I use it with Spark on macOS and iOS (Spark Classic) and it just works. Archiving works fine, marking as spam actually moves and 'activates' Fastmail's training. There's email masks, aliases, the UI is always fast and responsive in the web view when I go there.

Have you had any issues with Spark or are there any downsides using it? I haven’t used Spark since I started using Fastmail and have been thinking about it

None that I've found. I think just make sure when you configure the account in Spark that the folders are set correctly (i.e. archive and spam folders are mapped to their folders in Fastmail) so you get the correct functionality from them.

The only thing I miss from Gmail is a "send and archive" button to save me a click when replying to emails.

Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

I find myself using the web UI because it's much faster than MacOS Mail, which often gets a bit stuck when downloading new emails via IMAP. I'd prefer to use a native app, but it happened without me thinking - I just ended up going for the fastest option unconsciously.

Try Thunderbird. It's easy to set up IMAP to gmail, and it's very quick. Keep what you want on the server (or download and delete) and just never look at the web client again.

I wanted to use Thunderbird, but there is no Thunderbird for iOS (well, there is one in development, you can install it through TestFlight, but didn't work at all the last time I tried it). I try to use the same apps everywhere to have some consistency.

Probably the nothing to install experience. Every Android phone comes with Gmail and every device has a web browser. Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

I'm using Thunderbird with POP3 accounts, download on my laptop then remove from the server, daily backups. My phone has K9 (the old one with the UI I like) and I never remove messages from the phone. When I send mail from the phone I bcc myself so I can see the message from my laptop later.

Why? Because I don't like to leave my mail forever on somebody's else server. They can lock me out at any time (it will probably never happen) and my mail is mine.

Would I recommend this to anybody? Of course not.

Is it a problem not to have access to all of my mail when I don't have my laptop with me? It never happened to be a problem and it's always less likely to be a problem because of all the messages that are exchanged outside email and on mobile first platforms, even for work.

iOS comes with a mail client. It connects to my exchange, gmail and Zoho accounts.

You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.

This is obviously better, but until just now it never occurred to me that this would be the way iOS users would engage with gmail, since I've only ever used Android. I always thought the iOS built-in email app was just for Apple mail or something.

TIL. We really do live in separate bubbles.

And a great email client at that. Both iOS and macOS's. I can't imagine trading it for some web UI.

“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.

It’s great if you never search for email I guess.

It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...

...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.

The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.

But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.

It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.

At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.

There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again.

These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.

The worst is that if you look at Console.app and stream error logs from the system processes, there's hundreds of error logs per minute being dumped out on a brand new system with nothing installed on it yet, including and especially from spotlight. There's bugs all over the place that some engineer at Apple thought enough to emit a log for, and the result is they just ship with the errors anyway. They only seem to care about 100% reproducible bugs, and even then they sometimes ship with them anyway. They don't seem to care about all these little unobservable issues that "only" log errors, even though 9 times out of 10, when a bug does become a reproducible/observable issue, there was an error log that was warning you about it the whole time.

If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."

Totally agree. I hit another crazy iOS bug this morning I hadn't hit for a few months - search for an old email - specifically my old Ableton licence from 2022... Return to my inbox 20-30 mins later on that device and it's now full with every email returned from my earlier Ableton search. Open my email on any other machine (MacBook, iPad, etc.) and it shows correctly, but iOS will keep showing all those old emails until I manually move each one back to its original folder. Pretty annoying if they come from different folders, and deleting them deletes the original in the email account. Persists across reboots, so again clearly spotlight search borks out and wrecks the local mail index. It needs a "rebuild" button, like Mac Mail has to "solve" this.

When I open Gmail, whether an app or on the web, it already has the latest emails loaded. When I open Mail.app, I have to wait for them to download.

This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.

> Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?

They aren't sure, that's why they are asking..

Thank goodness, Gmail does not come on iOS. No other apps are pre installed except Apple's, and I am always very thankful for that when I set up a Samsung tablet as a kiosk and have to delete sponsored apps, AI apps, Spotify, Microsoft apps, Samsung apps, Google apps, kids apps...horrible experience.

The Apple Mail client works very well with Gmail. The only real negative is that it’s not true push email, though it is largely close enough.

The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.

My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.

I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.

If your concern is just having access to your emails if someday shit hits the fan and you’re locked out, why no smtp ? Seems easier.

SMTP is to send mail and that's how I send it from my laptop and from my phone. POP3 is to read from a mailbox.

Or imap !

IMAP usually means that mail is stored on the provider server even if one can download and delete. Furthermore POP3 is a trivial protocol that could be operated via telnet before everybody went TLS.

The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.

Thanks. I meant IMAP

A lot of providers don't give you imap anymore or it's an extra cost option. SMTP also comes with a ton of traps because of spam fighting measures.

Also monopolies and mobile devices and skill issues.

Which providers don’t give IMAP?

> Why are people accessing emails from the webUI. Email is SMTP and IMAP, use any number of clients to access your email.

Because the UX of most email clients is extremely bad when compared with the webui of these email providers.

It's also IMAP is an awful protocol with so many glaring issues its impossible for a modern client to paper over them. Fastmail invented JMAP but it doesn't seem to have taken off with any other providers.

>so many glaring issues

like what?

From memory, there are no bulk actions, so if you want to say select all emails and delete you have to send thousands of requests. If you want to rename a folder you have to send a request for every email in the folder. There is no way to set up filters that run server side, there is no way to get push notifications.

And probably a million other things that don’t hold up today.

Deletion is done by marking messages with deleted flag and then expunge to delete flagged messages. AIU rename exists: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3501#section-6.3.5

Push notifications: https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin

Sending those thousands of requests is something your mail client does for you. Deleting 5000 emails takes a few minutes, but how often do you do that? I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine.

For server side filters I just set them up in Fastmail using the web UI. That's the type of action I do once or twice a year, so totally OK to hop on over to the web app for just that.

I have no idea what you mean by 'push notifications'. I have Thunderbird open on my desktop, and it shows me when there is email. I have K9 on my smartphone, and it shows me when there is email (I don't have it set up to display notifications, but that seems possible). That's basically all I need to do email.

Try Mailspring. I’m a huge fan: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring

That's an electron app. What does it offer that Thunderbird doesn't?

I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.

In mobile, webview-based apps exist mostly because they provide more ways to gather data on users.

> I would go further and ask what do electron apps offer in the way of improvements that WebApps don't.

If there was a way to run Mailspring on the web, I’d switch in a minute! I’ve tried to port it one time, but it got a bit tricky.

Mailspring uses a native module for syncing the mail, which would have to run either on a server somewhere or in a web worker. I think the web worker makes more sense nowadays, and would make it an offline-first app, but there’s a catch: how do you connect to IMAP/SMTP from a web browser?

Running the sync engine on a server is possible, but you have to have a server. It could make sense, though, if you’re running your own email server and want a killer webmail app to go with it.

Thunderbird is great. I’ve been using it a long time, too, and feature-wise, I think Thunderbird is way ahead. I just find Mailspring a bit more... pleasant to use? And I think it’ll be an easier switch for people coming off Gmail Web, which is why I’m recommending it.

(Also... Thunderbird is not that different from an Electron app itself. It uses Gecko instead of Blink, and has a few bits of XUL here and there, but the core premise is the same. Though it doesn’t use React at least!)

Every desktop mail client is bad in its own way. And then I have to set it up on all computers I use. Web UI just works.

Guess you've tried every desktop mail client?

I only use one computer and my local mail app (macOS's in my case) just works. I can't imagine trading it for visiting some web site to read my email.

macOS mail app is a special type of terrible especially if you deal with multiple email accounts. Every os upgrade causes various bugs such as search index all of the sudden not working and you have to reset and reimport all your mailboxes

I've used Mail.app since 2004 and have not had any of those problems except searching using Spotlight have occasionally been broken over the years, but never searching within the app.

And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.

I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.

The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.

I agree. Mail.app is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. It has some nice features as well, especially the editor. But some of the bugs I have experienced were catastrophic, such as silently failing exports that appeared to have completed successfully (this was recently fixed after years).

Good for you. I've tried a few during the last 30 years and once Web UIs started being usable (after gmail), I use them if possible.

Because it is really nice. I prefer it to thunderbird/(apple) Mail.

I get the same interface on my own computer as when I go on some other machine.

This is the way. Use a tui client like alpine or mutt, and enjoy managing 100s of thousands of emails in ms. I feel physical pain when I have to see colleagues and acquaintances wait for several seconds in their heavy web interfaces. I can manipulate batches of emails with terminal tools and the power of Maildir.

I do the same, but with mu/mu4e in Emacs. Not having to open a browser to read email also helps with staying focused for me.

Because Fastmail has a fantastic Web UI, have been using it for years.

Nothing is more fantastic(er) than a native application handling multiple e-mail accounts without effort or lag.

Thunderbird and macOS mail are great for that. Supporting everything from GMail to personal mail servers, and everything in between.

What is Thunderbird written in. #lazyweb #nollm ;)

The amount of configuration required to rival what's available out of the box in Web clients (especially indexing, searching, filtering, blocking, etc.) is a bit too much for someone who isn't already interested in it. I tried GNUS in Emacs and a few TUI apps; I do like having all my emails accessible locally, but for day-to-day use, web clients are more convenient. I haven't tried Thunderbird or Outlook (if it still has a local version), though, so maybe I'd have all the conveniences I want there - but since I already have them in Fastmail, I just don't have an incentive to switch.

I migrated from gmail to Migadu. They have a webmail client, but they make a point that they Do Standards.

They also let you host as many domains as you like and the servers are all EU based.

Well I usually already have my browser open, and "Ctrl+T, 'fa', [enter]" loads up my email basically instantly. I don't want email notifications (or any notifications, really) so a local app just seems like it would introduce a lot of clunk for not much benefit.

I like using the webui because my mailbox is too large to pull down locally and it’s easier to handle through the web.

I also have it pulling to local clients that just keep a few messages. Maybe 30% of the time is webui.

Has worked well for me for 30+ years (substituting telneting in and using pine until webuis existed).

“Email in the cloud mainly” is a useful pattern.

>use any number of clients to access your email.

Your car can have any colour, as long as it is black.

All native email clients are stuck in 2005, lack most basic features, and have bugs not fixed in decades. Also, most providers have poor support for new IMAP features, such as NOTIFY.

I loved Mimestream when I worked at a place that was on Google.

https://mimestream.com/

But Mimestream is good specifically because it uses Gmail Sync API, not IMAP/SMTP.

50 dollars for an app on an OS which I don't use, when Telegram is free and works everywhere?

Name one feature (i.e. thing that requires client support, not UI) that's new in email since 2005 and that's also worth having.

JMAP.

Modern authentication.

S/MIME with cryptography that isn’t RSA.

Without IMAP NOTIFY email is almost unusable.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5465.html

It's from 2009.

Without managesieve (2010, https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5804/ ), any decent filtering is impossible. (And no, it's not supported by almost any email client)

JMAP has already been mentioned.

I also don't remember any email clients supporting carddav.

>not UI

Why not UI? UI is very important. Even such a basic thing as muting folders works like cr*ap in k9mail. Is it better in "fairemail"?

I never understood why anyone would want to download an application to do something as simple as checking email.

To have a copy of your emails on your device, for backup, and offline use.

A web UI can do that

The comment I was replying to was wondering why people installed apps to read email instead of using the browser based clients. So I don't understand your point ...?

You can have a copy of your emails for offline use in your browser.

Less so as a reliable backup.

To be clear, a "Web UI" usually refers to a desktop or mobile application whose user-interface is built with web technology (HTML, CSS, JS etc.) that is rendered using a webview component in the application. You don't refer to a website (even if it is a web-based application like GMail) as "Web UI". It is still called a website. And while you are right that browsers today can store data for offline use, nobody considers it good enough for a backup.

A web UI cannot do that. It is simply not possible.

Websites can work offline

Because native apps are faster, work when you aren't online, and are all around more pleasant to use.

> work when you aren't online,

...but why do you need that?

Why does it need to be that fast too?

I guess many more people here are real power-users of email than I would expect for a forum full of engineers lol

> - Clicking an iPhone notification opens the app, but never brings me to the actual email

I've been using fastmail on iOS for years and have never experienced this issue. Clicking from a notification opens up the email. Maybe there's a setting you can adjust?

Fastmail had a UI change a year ago, where they went all "rounded corner" and created unique rows for every message that weren't so easily sorted with Stylus CSS. I emailed them about the changes, and a few weeks later the messages were listed in a way that I could easily apply my own stylesheet again. They also acknowledged on their subreddit the UI change was not incredibly popular (even the CEO was "not enjoying" it) and they took some feedback and provided a few better UX customizations in the options.

At one point, Fastmail had an error parsing Unicode in misconfigured iCal files (Google Calendar showed events correctly) but after a short back-and-forth, they fixed it within a week.

Now, Google Calendar has had a problem with my organization's iCal files for the past four weeks. Submitting a bug report via the help community is very opaque and unhelpful (a la "Have you tried turning if off and on again?"). Fastmail loads the iCal correctly. I have no clue if Google is aware or when they'll ever fix it.

One huge productivity advantage to FM over Gmail? Sort by sender name. (This makes it so easy to bulk apply changes)

Setting up own domain has been straightforward. (It's a bit of work ensuring DNS records have DMARC/DKIM/SPF, but it's all in the FM checklist/documentation.) Setting up Python scripts to auto email me using app passwords has been straightforward. Creating aliases and throwaways is straightforward.

I have not regretted paying for email; specifically, Fastmail.

It's great when the source of revenue for a company is the user, rather than other companies that the user is being sold to. Too bad this is so rare these days.