One person's "tedious and boring" is another person's "reliable."

Reliable and modern are not mutually exclusive.

Once you've used a service like Intercom, FrontApp or even Google's "Inbox" you realise emailing can be far more productive. It's a shame that companies like FastMail gave up on trying to improve the experience.

The features you list sound like something that should be implemented by an email client not an email host. I realize they have their own client, but that is really just a means to an end as it is obviously not their core business.

On top of that, it sounds like you really want something other than email.

Snooze is a really weird way of trying to shove stuff in your inbox... Out of your inbox for some reason. You come back to an email later... by still finding it in your inbox.

And there's no good standards compliant way to implement that, so it'd mess up third party clients. This is why Gmail is such a broken experience if you aren't using Gmail's own proprietary Google-blessed apps.

Those are all features of the client, not features of the service. You can use a different client if you like.

FastMail is the service and the client. Or am I to believe the Fastmail.com web interface is merely some kind of proof of concept and that they intended for people to build web clients on top of the Fastmail service?

I think the expectation is that since they speak IMAP, people will use mail clients on their own devices to access their mail. So they don't need to implement every feature a mail client has ever come up with, they just need to speak a standard protocol mail clients can understand, and then you can use the mail client of your choice, with the features you want.

They don't need to do anything, but IMO they should be doing more to enrich the email experience. Have your rock solid standard IMAP implementation, but if you've got a web client and apps for Android and iPhone why not make them better? I'm tired of having an inbox full of emails which I know I can't do anything with now because they are waiting on some other event to take place, I just want to be able to hit a Snooze button and have the email disappear for a few days. It's not that challenging of a feature for a dev team to implement is it?

> I just want to be able to hit a Snooze button and have the email disappear for a few days.

* Create a folder 'On Hold'

* Move emails there

* Check in a couple days.

If you want alternatives, check AirMail. I find it's a good client on iOS and OS X that implements what you want

That is a terrible hack of a workaround and you know it :)

With Google Inbox (inbox.google.com) I can Snooze an email for [x] number of days and it'll be gone from my inbox and I don't have to think about it until it comes back. I use Inbox for personal email but I'd rather not be.

Airmail doesn't have a web client, and that's where most of my emailing takes place, so unfortunately it's not an option.

We use FrontApp on top of FastMail for customer service, it provides a bunch of useful features on top of email, such as the one I just mentioned. I could use it for my personal email but that would mean paying two monthly subscriptions. Plus it doesn't have spam filtering built in.

> With Google Inbox (inbox.google.com) I can Snooze an email for [x] number of days and it'll be gone from my inbox and I don't have to think about it until it comes back.

And... You've just lost standards compliance so you can't use any standards compliant clients. This is a terrible hack of a workaround and you know it :)

No I haven't lost standards compliance. The feature does not interfere with IMAP at all. Sure, I don't get the useful features with a standards complaint client, but why would I expect to?