough to reply from the same user.
I've used Fastmail for years. It's been rock-solid, both before and after the acquisition. I can only recall one outage that was long enough for me to notice in that time. It's very, very good if you want an imap provider. The only compelling argument for gmail, imo, is the integration benefit, which continues to increase (e.g. recent Now enhancements).
I've been using it for a couple of months now. (enhanced account), mostly as an implementation detail. Setting it up and migrating is simple, their web interface is nice, and the few questions I had were adequately and quickly answered. I've also been using them for DNS, which is very simple as well.
In short: Does what it says on the tin. It's email and they do it well.
I've used them for years. In fact I'm grandfathered on an old plan that had a single payment for "lifetime" service. They've steadily improved, and while I still prefer the very simple webmail interface they had a year ago, they've improved their current one since it was introduced.
I have the same grandfathered plan. I wish I had bought more storage when it was available. It looks like we aren't getting any upgrades not that I blame them.
I've been using it for about 6 months now - couldn't be happier. The web interface is far better than Gmail's and it works better with desktop mail clients than Gmail ever did.
Only thing I miss is push email on my phone but I don't miss it as much as I thought I would.
I switched to Fastmail about 6 months ago. There were a lot of things about GMail I missed for first two months, but now it's settled into my workflow and I love it, particularly given all the GMail overhauls lately.
Yes! I switched a few months ago. I find that the web interface and features offered are GMail-competetive. It's good, reliable, ad-free, and is accompanied by good customer support.
Yes. Happy user for just over 10 years (if memory serves). I remember a couple of outages back in the early days, but since then it's been rock-solid, AFAICT.
I've been contemplating the switch - but don't know anyone who's actually used it.