To me the only downside is the mobile app isn't quite as polished as Gmail. It doesn't work offline, and I notice occasional bugs or awkwardnesses. But it's still very usable, and I much prefer the Fastmail web interface to Gmail.
Edit: Also, the Fastmail importer didn't work very well on my large number of Gmail messages. It failed a few times and restarting it resulted in duplicate messags.
But FastMail supports other clients, right? I don't want to be forced to use their web interface or their app; I'm happy with the Apple-written Mail apps.
It does, but at least for me the problem is using my separate forwarding-only e-mail address instead of fastmail.com as the sender. As far as I see, I need the native app for this.
I have one issue with FastMail that I didn't have with Gmail. Every few days/weeks I'll get a wave of backspatter from someone spoofing my domain to spam. I've researched and it doesn't look like there's anything I can do about this. Most of the backspatter ends up in my spam folder, but not all of it does. I don't know if Gmail automatically removed backspatter -- not even sending it to my spam folder -- or if this only started after I transferred my domain.
It works like this: the spammer forges their headers to make it look like the from address is under my domain. My domain has DKIM/SPF set up, so a good recipient will compare the email to the authentication records, see they don't match, and then trash the email. But there are still a lot of mail servers out there that don't have that set up, so they accept the email as valid, process it, then return it to me when the account doesn't exist on their server. Like I said, annoying, but not a lot I can do other than set up rules to trash messages with a subject of "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender."
I've been doing this for over 15 years, but with a much simpler setup: I just forward it to another account, which for the last 10-ish years has been an @gmail address. The mails show up in my Gmail inbox as From: the original sender and To: the custom domain.
As a caution: don't forward a top-level domain. You'll get all kinds of dictionary-style spam attacks and it becomes flooded with noise. Instead, use a sub-domain, so you get for example <*@something.mydomain.tld>.
Nice tip, I'll implement that for my setup. I had to stop a catchall on a TLD for the reason you mention and it'll be trivial to switch to a sub-domain. Thanks.
I don't disagree it's better if fastmail (or whatever) can receive directly as it saves another MX server in the middle, but it's still doable without the end provider explicitly supporting it.
You're probably considering switching based on your mail needs, so this might not apply to you, however:
In addition to mail, Fastmail also advertises[1] their plans come with their FastMail Files feature. It can be used for one-off file sharing (akin to Google Drive) and even static site hosting (explained in their support docs[2]). However, I learned from the CEO's comments in my support ticket that they're apparently overprovisioned and don't expect everyone to actually use the storage included with their plans.
I just took a cursory look at their landing and pricing pages and see they aren't touting Files loudly right now. (My initial thought is a hope that they took my remarks to heart from the thread that led to my decision to leave, when I said they should "go tone down the hosted storage aspect of your marketing". However, given that the promotional blog post from [1] occurred within the month that followed my comment, I suspect not.) The blog posts and Fastmail documentation[3] about the Files feature are still available, of course, whether or not it's still on the landing page.
This itself would have been only slightly disappointing, but the bad taste came from the passive aggressive responses in the support thread, that this was the same sort of attitude adopted in a previous (unrelated) support thread from a couple years ago, and that in this most recent incident, they decided to go on the offensive and compare using the 25GB storage space for making backups to abuse. (Their choice example being someone trying to abuse an ISP's lax limits on DNS to tunnel IP over it.) I half expect someone to show up here to try and apply a layer of spin in exactly the same way. Bonus points if they ignore my actual use case, try to make it out as if I was trying to do something I wasn't, and then call me the "disingenuous" one again.
1. https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/03/29/faster-files/
Isn't that true for every file hosting service everywhere? Most people only use a fraction of their available storage, so there's no need to actually provision enough space for everyone to use 100% of their quota. Doing so would be a waste of space.
I did use inbox before (and I still get some email to my gmail account) and it does have nice features like snooze that I miss. But on the whole I am happy with my choice to use fast mail.
I should also add that I seem to get slightly more junk mail than I did before, but it is close and hard to tell, I have not had a real email marked as spam yet, which did happen from time to time with gmail, so this isn't a complaint, just an observation.
In Gmail (with G Suite) one has to manually add every identity they may wish to reply from - there’s no <star>@ option. Additionally, it’s impossible to hide your real email address/Google Account address. It’ll always be disclosed in the email headers unlike FastMail.
I’d love if G Suite would make such a workflow easier..
[0] escape characters don’t seem to work here, <star> refers to what’d you think it does
I didn't know that, but it's fantastic news! I was doing things the awkward "gmail" way.
Edit: Simply throwing this out there in case Fastmail doesn't and you're looking for alternatives. Not shilling for Zoho.
Personally, I'm only interested in email. But thanks for letting me know about other options!
I ask because that is what I want. I want my account to autodestruct if compromised and when recovered I want to be assured that all my personal data has been safeguarded by effectively throwing away the key into the depths of Mordor.
This is partly possible with Gmail, as you can use addresses like <[email protected]>, but not all sites support emails with a + in them.
What differences have you noticed in your year since switching? I'm especially interested in any downsides. My biggest worry about Gmail is the lack of privacy from Google.