My biggest problem with Fastmail is that they make it extremely difficult for a single person to have an email address with your own domain. IIRC you either have to purchase a family plan or go throw aliases, the latter of which is user unfriendly.
Yep. But that's why we've unified the family plan levels to be the same as the personal ones.
So the only difference now is it's $5/y extra to have the family "container", which lets you create accounts in your own domain rather than having an @fastmail.fm account and aliases. Having that container then also lets you setup multiple accounts, manage them, share folders between users, etc. If you only have 1 account, then yes, it's a bit annoying, but I don't think $5/y is too onerous.
Their Enhanced level of service doesn't work for you?
It does for me, catches everything sent to ancell dash ent dot com, which allows me to do the usual "who's selling my email address" trick with customized addresses, like redcross.org.ph@anc... when I sent some money to the Philippine Red Cross.
There may be some distinction here I'm missing. In addition to this domain aliasing feature I haven't tried out, Fastmail.com is hosting my domain. Right now it's got their standard settings:
But there's also a "Custom DNS - control all records published for the domain" feature I haven't tried out yet, since I don't at this time have anything else for my domain publicly accessible.
Ah, maybe you're referring to how this translates to Fastmail mailboxes. Specifically a "virtual domain" concept where aliases are established, and I have both the wildcard * and hga at my domain aliased to hga at fastmail dot fm?
If the above is what you're trying to do, how is it user unfriendly? If not, out of curiosity and maybe a need to do this myself in the future, what are you desiring to do?
It's user unfriendly because the @fastmail.com is your actual email address. It's user unfriendly because you have to know that. It's user unfriendly because if you enter settings incorrectly into your mail app, you'll be sending email as @fastmail.com.