I eventually just set up my own mail server. It was difficult and unpleasant, but when I was done I felt a lot better about my mail.

I switched twice, from my own mail server -> gmail -> back to my own server. Setting up the mail server the second time around was much more difficult for me. There seemed to be a lot more to get right this time around. (anti-spam, in particular. Ensuring that your mails aren't dropped by other servers can be a pain to get right).

I found http://www.mail-tester.com/ to be very useful.

That's awesome, thanks for the link.

So instead of Google, fastmail have all of your email. Big improvement ... I guess.

Well, one is a small Australian company that make money from providing e-mail as a service, the other being a global company that use behavioral profiling to skew your view of the world.

Fastmail doesn't peak into your emails like Google does with gmail. That is a big improvement.

How do you know?

He obviously doesn't know because he's wrong. Fastmail still analyzes mail for spam and indexes them for search, among other text processing.

Are you happy with deliverability? I have had some Fastmail issues where mails did not get delivered as reliable as with Gmail … filters are also much less convenient to set up.

On the other hand, Fastmail is great as an IMAP provider.

The web GUI etc. are OK but there are still issues, for example with non-English characters in the search. 2FA is kind of strange too with its mix between your password and the 2FA token. And spam filtering is of course not comparable with Gmail in my experience (with Fastmail erring on the spam side and Gmail erring on the false positive side, I don't know which one is 'preferable'!).

Worked well for me so far, agree on the 2FA, but apparently thats going to be fixed in a not to far away future

It costs money. Even if it cost 5$/year it would be a major hurdle. But it costs 40$/year for the same level of functionality as gmail. Sadly, most people will consider this a no-brainer in gmail's favour.

I think its cheap, for example Netflix would cost me 120 bucks a year and I just occasionally use that service, email I use all the time.

I've grumped about this before, but fastmail is not great email or calendar; I have a long list of bugs.

For example: just last month I discovered they can't reliably handle calendar events sent from outlook (you know, that tiny calendar server that no business uses). This made a phone screen a huge hassle to schedule. Somehow a meeting request sent as 3pm PDT / 2200 greenwich got loaded into my fastmail calendar as 2pm pdt/10pm bst. It's just flaky.

Tried it but the mobile app could be much better.

If you have iOS everything integrates so no need for the app if you do not like it. Android is a bit harder to setup, but you can get mail, calendar and contacts working there too