I'm a FastMail customer. Here's some things I like and why I switched from Gmail and Google Apps:
- better shortcuts in the web interface
- the mobile web interface is actually good
- can import email by IMAP
- POP links actually work, Gmail's POP links are broken
- IMAP is better implemented
- Gmail limits IMAP to 15 max connections and
each folder ends up being a connection
- CardDAV works and has good picture resolution,
when I was on Google Apps they were limited to 80px
- FastMail's Sieve filters are very flexible
- on folders vs tags, I like folders more, because then
I can import my huge work email as a backup without
polluting my searches and my archive
- Google Apps email aliases limited to 30 per user, which is
pretty dumb and insufficient if you have a couple of domains
- FastMail does sub-domain email aliasing, which is awesome,
as now each user account I have has its own email; Gmail
only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
Part of this decision was also a switch from Google Drive to Dropbox: Dropbox supports Linux, Google Drive does not.
On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info.
They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.
And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.
In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.
This is true of their interface as a whole. I keep it pinned as my first tab and avoid using a native mail client at all. It barely uses any memory or cpu, is always responsive, and has never crashed on me in 2 years of constant usage.
It's an amazing product and I'm always happy to see people leaving GMail for it.
If you have your own server (of any kind, even a Raspberry Pi), there's no excuse for not running your own CardDAV, at least (you can also run CalDAV), and it works beautifully:
Radicale even commits every change to a git repo, if you want, so you can go back to your contacts history an arbitrary amount of time just by using `git log`!
I'm interested in keeping my data private, and willing to pay for it, I'm just not interested in maintaining a server, and dealing with 1) keeping it up, and 2) keeping it secure.
I'd just rather pay someone a small monthly/annual fee to do it for me, along with keeping my data private.
I wasn't aware that sandstone had a hosted option, I was under the impression you had to provide your own hardware/vps. I'll check it out, but I'm still not that interested in maintaining and keeping it up to date!
That's true, but many people have a home server anyway, so this is a very nice addition.
As an aside, after this article I wanted to give Fastmail a shot, but I had already signed up a while ago and then never logged back in. I asked support if they could give me another trial so I could actually try it out, but they said I had to pay. Not great customer support there, especially since I had sent or received zero emails and creating another account for a trial is trivial...
Absolutely. I'm not bothered with allowing an externally facing system inside my home wifi network, and I'm not interested in ensuring I keep my systems patched and up to date. Id also not like to leave a box running 24/7 when I can leech a teeny amount of power from a data entire only when it's needed!
Would you be interested in a service where you buy your own server (metal/VPS/whatever) and through an API/web interface select which profile to run? E.g. webserver (apache, nginx, ...), mail server (postfix, exim, ...), load balancer, database (mysql, pgsql, ...), or "app" (ownCloud (has CalDAV support), Wordpress, etc.)?
The idea is that the server is yours, and yours only. We manage the setup, monitoring, alarms and all the boring stuff. If you need any assistance, we have sysadmins that can help for a fee, and depending on how critical it is for you, we'd offer multiple levels of subscription with different service levels and response times.
You mention response times and priority support, and are talking about choosing nginx vs Apache. That's far more detail than I care about. I want to click a button, give you my card details, have an inbox and calendar that I can easily access on my phone, work machine and home machine, and with some level of guarantee about the security and privacy of my data. I'm not bothered about support response times - 99.9% of the time I'm not going to need it.
I want google mail + Google calendar, without the Google.
The listed roles were just to show the idea of the service; an role providing mail and calendar (e.g. Kolab) would only have a few required options (if any). Any additional detail would be optional and have our default recommended values.
I would say there are plenty of people who _would_ be interested in that sort of a service. I've been thinking about this since I wrote the above responses, and I'm fairly certain that what I want is gmail + google calendar + google drive, without the google. The more friction or configuration steps I have to go through, the less likely I am to use it.
Case in point: I'm not particularly happy with providing LastPass with my password info. I currently pay for their service. In order to transition to KeePass, I have to give up the automatic sync functionality between my devices, I have to manually back up my key database myself, and I lose the browser extensions that lastpass provides. I'm finding it hard to justify switching for the above reasons.
I'm using https://soverin.net for €29/year (€39 if you don't have your own domain) to limit my google dependence. Added benefit that they are based in EU. Disclaimer: our company works with them so I'm definitely biased.
Looks nice, but my worry is if they'd be alive in a year. I have actually used an e-mail provider before that's no more.
I'd like the European level of the data privacy but also a company that is set to live long, and the web site looks too much like a startup that can disappear tomorrow (as in "it didn't grow enough, who cares, it's just a web address, let's kill it and do something else.")
Honestly, I don't know. It depends on how usable the service is. I'm currently paying $36/yr for a vpn, $20/year for mail, and $12/year for password sync.
Ideally I'd like to spend about the same, and be able to move my file syncing away from Dropbox/google drive, and my calendar off google. I'd be willing to pay a little more to support a cause though.
We recently migrated to GApps sat work, and this is exactly how we imported old mail, so the feature is definitely there. I'm not sure if it's only available for GApps users or only available during some unspecified migration period, though.
It's only available to GApps users in the Admin panel. And when I tried it I had about 30% of my email missing in Gmail, so the import misfired. I ended up copying email manually with an email client. Maybe they fixed it, as I says, these days I'm on FastMail. But it's still a pita that the import has to be handled by admins.
Well, for me that's not weird, it's just a big fuck you, totally consistent with what other companies are doing. Multi-platform these days means Windows + OS X + Android + iOS. And the market I'm in is too small for them to bother, so might as well sit on that pile of cash and not want my business.
The weird part is that Linux is mostly about the server, being a really good home server for many people. And setting up a home server that synchronizes your files, for cheap with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard-drive, is a no-brainer. It's almost like they don't want people to do that.
But anyway, I'm voting with my wallet as they say. Currently paying €13.98/month for Dropbox, because I included the 1-year versioning add-on.
I also just gave up on 1Password for the same reason, even though I was happy with it on my Mac, switched to KeeWeb + Keepass2Android + MiniKeePass. In some ways it's even better - I now have a full history of all my edits and it can never switch on me or die.
1password keeps a history of edits, too. I don't know any way in which it's not a full history… hmm… maybe because they expose previous passwords, but if you change your username, they don't keep the old username unless it was a separate entry?
They are probably dogfooding the office suite that works fine in Chrome on Linux, and anything that's not a Doc/Sheet/presentation is source code under version control. I doubt they felt a pressing need for a desktop app supporting arbitrary kinds of files.
I've been thinking about moving to FastMail for quite some time now for pretty much the same reasons you mentioned.
What still keeps from switching though is that I rely on services like SaneBox and Unroll.me for organising my email. Unfortunately, the last time I looked only GMail is properly supported by these services and there doesn't seem to be a vendor-independent alternative either.
Does anyone here use services like SaneBox with FastMail?
> Gmail only does "plus" aliasing, but that's obvious and problematic
When using Gmail with Google Apps you can set up wildcarding, I have it setup so I can put anything I like before the at symbol and it all funnels into my inbox, no plus required. I use this typically to set the email address used with a given company to their name @ my domain.
One of advantages of using google products now is that all of their products can be controlled with a single account without much hassle. Since one is going to use at least one of their products, it makes to use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of advantages, although Fastmail does provide more flexibility.
Search within emails is good and supports advanced search with "from:", "to:", "after:" and things like that. And if you're using a desktop client, like Thunderbird, search through IMAP with FastMail feels faster.
The only difference I found is that Gmail also indexes attachments, like PDFs. Which is a cool capability, but I wished for that only once in the last year and that's only because somebody sent me a PDF without a textual description of what it is. So it can be useful, but not a deal breaker.
I find myself in a minority on this one, but a big part of why I switched to FastMail is Gmail's search was always slow and typically insufficient for me. E.g., Gmail didn't (doesn't?) do stemming, meaning I needed to memorize exact phrases to find messages. I've had no such problems with FastMail search and it's remarkably quick.
I had the same experience years ago. Checking again today on my GMail account shows that partial string searches (or prefixes) don't work at all, but I don't really notice it because it gives good search suggestions in the popup.
For example, if I search for a partial string, say the first part of my last name, GMail finds no messages. But there are hundreds of messages from my family members with the same last name in my inbox.
Another example: searching for Verizo results in "no messages found", but GMail recommends I search for Verizon and that shows all the messages I expect (at a glance.)
Gmail search definitely stems. I just spot checked a few irregular plurals and their singular forms are all found. One other benefit of Gmail search is it also searches Docs and other private data. For some reason the Gmail search is more effective and faster than Google Docs' own search.
It's been a few years since I've actively used it. If they added the feature, fantastic. I recall looking for an email containing "dog" and search for "dogs" and couldn't get a match.
It's unlikely I'll be switching back soon, if for no other reason than I'm prepaid on FastMail, but how is searching over large accounts now? I found with more than a few GB of email, search would take upwards of 20s. I had to get very aggressive about deleting messages to keep the search time down.
20 seconds is completely outside of my experience. You were searching with the gmail frontend, or via IMAP? I have 5GB in Gmail and I get instant results as I type in the search box, and full results in about one second when I hit the enter key. I only have a little bit of email in my fastmail account so I can't really compare it.
This was with the Gmail front-end. It's entirely possible there was just something messed up with my account. I haven't come across too many others that have had similar issues, but most people I know have much smaller accounts.
Thanks for letting me know my info is out-of-date. The problem with these sorts of comparisons is it's hard to use both options extensively, simultaneously.
90% of the time I'm just searching for messages from a particular sender. Like GMail, FastMail autocompletes contact names in search so this works great for me.
"the mobile web interface is actually good" That's funny you should say that. I use gmail on its mobile web interface exclusively (using chrome on ios), while my wife who is a fastmail user can't make heads or tails of their mobile site. What is it you prefer about fastmail's mobile site?
What problems does she have with the web interface?
For example one thing I like in FastMail is that in the message list you can finger swipe an item to the left for Delete and to the right for Archive. In Gmail doing that is not accompanied by a drag, so it isn't intuitive and you can only Archive, but not Delete. I like my Inbox to be clean and I prefer to delete junk, no reason to pollute my archive with nonsense. And when viewing a message, FastMail's UI also has arrows for jumping to the next message, which I like.
Another thing that bothers me in Gmail is the message details. In FastMail's UI you get more details.
And also, Gmail's mobile UI has virtually no preferences you can adjust and you have to switch to the desktop version for it, whereas FastMail's mobile UI has most settings in the desktop version.
Honestly I don't know. All I know is she basically refuses to use it because it's too much work.
It sounds like the FM mobile site meets your requirements, especially with respect to inbox zero housekeeping (that I don't practice). I think that's a long way from claiming that the gmail mobile site doesn't work, as the other poster stated.
I think it's nice that there is more than one email service. I don't think they have to be totally ordered by some objective criterion.
One thing that _really_ annoys me about swipe-to-archive on gmail is that, if you do it accidentally, you can't swipe back to undo -- you have to actually tap 'undo'.
My muscle memory just seems programmed to swipe back in the direction I came; and this seems much more intuitive. It's such an annoyance that I've now disabled the swipe functionality.
Does Fastmail implement this better? Or maybe I'm just strange...
Hey, yes, in Fastmail it is properly implemented - it behaves just like the iOS email client, or others: you have to swipe all the way (either to the left for archive or to the right for delete), but if you swipe back, or if you simply release without going the whole way, it will just cancel the action. And you get the swipe animation, so it's intuitive. Which is not something you see often in mobile web interfaces :-)
I, too, would be interested to know what issues someone could have with the Fastmail mobile interface. I'm not even sure how they could make it simpler - it's pretty great.
HN has tiny links (firefox android at least), I always have to zoom in to get to comments or upvote anything. But otherwise fairly readable …
I agree about Fastmail's mobile interface though. Almost anything else goes through Reader View (currently trying out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea... which seems promising). Just wish the Reader View could remember my scroll position …
Funny, one of the reasons I switched to fastmail was because my mum could understand their interface but gmail kept changing every month! I haven't had a support call asking where the new email button has gone since.
One of the biggest benefits to fastmail for me is the buttons are labelled with text on desktop.
On the matter of privacy, Google is simply too big and has access to too much info. They have your searches, often representing your secret desires, your video/music preferences, your favorite locations and habits, your travel itinerary, your voice, your chats, your G+ likes, your email, your purchases, etc.
And don't get me wrong, personally I've never seen many big companies as competent and as non-evil as Google. I also worked with their AdX and I can tell you that from the advertiser's perspective, Google discloses much less information than others in the business. But they don't have to be evil right now, they simply have to store that info and analyze it later, sell it, etc. And consider that the info in question is enough to determine with accuracy if somebody is pregnant, male or female, black or gay, as in things that in the right context can get one injured or killed.
In other words you can use Google's stuff, but reducing their area of knowledge and not placing all your eggs in the same basket is always wise.