I’ve had a paid account with Fastmail for probably going on 8 years I’d say. It’s been a fantastically reliable service and the odd (perhaps 3 or 4 times) I’ve needed to reach out to support it’s always prompt and a real conversation.

I'm also a happy Fastmail customer. They actually offer customer support (at least they did a couple of years ago when I needed it).

I had an issue with Fastmail where I accidentally deleted a bunch of emails, and with help from their support I was able to restore them from their backup quickly.

Contrast that to Gmail, where thousands of messages suddenly disappeared from the inbox, and the only support option was a forum with dozens of other users asking for solutions to the same problem.

I've had the same good experience as you. As another datapoint, they really do live up to their name. Everytime I test sending myself emails, I almost always get the email to my fastmail address 30-90 seconds faster then Gmail. Also gmail tends to disapear messages if they're not from a super uber reputable email provider, which sucks sometimes. Fastmail will always deliver my emails if I am playing with a local postfix server or something like that.

i have a gmail account that duplicates/forwards to my fastmail and somehow fastmail shows the forwarded email waaaaaay before gmail even tells me i got the original. i giggle every time.

I sell an app, and people often tell me they can't find their license code anymore. More often than not, these are from Gmail addresses. This may be just because Gmail is popular.

But it's still baffling how Gmails original proposition was that you would always have an archive of all your mail and could search it instantly, yet all these people can't find the email with a license code for an app.

> from _their_ backup quickly.

Wow, that is something

Deleted emails are kept for one week so that accidentally-deleted items can be restored:

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/restoredeleted.html

Gmail is required by law to really delete things the user deletes. There are guarantees around how quickly it will be done.

> Gmail is required by law to really delete things the user deletes.

This is not universally the case and the opposite is actually stated in their privacy policy and data retention agreements as it relates to financial transaction information (which likely needs to be retained for tax purposes).

While Google likely pays it safe and complies mostly with CCPA/GDPR 'rights to be forgotten' for the rest of the US, and a good chunk of the world there's no legal requirement outside of the contractual agreements provided in paid Workspaces on when they need to purge this data.

Current privacy policy: https://www.gstatic.com/policies/privacy/pdf/20210204/3jla0x... Data retention policy: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention

Nice to hear about the support. I haven't had to use it.

I'm a 2 or 3 year customer, bringing my own domain. Love being able to send and receive from *@mydomain.com for the entry level price ($50/year, I believe). App works great on both Android and iOS and doesn't drain my battery.

I'll put in a recommendation for MXroute (mxroute.com). They're geared towards slightly more technical users, ime, but there's practically no limits (apart from rate of outgoing mail). Unlimited domains, unlimited aliases, unlimited accounts, even. The entire service uses DirectAdmin as a management UI so it's pretty easy to use. They've even got plans geared towards resellers. The owner/sysad is an ex-Digital Ocean guy who's obsessed with mail delivery, so you're not likely to face any issues delivering to practically anyone.

I shifted over from Fastmail (who are amazing, don't get me wrong) because I got a good Black Friday deal.

I did not know mxroute.com and went to their web site to get some information.

I must say that I would not have lasted there a long tim eif it was not for the HN recommendation. I did not find any place where they actually explain what is the "unlimited part" (= can I really, for 45 USD, register my three domains, and a number of email accounts on each of the domains?).

I wanted to ask the question on their chat - cannot login, a customer account is required.

I wanted to ask a question on the community forum, cannot login,probably limited to users as well.

I will end up sending an email to the contact address but this was not a great experience.

To be clear - I have no idea about the service itself, it sees to be very good from the technical descriptions (at least they understand email delivery).

Apologies for the bad first impression. This is somewhat intentional. MXroute was originally created for sysadmins who don't need bells and whistles, and just need their email to get to its destination without fussing with IP reputation and things like that.

You know the old saying "If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans." Well, we became very popular with end users that weren't sysadmins at all. Still convinced that we could offer high deliverability at low cost while slowly improving UX to fit a new type of customer, we entered a bit of a dark age where support tickets were going unanswered for months. Because our pricing was meant to be extremely competitive and completely ditch the whole "per user" pricing that plagues the market space, and we were becoming more popular with end users, we were overrun with basic support questions and pre-sales inquires.

The first thing we did was cut out pre-sales inquiries. With enough sales occurring organically without advertising, and with pre-sales inquires having a high correlation with cancellation requests (because our UX wasn't designed for the end user who happened to be the most likely to have a huge list of questions before purchase), we decided that we weren't going to let our overhead (and as a result, our prices for existing customers) suffer at the hands of something that wasn't generating revenue.

The second thing we did was to cut back on direct support and focus on publicly available information for troubleshooting. Ideally, we'd funnel customers or prospective customers into our community forum and community chat, where they could ask questions and help each other with answers, and build up a list of questions/answers that were given in the language of the customers, to help reduce repetitive support requests. Because we found that 15 customers might ask the same question in 15 different ways, by having a community resource where the questions and answers fit those different scenarios, we could do more there than we could by automating responses to keywords.

Leveraging these community resources assisted us in building customer facing documentation and automation rules for our direct line of support, which in turn allowed us to begin leaning back into more directly available support with automation and documentation to fall back on.

Now, we're back offering more direct support after having weathered the storm caused by the unintended shift in our customer base. This is of course assisted by our documentation, and articles are regularly added to address common questions. We're routinely adding automation to auto reply to repetitive questions, and taking those repetitive questions to form better onboarding processes that intend to prevent them.

Time and time again I saw that companies were getting lost in the overhead required for providing support. You'd see in my employment history that I've been on the front lines of that with support at HostGator and DigitalOcean. I always had a vision of how to scale support in a way that would not require the seemingly inevitable steps of outsourcing, followed by selling the company. But only on MXroute did I have the direct opportunity to implement my vision. It hasn't been a flawless process, but I do think that the present result is some of my best work. Of course, as with anything, opinions may vary.

Thank you for your reply.

I completely understand the support part - I have been in IT for 25+ years so this word hits close home.

I would also be interested in a service for technically apt users, but what I was trying to say is that having some basic information upfront, understandable by someone who know how to configure mail, would have been enough.

Something like "you pay XX€, you set the MX on your DNS to point to us (maximum XX domains), for each domain your have YY standalone accounts, and each can have ZZ aliases. You can have aliases cross-domains (or not)".

The kind of basic information that would immediately show what your service is, especially when there were so many people recommending it.

I am also all for the community approach, it is just that there is no (obvious at least) way to create an account (I was even ready to use LinkedIn for that but it was rejected).

To be completely honest, I did not go though all the docs before my first comment. I did it now and still could not find the information above :) (but maybe I did not look at the right page)

Appreciate those notes! Will be redoing a lot of the documentation very soon, and will keep this in mind.

That lifetime plan is tempting

Go to the lowendtalk.com forums and you'd probably find threads with even cheaper plans. They come with certain limitations, but are good for some people.

+1 for Fastmail. I've been happy for several years.

I wrote about my experience switching off of Gmail with some tips here if it's helpful: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/

Nice blog post. I made a similar switch, but in the back of my mind I worry that I’ve introduced a new risk factor, since it’s much more likely for my custom domain to get hijacked than gmail.com.

See for example this story of someone’s Twitter account getting stolen via a social engineering attack on their registrar: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...

A Google search suggests that setting up a registry lock could be an additional layer of defense against these types of attacks.

Have you done anything to guard against this type of attack?

Thanks! And no, I have to say I hadn't really considered that angle. In the example that you linked, they didn't steal the domain, they just changed the MX records, so transfer lock wouldn't help.

That being said, my account with my registrar is 2FA-enabled and I do have transfer lock turned on. I hope that someone wouldn't be able to social engineer their way into my Hover account, but who knows.

Maybe I just mention this in a footnote.

I'm a very happy customer of protonmail. They're consistently extending their offering (VPN, Calendar, Drive is up next), their pricing seems fair, albeit not exactly cheap, but to be honest though, I almost consider this to be a feature - I'm perfectly okay with paying good cash for something as important as mail.

Their UI was somewhat lackluster but they recently released a completely overhauled version (just a few days ago), which seems kinda nice so far.

All in all, I can only recommend it. That being said, I'm mostly only receiving mail and rarely ever sending out any, so YMMV.

As a former ProtonMail customer (for several months) and current Fastmail one (~ 4 years): If you have more than 2 domain names, you'll pay 30 EUR/month for your ProtonMail account. I think that's ridiculous. The 5 alias limit for the "Plus" tier is also too limited in my opinion.

I don't know how well all the features match up but you can use as many domains as you want on Migadu for $19/year.

> Their UI was somewhat lackluster

I remember looking at ProntonMail 3 years ago, before I settled on Fastmail instead. To be clear, I have no intention of leaving Fastmail; they have the perfect feature set for me, and have been forthright and competent when it comes to publishing details regarding the problems that have cropped up with their service. I have nothing but respect for the Fastmail team. Russia is in the top 3 countries for which the blocking of Fastmail doesn't concern me; no service is immune to this kind of government interference.

That said… just to refresh my memory, and in case anything ever does happen to Fastmail in my country… isn't ProtonMail the one that had the WORST UI I've ever seen, where every click within the settings was a new maze embedded within another maze? I remember the UI for one of these popular and "secure" email hosts being so ultimately gross, as if it was designed and coded by a 10 year old who just discovered HTML with no knowledge of CSS, where it was just pages after pages of checkboxes and radio buttons with no documentation? Was that ProtonMail, or one of the other very few and far between options?

I remember only having looked at a couple of the modern options to cut my ties with Google, and Fastmail was so far above and beyond the other "viable options", such that it wasn't even really a choice. One of the options clearly looked like a lot of low-level work had gone into security, but that it was effectively unusable from the perspective of the users–including admins–who had to contend with its interface?

I have and like ProtonMail - but until it supports calendar in its iOS app it’s an incomplete solution / non-starter.

According to the blog post, ProtonMail and others are in this boat, too.

Fastmail offers a VPN? I can't find anything about that.

ProtonMail does

My bad

Devil's advocate, wouldn't keeping the two using seperate providers be better? Not 'crossing the streams' so to speak

I've been a paying customer for a few years (since Dreamhost shutdown catch-all support) and when I 1st migrated I tripped over a bug in their IMAP implementation that made thousands of messages disappear from my mailbox. Their support identified the bug and pushed a code fix into production in less than 24 hours, which immediately resolved my issue.

Gmail on the other hand keeps kicking my devices out of being able to log in and activating a security lock down, and the closest thing to support I can get about it is a webpage that implies that can only happen if my devices are hacked.

Long-time (edit: 15+ years) customer of Fastmail, have only praise for them.

For me it's a service that just gets out of the way and I get on with life, not worrying about who's mining emails etc.

Fastmail has been nothing but awesome. Currently using PO Box, which is a a sub-company or something. I get all the Fastmail features and it's been awesome. So happy to fork over my money for such a reliable service.

> I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams

this reads funnily non-techy

i mean web-mail exists or are you reffering to some imap/smtp-in-http?

should be good as long as it is ssl-encrypted and runs over tcp-port 443, no?

Fastmail created the JMAP Standard, published by IETF. Take a look here: https://jmap.io/

Web mail can replace IMAP/POP, but you're still going to need an SMTP server to receive email. Or is there some sort of widely supported SMTP over HTTP protocol that I'm unaware of?

Webmail replaces both IMAP/POP and SMTP for the connection between the user and the mail service they are using. The connection between you and a webmail provider is just a simple HTTP/S web application. It’s the connection between your mail service and the recipient’s mail server that will use traditional mail protocols.

I am aware of that, but you're missing my point. Webmail needs SMTP (while it doesn't necessarily need IMAP/POP). So there is bound to be an SMTP server somewhere that cannot be hidden in HTTP traffic, which is what I think hansel_der was implying.

Well fastmail's servers are not in Russia, so they can just keep using SMTP without issue, it would only be the client in Russia who would need to tunnel his traffic to fastmail.

You're forgetting the SMTP server on the other end. If Fastmail SMTP servers can no longer relay messages from/to Russian SMTP servers, then Fastmail is no longer a viable email service for Russians communicating with each other, unless all of them were using foreign based email services.

I am not forgetting anything. It is indeed true that fastmail is broken for Russians in Russia. And trying to tunnel out to fastmail just to mail back in to Russia makes little sense.

Also broke are all Russian email users who have to send to or receive from the free worlds fastmail accounts. Would seem this is just Russia damaging Russians.

I've been a very enthusiastic fastmail customer for N years. (I don't remember timelines very well, but N is large.)

I've been using Protonmail for some time and started paying for it about one year ago. I mainly switched to the paid plan to get access to their Protonmail Bridge for use with a local email client and that has worked well so far.

I started using fastmail about 6 months ago and have really enjoyed it so far. My only concern is whether they’ll be around long term (10-20+ years) because it’s quickly become my default email for important stuff.

I started using fastmail about a year ago. They've been around since the late 1990s so I feel good about their longevity.

I wasn’t aware of that. That’s very reassuring.

I've had my Fastmail account for over 20 years. It's an employee-owned company with first class ethics and a first class service. An absolute beacon of integrity. It's too bad these qualities aren't more in demand. Make sure you use a Yubikey. An honourable service provider isn't enough.

Others commented about your own domain. It's straightforward to set up, costs maybe $7 a year. You may want to look into it.

Additional bonus: use all kinds of addresses you want ([email protected]) for easy blocking if an address leaks.

You can always get your own domain and only give out email addresses from that. But my prediction is that Fastmail will outlast GMail.

A bold prediction to be sure.

I hope you're right!

There's German mail provider Mailbox. https://mailbox.org/en/ They tick a lot of good boxes for me.

> I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure.

As long as server name sent in cleartext in SNI, blocking any website is trivial. Telegram uses a different approach with multitude of proxy servers and dynamic proxy changes via Apple/Google push messages. It's not applicable to an ordinary website.

If/when encrypted SNI is widely implemented, it might work.

> If/when encrypted SNI is widely implemented, it might work.

No. China is already blocking all connections with encrypted SNI. If such services become popular or make the encrypted SNI mandatory, then the choice will be to either install a government MITM certificate or not use the internet at all.

My point is that right now Russia does not have to choose between blocking entire CDN or allowing all websites. Unencrypted SNI allows to selectively block some websites while keeping CDN for other websites untouched.

Russia's situation is far from China, AFAIK.

Try Infomaniak (https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/web-and-mail/mail-host...). I've been using them for years. Solid platform, not 5-eyes, good webmail experience, cheaper than fastmail.

Just be aware that they require a phone number to sign up (can’t remember if it’s Swiss numbers only) and if their security systems trigger, they ask you to upload your government-issued ID.

FastMail customer. +1, nothing but good things to say. They even championed the new JMAP standard.

For your concern, Zoho is a great option. Very reliable support. I got locked out once and they were able to help me get back my account really fast.

I moved from fastmail to Runbox many years ago. The Runbox service is very reliable and all the servers are outside of the US.

migadu is a really option

Second this

Assuming "really [good] option"

Very happy customer of kolabnow

Checked out both protonmail & fastmail among others, ended up selecting kolabnow, no regrets.

Fastmail seems to be the best provider currently. Have only been using them for a bit but had no issues.

Around fifteen years for me, fastmail is great.

I've been using fastmail for years and I love it.

I’m also a Fastmail user (for the past 5 years or so), but I’m considering switching to iCloud, given the announcement it’ll start supporting custom domains. Fastmail is pricey ($50/month for the non-lite tier), whereas iCloud is $1/month for 50 GB.

Fastmail has three current tiers: Basic, Standard and Professional. Basic is $3/user/month, Standard is $5/user/month and Professional is $9/user/month. None of them are remotely close to $50/month for ordinary single users. You would need 10 users to get to $50/month for the Standard "non-lite tier" plan.

Perhaps the user has confused fastmail with another service or they might have some legacy plan which is more expensive than it needs to be. (I think I have a legacy plan...)

Isn't most legacy plan less expensive? I have legacy plan that's basically the current Standard plan but at $45/yr.

Could you link to the iCloud announcement that says it'll start supporting custom domains? I saw that it will support disposable addresses, but didn't notice anything about custom domains.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/08/icloud-mail-custom-doma... - it wasn’t discussed in the keynote but it showed up on the iOS 15 new features page

I don't think Fastmail has any plans that are $50/month

More like $5/month. Or $50/year