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.