What is Reddit's opinion of
Fastmail?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ Fastmail website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
>I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does).
>Later: OK, so on Windows a trivial Electron “just load https://www.fastmail.com/login(and then log in)” app uses ~230MB of RAM.
I don't use them myself, but I've heard good things about FastMail. They don't data-mine your email, and you can set up aliases and/or a catch-all at no extra cost.
I've had a good experience with FastMail. It's been really reliable at a decent price.
In case you're considering self-hosting, be sure to read up on things like mail server reputation and deliverability. I'm not saying not to self-host, but you should know what you're getting yourself into.
Two privacy issues.
Firstly Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. - https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
Secondly, because their servers are based in New York they don't have data sovereignty - the communications get caught up in PRISM.
That said this would apply to most email providers, at least they do not appear to be selling your data or mining it for analytics. It is a pure and simple email provider. The web interface is not free software but it can be run via POP3, IMAP etc.
Good service.
Absolutely this.
I use aliases for 99% of my accounts. In case someone is interested, examples of companies that do this are SimpleLogin, AnonAddy, and Fastmail (integrated into 1Password). There are others but these are the top ones that come to mind.
I don't think I can give you a direct comparison as ultimately email and search are too very different beasts.
A big part of our privacy comes from our decision to not store your data, which can't be done the same way by email providers.
At the end of the day it's about finding a company you feel you can trust, reading the Privacy Policy and making a judgement call.
Personally, I do really like Fastmail they have a Privacy Policy that is clear and easy to understand: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html - they outline the influences of their jurisdiction, what happens to any data stored, and how it is handled if you delete your account.
(Note this is a personal endorsement not an official one.)
I have a similar setup, not sure what OP uses but I use Fastmail. I have it configured with my own domain and have any email sent to @mydomain.com just go into my normal inbox.
There are already plenty of services like that—FastMail, for example. Pretty much any paid email service is going to have completely different priorities from Gmail because they don’t need or want to show you ads.
Fastmail.com. Left Gmail for it, never went back, worth every single penny. Plus it’s, fast.
(Edit: apparently I have a referral link for it on my account. If you decide to use FM, consider hooking a buddy up: https://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=12015577)
I switched to Fastmail and love it. It's like $10/year for a basic account which suits me just fine. No ads, good privacy policy and I've never experienced any technical problems. I couldn't recommend it enough.
If you prefer a browser client, Fastmail's easily the best I've used: it's light weight and extremely snappy.
I use Outlook at work and agree with others that its browser client's okay, but it's nowhere near as light or responsive as Fastmail. It often takes a few seconds where Fastmail is near-instantaneous.
Lastly, sorry to say the obvious thing, but people sometimes forget that it's there: if you're willing to entertain a desktop client, don't forget to check out Mail.app.
The downside to Fastmail seems to be that staff have the capability to access your data, and they're very upfront with that fact on their website: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html#staffaccess
Might as well recommend fastmail.fm here (if you are open to paying for email), it was already fast compared to the old gmail interface, but as I keep my old gmail address around because of the fun mail I get (I have with a very common combination), I once a week or so check it. It's such a horrible experience, it's actually funny.
/u/the_second hat ja bereits sehr gut erklärt, wie der Umzug allgemein läuft. Falls deine Freunde ihre E-Mails nicht beim großen G liegen haben wollen, gibt es jede Menge anderer kommerzieller Anbieter mit Support für eigene Domains, z.B:
- protonmail.com (Firmensitz in der Schweiz)
- startmail.com (Firmensitz in NL)
- fastmail.com (Firmensitz in Australien)
I read Fastmail's privacy policy and it sucks donkey balls. They are saying they will share literally everything and use analytics on top of that. Lovely.
https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy/
Good thing is, only 1Password is using it for integration, and I am not gonna use it.
Just want to echo the endorsement of Fastmail. They also have a webpage that compares their service to Hey and shows how to recreate the Hey experience in Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.com/hey-fastmail/
If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
Did anyone think unroll.me and other businesses who give away services for "free" are a welfare institute? If they're not getting money from you, they'll get money for you(r data).
I don't like most of these kind of services. I use a paid email provider instead of Gmail, for example, for this reason. In this case, just don't sign up for every "free" sweepstakes-newsletter there is and manage your own subscriptions. Simple.
Iredmail is a turnkey Foss self hosted mail server option. No limits, integrate all of the above and more into one suite.They have a one time fee for a web panel to simply common actions for roughly 500 which is likely worth it, but either way it should save you some pain if you really want to host your own.
For quality hosted, fastmail for buisness is something like $40/yr/user. It was run by the Opera browser guys until it spun off, but it is a browser based answer, hosted, that doesn't sell your info to advertisers and has a slick UI.
I've been using FastMail.com for a few years now, since I started disliking Google more and more. I've had zero problems with them, and it was easy to configure my own domains to work with with them. It's not free, but it's not expensive either. I don't mind paying for quality service.
They're based in Australia, and their privacy policy is here.
I just had to hop in and say that I happened to search for this today and applying rwojo 's Sieve Code worked perfectly. Thank you so much!
Steps for those wanting to duplicate this:
https://www.fastmail.com/settings/filters and login as u
On the bottom right of the main canvas area, click "Edit Custom Sieve Code"
You will see several text boxes, some that are read only and others that are read-write and say 'enter your custom code here'
Copy/pasta the first code block from rwojo's messages (https://old.reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/pjr3u8/help_sieve_how_to_dynamically_filtersort_emails/hbye6rj/) into the first writeable text box.
In that text box, change "<your primary email>" to actually be whatever your email is, preserving the quotes. Example: ""
Press enter a few times in that same text box to give yourself a few lines.
Go back to the reddit post and copy/paste the second code block into the bottom of the same text box you were just in
Go back to the reddit post and copy/paste the final code block into a different text box. This one is the one that is at the bottom of the page.
You are done. Send a test email to one of your aliases and give fastmail a minute to process it. provided it doesn't hit any other rules u may have made for it, Fastmail should create the folder and drop the email in there.
Bonus. If you use Thunderbird and it is not showing the newly created folders even though Fastmail is, you can have Thunderbird re-download folders by collapsing and expanding the folder list root node in the sidebar (aka the thing that says <> and has all of the folders like Inbox etc inside it). And if that doesn't work, restarting Thunderbird will also work.
MXroute might be worth looking into. If you use MS Office 365 for your business, the family plan is not a valid option anyway, so it might be worth going with Microsoft 365 for the business, and put your personal accounts on another service like MXroute.
Fastmail is another good choice, but it will run you more than MXroute
I’m on the standard $5/month 30GB storage plan. There’s also the basic 2GB for $3/month or professional 100GB for $9/month. All include 600+ aliases, and the standard & professional plans give you option to use your own domains, limit is 100 I believe.
It is covered in the Fastmail help:
At Fastmail, you can sync a calendar from your account at another service, such as Google or iCloud, while being able to view and manage it from your Fastmail account. This lets you make changes at either service and the calendar will stay up to date..
Check the important note in Fastmail help, you need to check that your Google calendars are exposed for CalDAV here
I use subdomain addressing with Fastmail for all my accounts. So for apple it could look something like: [email protected]. This reduces risk of spam, etc., after data leaks, although Apple isn't one I'm particularly concerned about.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html
Maybe consider looking into installing something like Little Snitch or LuLu as well.
If I understood correctly, you want a personal domain email to function as closely to iCloud mail as possible right? Check out fastmail.com. I have had great success with this but just ended up doing O365 after a couple years. Just couldn’t beat the price and features for $60 a year.
It's not free, but the money is well spent. If you have control of your domain, you can use it there too.
Bonus: push works properly on iOS.
I'm a very happy customer of coming up to four years now.
I've used this Fastmail site to test sieve syntax. In this case, it looks like it's choking on the comparator. According to this reference site, "unicode" isn't a valid option here.
I've been a big fan of Fastmail for years. They provide a great product for a reasonable cost and go out of their way to provide good privacy for their users.
https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you/
https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
So its encrypted at rest but they hold the keys. But its in US.
I use FastMail and like it quite a bit ($3-$9 / month or cheaper if you pay for a year)
Here is my referral link which gets you 10% off your first year (and gives me a discount too): https://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=16537345
I know that you mention wanting a free service but I have found it difficult to find a free service that provides decent service.
I moved away from Gmail several years ago and landed at FastMail. It's not free but it's not super expensive either at $50/year (for the account level that you would need to host a domain).
That price gets you 25GB of storage space, mobile sync of calendars, contacts, and mail with whatever client you want (though they also have an app), and you should be able to have all of your mail delivered there.
The biggest reason that I switched is that I trust their team to provide a good product at a reasonable price. I like that I don't have any ads in my inbox and I trust that they aren't reading my email. In addition, I like that they contribute back to the opensource mailserver that they use.
Domains: Hover is the entire list of domain registrars for me. They do domain registration and do it very well. No packages. No options. Buy domain and that's it.
They offer email as an add-on service but I've never used it.
You can usually find a discount code on a podcast. 5by5, Twit, and Relay networks are frequently sponsored by Hover.
The rest of my advice is less precise. I run my own VPS but I don't recommend it. I run it so I know how to run all the various bits. Unless you really want to I'd recommend paying someone else to do that. Get a managed server and let them worry about software updates, load balancing, security, etc.
Email can be part of the managed server or you can go with fastmail I have Gmail for business and if I were to start again I'd go with fastmail combined with mailroute for spam. Again 5by5 and Relay podcasts can offer discount codes.
> Why do you want to get off of Gmail?
Because it's Google. I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with my personal information going through them. The one feature Google does provide if the name alias stuff "foo", "f.oo" and "foo+bar" all go to the same inbox; that's the one thing keeping me on them. And that might not be as rare as I thought...
Unfortunately some idiotic webdevs don't permit "+" in email addresses despite it being valid. Luckily there's sub-domain addressing too. US$40 (~£2 a month) a year for email? Not too shabby.
> Having used different email client
The client is a total non-issue. I can happily use Thunderbird, Evolution, Mutt or whatever. So long as the service provides an open standard, I'm happy.
This is technically possible (FastMail example). If you set up your own domain, email naturally can be directed to your email provider, XMPP chat sent to the same can be directed to the chat server, and SIP VoIP can be directed to your IP phone or softphone app. A savvy individual can then have "email/XMPP/SIP: " printed on their business card.
Don't bother with GoDaddy. There is really about 3 options if you are serious about email (and if you are dealing with a multi-million dollar business, you should be):
1) Office 365
2) Google Apps
3) FastMail
I like Office 365 because you get the desktop versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. included as part of your subscription but all 3 services are well reviewed and are fairly popular. You won't go wrong choosing one of them.
As a side note, you are probably not thinking about this now but there are regulatory compliance standards that you should be following when dealing with email. In most cases, corporations are required to retain email records for a duration of time and have these records be auditable along with a whole host of other requirements. You don't want to be the one responsible for all this stuff, unless that is part of your business.
Plus addressing is part of the email address standard. I feel like any random spammer these days knows enough to strip off whatever comes after the + and before the @.
Surprised no one has mentioned FastMail yet. :)
They aren't free (because nothing will be both free and high-quality IMHO) but they aren't expensive either. See their plans here.
I'm actually in the process of switching to them from Gmail for my personal email.
Easiest way to go about that is to get your own domain name and get a mail service somewhere that supports catch-all mails. That would give you a single inbox and practically unlimited email addresses.
So you could for instance use [email protected] to sign up with twitch, [email protected] for reddit etc. Then if it's leaked you could easily create a filter for incoming mails on that specific address to block it and just think of a new one to either change or create a new account with.
A second option is use the recent partnership with 1password and fastmail to do just that but with a click of a button without all the technical hassle.
I can recommend Fastmail. I've been a paid customer of theirs for the better part of a decade now. The service is extremely reliable, supports standard protocols, and has generally high limits across the board. I'm paying around $44 USD/yr and for that I get 30G of mail storage, 10G of file storage (+website/photo hosting) and a slew of "advanced-email-user" features. Search works well, the import feature works, the calendar is solid, and I'm satisfied w/the mobile app though admittedly I don't use it much as I'm always in front of a desktop. What's missing vs PM is E2E encryption but given how few of my contacts use PM I'm content to manage my own PGP infrastructure, something that's only getting easier with the latest versions of Thunderbird.
I've also been a Gmail/Gsuite user since forever and still have a half-dozen or so accounts at the G. I actually prefer the FM web UX to Google's and as a programmer who has worked in the email software realm quite a bit, I dig the power-user features that come with the package. FM's worth a test-drive if you're considering going back to the big G - you can sign up for a 30-day free trial and see if it works for you.
I'm happy with fastmail.com . Simple, standards compliant, with clear guides on how to connect your clients, fair pricing, custom domain names, no tracking or ads, no vendor lock in.
They have web and mobile apps if that's your thing, but I use 3rd party clients and only really use the webapp for adjusting settings. The mobile app unfortunately is online-only (but 3rd party mobile apps can be offline.)
And my favorite feature is using dot aliasing in addition to plus aliasing (you can do either [email protected] or [email protected] )
They're not trying to solve the "email is an inherently unencrypted and insecure platform" problem, but they do solve the "advertising companies are reading my email" problem.
For e-mail clients:
SSL = implicit encryption
STARTTLS = explicit encryption
So you generally want to go with "SSL", as this is (maybe somewhat unintuitively) actually the more secure choice. Of course, it hardly matters for connections to localhost.
If you want to know the history behind this naming, this is a very nice overview and technical explanation: https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/ssltlsstarttls.html
RFC 8314 also recommends using implicit encryption for e-mail and discourages the use of STARTTLS https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8314#section-3
Depends on how you're handling your email. Sendmail, fastmail (doc on this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html ), and a few others like Yahoo/Microsoft etc. (last I checked) also handle the plus sign in this way... so it really depends on if you are managing the email server yourself... or if not, if your hosting service is using a mail server that supports/allows "plus addressing"
Historically, you can get into the G Suite reseller program if you meet certain criteria. This program however seems to have been rebranded as "Google Cloud Partner Advantage":
https://cloud.google.com/partners/become-a-partner
I'd probably rather try to get into a reseller relationship with Fastmail though.
Granted, I know nothing about Rackspace or Intermedia so I can't offer advice directly related to your query.
Reading on the fastmail website, your yubikey should support U2F for it to work. https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/2fa.html
You should see if your yubikey model supports U2F though I thought all of them do, not sure though.
It could also be that when you insert the yubikey, that you still need to touch the gold ring on the yubikey to activate it.
Is the goal to have it show for people in other email services when they receive your message?
If so, worth noting that some services (e.g, FastMail) and clients (IIRC, Thunderbird) actually use Gravatar for this. It's not a catch-all solution but doesn't hurt to set up anyway.
Gmail notably doesn't do this, unfortunately, and ever since they killed off Google+ there's no "hack" to do it without a proper account anymore... but that's not the end of the world.
Customer support answered with the following:
>> I've tried setting up two other users, however, and neither of them see the shared contacts in Apple Contacts on their macOS desktop machines. Private contacts appear immediately and seem to work fine, but the shared contacts do not appear at all. One user is an admin, and the other is not.
This is due to a Mac limitation. Mac OS only allows you to configure either the Personal address book or the Shared address book. It appears the users have added their Personal address book which is why they find it to be in sync.
If they would like to configure the Shared address book, please ask them to change the CardDav username to [email protected] instead of [email protected].
More details here:
https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/maccontacts-manual.html
Hope that clarifies your concern. Do let me know if you need any further assistance from us, I'll be happy to help.
To clarify, look here https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html
Our main servers are located at New York Internet (NYI) in Bridgewater, New Jersey, USA.
Our secondary sites at NYI's Seattle location and with Switch Datacentres in Amsterdam have equivalent physical security.
The part of migration is not really difficult its really very easy just changing some DNS records at your registrar and some easy to follow setup pages at the email service. Thats it. No big deal.
The only difficult part is getting the old emails migrated. That is a pain. Most good email services have an option to import. So while you experiment read up on those and understand what they need for import/export. If IMAP is enabled by you present provider most services will help you transfer easily from there without any hassle. If POP is enabled then you can download on a desktop client and transfer from there. Both of it will take time and could be annoying.
You can setup your new email service, all the required/old users and all the previous emails from old inboxes before moving your domain to the new service. The domain can be moved after everything is setup so all your email data is moved first just like we do with moving websites, move all the data and test it first and then direct the domain. Email can work just like that. Keep this in mind and you will be find it less daunting.
Check out the email services and the ones you want to go for and read their migration page or ask their customer service about it. This will help you understand aka get a general idea of how this can be accomplished. Read up Gsuite guide and FastMail. Their guides are a good primer.
If the migration of those emails is going to be really hard you have to see if those emails are that important if they are and are less in number then I would suggest doing the dirty hack of simply forwarding them to a temp email account and forward them again to the new setup. Or download all via a desktop client and sync with the new service. If emails are not that important then just start fresh.
I did too. It takes indeed a loooot of time but it's so rewarding getting through all accounts, modify passwords for safer one with keepass, changing email using the + adressing (https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html) trick to sort automatically and know who sold your infos. It feels good getting back its online life ! Good luck to everyone getting into it !
Interesting! Fastmail has a reasonable price, starting at $30 per year. Its wikipedia article that states:
>The site developers are among active contributors to the widely used Cyrus IMAP open source software project and include the lead developer and maintainer of Perl module Mail::IMAPTalk. They are actively developing JMAP - a new open email protocol.
Also, it has some features that protonmail lacks: (1) it can use IMAP (2) looks like it can act as a server for calendar/contacts with caldav/carddav.
Couldn't find anything about the opensourceness of the service server, though.
Vanvittigt at ingen har nævnt Fastmail endnu. Har brugt dem i omkring 3 år, og det har altid bare fungeret.
Firmaet har eksistreret siden 1999, så man kan være nogenlunde sikker på at de ikke lige går på røven. Og så er priserne meget rimelige. Det er ikke gratis, fordi Fastmail ikke viser dig reklamer, og sælger al din data.
Jeg begriber ikke at nogen stadig bruger Google.
I just wrote a comment about this, but I use fastmail and love it. Migrated over about 10 years worth of email, contacts, and calendars from Gmail no problem. It's a paid service (which is good - if you aren't paying you're the product, not the customer) but it's totally worth it. Also recommend buying your own domain name and using it for your email address. This way if you ever decide to move away from fastmail you don't have to change email addresses. For a year of fastmail+custom domain you're looking at about $60. Totally worth it if you use email a lot.
Parlo di quasto. Il piano che ti permette di usare il tuo dominio costa $50 l'anno, che rispetto a gmail e' tanto ma ne vale la pena (ad es se in 10 anni gmail fallisce, se hai il tuo dominio non importa perche' cambi solo provider).
C'è Zoho ma lascialo perdere, sono in tutte le blacklist (provato per più clienti e non ha mai funzionato bene).
Mi sono invece trovato bene con FastMail.
L'integrazione che hanno Google e Microsoft, soprattutto lato Drive/OneDrive è irraggiungibile però.
Then it is probally a good idea for you to outsource your email system.
Office 365, Google for Work, Fastmail,, RackSpace Webmail, Amazon Work Mail, and 100's of other companies that specialist in providing small business with Email services
…er, how? I know that they're used behind-the-scenes for e.g. Google, but I'm not aware of any way to get Calendar and Contacts to use an arbitrary CalDAV or CardDAV server. E.g., FastMail indicates that's not even possible. How do you do this?
I prefer using FastMail. They've been in the email hosting business since the 90's, have very fair pricing, and don't mine my personal communication for marketing purposes.
Send grid are the go for sending emails, and as a bonus, if you already have emails working in your app with ActionMailer, then it's just a drop in with the gem and config and it will just work if you use sendgrid-rails
As for your email hosting if you are comfortable with Google and their services then why not just use Google apps? Gmail is pretty good and it's stuff for your own domain is super easy to setup. If you aren't comfortable or happy with privacy stuff with regards to Google, which is a totally valid position then Fastmail could be a good answer for you.
Fast mail is not free but quite reasonable and alleviates you from the hassle of running your own mail server, which I have done and will say is just not worth the hassle.
Well, I think it's a great product with a great future. One thing I would suggest -it's based on the concept "Beg w/the end in mind." Even if we assume you guys would NEVER sell this business since it's your baby that you've incubated since it's inception, try to IMAGINE that you would sell it and think about what a prospective buyer (with MAJOR money) would look for.
I think that helps with your vision and focus. Even if you never sell. And, esp if you some day do.
BTW, when I said I think abstractly, I don't mean TOO abstractly. I noticed this site for sale - https://www.fastmail.com/mail/Inbox/d19598845bd7fb24-f19975373u11976?u=10a44198
That is really abstract - expecting people to come to your site to make memes! haha But, it's apparently been reasonably successful. I would not be interested in a business like that as I encourage people NOT to waste so much time online!
Google for work has a migration utility in the admin. Just setup your MX records to point to Google and then run the migration on your old emails. You can put your IMAP server settings (https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/servernamesandports.html) and it will move your emails to Google
I use fastmail as my mail provider and have done so for two years. The reason I pay for fastmail instead of using gmail or hosting a mailserver myself is, that while I don't want a company snooping in my mail, which google does for gmail users, I don't think I'm personally able to provide a more secure mail service for myself than fastmail can for me. They do it for a living, and I would have to use a lot of time to keep my own mail secure, time which I might not have. So instead, I pay fastmail and trust that they don't snoop in my mail because they say they don't. The day a leak arise saying they do, I will stop using them.
For mail that I really don't want there to be any chance of anybody reading it other than whom I send it to, I go out of my way and encrypt it using PGP/GPG.
Not too bad at all actually. It was a little beyond me.
I bought my domain from NameCheap. Something like 20 bucks for 10 years? The only thing I would remember is that certain "endings "have certain rules. For instance, my domain is a ".us" domain, which requires a US citizen to own it, and you have to use a real address in the US visible to anyone. In a ".com" you can add on a "WhoIs" guard, which sort of keeps you less visible in the internet phonebook.
Once I had my domain, I found a "host" the person or company who collects the mail delivered to my new address. It's usually not free to host a domain, and I pay a yearly fee to have mine hosted at Fastmail. But it was easy to set up hosting with them, and I like the features. Overall, would do again.
fastmail.com
namecheap.com (domain only, no hosting) fastmail.com (they host my domain)
I use Google Apps for work. It's about $5/mo per person.
People I know who have switched off of Google Apps speak very highly of FastMail but I haven't tried it.
> I really wish the DIY tools to set up equivalent services were that much better than their free SaaS alternatives like Facebook/Google/Gmail/etc. Currently it's a PITA to set up and host your own mail server...
> We have the technology, why can't we make this easier? Right. Because there's no (not enough?) money to be made.
But there is money to be made and people are doing it. I host my own e-mail and, yes, I wouldn't ask somebody like my mother or even most of my friends to do it. For social networking, you're probably right. But for other things, why not sign up for a company like Fastmail or others and be the customer instead of the product?
This is FastMail's privacy policy.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html
It seems they're asking for some trust in regards to a few things, but other than that it's pretty clean from what I can tell.
They're also reasonably cheap, $40 a year for 15GB of storage, although they do have other plans. https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html
Although if you want total privacy, your best bet might be to host it yourself. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your-own-e-mail-server-with-your-own-domain-part-1/
Yeah, this has become a problem with all of the major email providers. I recently tried to get my (uncommon) name from Gmail and the closest that was available had 5 digits added to it.
I eventually decided to pay a little bit and went with FastMail and have been extremely satisfied with the service so far.
No.
You’ll want to get your email elsewhere. I would never recommend GoDaddy though.
You can get your domain and your email from two different companies.
A couple of good email providers that I have personally used and that are reasonably priced:
https://www.zoho.com/mail/ (they have a free option as well, but very well hidden)
Here is the best option.
You can forward your iCloud to fastmail and also setup fastmail to send as iCloud works awesome. $5 month is worth it.
Changing email providers is a very time consuming process. I’ve recently switched from gmail to Fastmail with over 200 accounts. (I know Fastmail is not as private as others but I just wanted to ditch google and I liked the alias support and 1Password integration)
Every decent email provider will have a tutorial on how to switch from gmail. You can follow that to transfer everything to your new email account. Then the hard work begins. You will have to go to every single website/service you use and change your old email address to your new one.
The real pain starts when you run into stupid websites that don’t allow you to change your email address (I’m looking at you Shopify). Most of these can be changed by contacting their support but it will take some time. The rest will require creating a new account.
Before you start changing your email addresses I highly recommend looking into email aliases. They allow you to hide your real email address which has many privacy and security benefits. Aliases can be handled by your email provider or services like AnonAddy or SimpleLogin. If you ever decide to change your email provider again in the future you will only need to change the email your aliases are forwarded to.
Unless you use a password manager you probably won’t remember to change everything to your new email and that’s ok. Keep your old email address and either forward it to your new one or keep them both in your email clients. Whenever your old inbox recieves an email, go to that service/website and change it to your new one. You will be able to completely delete your old email account in a few years (once it stops getting any emails).
Hopefully this helps you or anyone who finds this post in the future. Good luck!
Fastmail looks like the most appealing to me right now; but it's not clear if the 600 aliases only apply for the one mailbox, or if I can do a "relay-everything-to-gmail" kinda setup with that too?
This doesn't say anything about forwarding https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
If your gripe with apple mail is how long it takes to fetch new emails, get a better mail provider (I recommend Fastmail) and use push. I never have to wait for my inbox to update because it updates in near real time as mail comes in.
> But if someone has my password, they could change this anyways.
There's an account recovery tool that takes this possibility into account
https://fastmail.blog/privacy-security/security-account-recovery/
I can confirm that Fastmail migration capabilities make moving from Gmail and Outlook super easy. Indeed, you will want to activate labels in Fastmail before the migration in order to have multiple labels in Fastmail. Additionally, Fastmail has a handy duplicate removal tool which you can try after migration https://www.fastmail.com/go/cleanfolders But be careful using it.
Well, there are cheaper options hosted email supporting custom domains, e.g.
https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/ - limited to a single domain per user, though. The top two plans offer mobile contacts and calendar sync, and have multiple mailboxes to take care of family.
https://www.hostinger.com/email-hosting - everything but the IMAP email is way too simple for my needs, but YMMV, or you might only care about email. But super cheap with the four year plan.
https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ - almost as polished and feature-filled as Google Workspace email/contacts/calendar, but cheaper. With the three year plan (unadvertised, but pop into Settings→Billing to see it) for the standard account you end up paying only USD 3.89 per month.
And there are others, too. My advice is to look further afield. Apple/Google/Microsoft are just a tiny slice of the email hosting pie.
I've been looking around for a private and cheap domains as I'll only be using them for masked emails. Cloudflare seems like a good option. Costs about $4/year and has Whois protection. FM also has a guide on setting them up. Does that sound good?
Currently i have a paid subscription to protonmail, but I'm going to be switching over to fastmail in a couple months. You should check out all the features: https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
Not exactly. The story of email is that although its been around for decades, you can still only look for the least-bad option.
Ended up on https://www.fastmail.com/ it's a decent webmail, but pretty much like any other.
Perhaps this would work out well for this use case
https://tutanota.com/secure-email/
Hosting email server yourself is asking for trouble, would VERY strongly discourage.
>Which is a bit of a lie as that’s before tax.
I have several domains and only 1 user account. I have a personal domain and several business ones.
Just go to Fastmail > Domains and click "+ Add domain". I'm not sure where you're getting stuck.
> but having to rely on a 3rd party or even a central entity handling my data... is very unsettling
But running arbitrary commands/code as suggested by complete strangers on the internet is.... better?
But putting your data on an instance you admittedly cant secure or maintain is.... better?
When it fails, who will fix it? Going to give a redditor remote access to your server?
What happens when a disk fails? Did you setup backups? Can you even properly restore from said backups?
Hopefully you get the picture. This is a bad idea. Fullstop.
Buy a domain, then pay https://www.fastmail.com/
If/when your develop the skill set to setup and run your own infra then you can just change your MX and A records and presto, you've migrated off fastmail.
Use masked mail with fastmail (which integrates with the 1password extension). And you got simple login behavior.
Honestly, when you consider the costs, you dont really save much rolling your own compared to paying fastmail. Rolling your own, you still have server costs, backup costs, time spent setting it up, maintaining it, etc. A hetzner instance is already more than $5 a month before tax, not to mention backups and how you value your time. Fastmail wins for $5 a month
Assuming this is email on your own domain you could move the email hosting somewhere else. Personally I use Fastmail for my domains and their spam filtering has worked well enough for me at least.
Fastmail has a spam folder.
To my knowledge, they don't take crypto. I poked around and didn't find anything about that.
They do emphasize privacy; but that's not their main marketing thrust, and it's not the same as anonymity. If they get a warrant or subpoena that conforms to Australian law, they will honor it.
They do have a free trial.
They have Android and iOS apps. The old app used to work with degoogled Android, but someone told me the new one doesn't.
It will work with most mail clients as long as you create an app-specific password.
The webmail portal is very nice.
I can't think of any cons unless you're looking for encrypted storage.
Ive been using Fastmail for so long that I can't even remember when I started. I think it was three or four cars ago. Maybe more. Never had a problem, never had an outage. They're one of the very few providers I can say that about.
Fastmail.com. Utterly flawless since the day I started using it.
I think only the paid version has CalDAV, though. I could be wrong about that. But if you want privacy, you have to pay for it. It's not expensive, though.
Fastmail will work with the native iOS apps and/or with its own. Setup is a breeze either way.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/iphone.html
The Fastmail app is actually very good, by the way, and will work on iOS, Android, or de-googled Android. So that's another option.
Yes. Your website only need an A/AAAA for the naked domain pointing to your DO instance public IP plus (optionally) a CNAME for the www subdomain. For the FastMail custom domain to work, all you need is at minimum, an MX record (you'll want to configure DKIM and SPF too to avoid spammers easily spoofing your emails). Both DO and Fastmail allows you to configure both records on their nameservers, or you can use free nameservers from Cloudflare/Namecheap if you prefer their interface.
Since DNS records might be cached by your ISP/OS and mess with your testing, try different websites to confirm your DNS records and preview if your website is actually loaded.
It scans about once/day (https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html#spamfolders), so leaving it for 24 hours should be enough.
I think it works best on folders that are intended to permanently hold messages, like Archive. For individual emails, correcting the spam folder (by marking messages a spam, or by marking non-spam that ends up in the Junk Mail folder as non-spam) is probably most effective.
If I understand you correctly, I don't think it'll be an issue via IMAP mode.
If you load Fastmail in labels mode via IMAP, it won't duplicate messages as independent messages in Fastmail. Copying or moving a message from one IMAP folder to another will just adjust the labels on that message.
That's all covered at Labels & IMAP.
Does that article address what you were hoping to do via IMAP?
I think overall though to your original post question, there's two routes:
- Embrace labels (or copy in folder mode) so you don't have to duplicate messages. This lets you see the same message in multiple places until
Deleteis used. - Truly copy messages somehow. IMAP's own native move/copy commands will just change folders/labels as designed with Fastmail. To do a true copy of a message, you'd need a client that will take the contents of the message and clone it into a new message. I haven't used an IMAP client in a long time that can do this, so you'll have to research more. I'm thinking things like export a message, re-import would work, but what a PITA.
Do these two options cover what you were originally trying to address?
Other labels will be retained, for example in these scenarios (I think this is all of them):
- archived via the
Archivebutton (removed from the special Inbox label), - removing the current label open on the interface with the
Remove Labelbutton, or - hitting by hitting
Xon a specific label in the label list.
However if you delete the message via the Delete button it will be moved to your trash and the message will not be visible from any of the labels attached to the message. They are still attached, but you can't even see the labels anymore on the message unless you Undelete.
With IMAP, you just need to understand usage of move vs copy in your client, more on the Labels & IMAP help topic. Basically move will remove all other labels and attach the new one for the destination, and copy will just add a new label.
When I click on "Inbox" in the left hand menu, I'd like to be taken to the unread section (ie: https://www.fastmail.com/mail/Inbox/?filter=unread) instead of the the read/unread inbox.
No video needed. :) It really is pretty simple, if you just get pointed in the right direction ... which I can do easily.
First, choose a domain registrar, and pick out a domain. I use Ghandi.net; it costs me about $25-$30 (including taxes) per year. They have instructions for things like how to set the domain registry up correctly (filling in basic contact info - much of it required by law, so people have somewhere to direct complaints / lawsuits / whatever, if the domain is abused somehow).
Then, choose any email server hosting service, set up an account, and follow their directions for how to point your domain at the server address they provide for you. I use Fastmail, on the Standard plan (necessary if you want to use your own domain) - which costs $5/month, or $50/year; I pay annually to save a few bucks.
Have you checked out fastmail? It's right at $5/ month, 30GB / user, use your own domain, catch all can be set up https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html
I have not personally used their service but their import also seems manageable, https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/migratemail.html
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You're going to build a Google competitor on Google?
It depends what your threat level is. If you're really worried about the government getting a subpoena for your emails, then Fastmail probably isn't the best choice since the data is encrypted, but they have the key. In terms of privacy they're pretty strict. I've bounced between them and ProtonMail and ended up sticking with Fastmail. Having the ability to sync my contacts and calendars with Fastmail was a requirement for me in the end.
Fastmail's security practices are here: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html
This is a great idea that I've been doing for sometime as well. Fastmail supports it natively via subdomain addressing.
https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html
E.g.:
This makes it crystal clear when data breaches happen and reduces spam since you can just disable the alias once it's leaked. An even better solution would be something like Sign In With Apple that works with all sites, since it also removes the ability for sites to use email as a global UUID. I've been keeping an eye on Firefox Relay, but it's not all the way there yet since they currently have a pretty low alias limit.
As a fastmail user, I'd just like to point out that the company allows users to create emails with a lot of domains so these could all be worth whitelisting:
I love fastmail, but it is not free. Still, the cost is low. From a pure-email perspective, most of the time it is better than gmail, the only exception that I can think of is that it does not show previews of pdfs. Outside of email, they do not have things like google docs and google sheets.
I use Fastmail for my mail+calendar+contacts, and I have a Google account registered under that Fastmail address for Chrome OS, YouTube, and Google Drive.
The Fastmail UI loads extremely fast and never feels sluggish! I wouldn't want to go back to the Gmail life.
If you're going to use Fastmail, buy your personal domain, add it to Fastmail and keep it for personal communication.
Then create aliases using Fastmail's domains for signups, you don't need to buy another domain and worry about renewal, plus if you buy a domain and use it for different accounts, eventually all the accounts could be linked back to you as there will be no one else using it, unlike when using Fastmail's domains.
You could create an alias for each service, Fastmail allows up to 600 alias for each user, but I think that's too much.
Instead what I do is create an alias for each category of sites or whatever sorting method works best for you.
For example:
You create for social media accounts.
Then you can use , it's called subdomain addressing and all emails sent to @socialmedia.fastmail.com will go to .
Now you can signup on different social media apps using , , etc...
Though I would recommend using randomly generated strings for the addresses so it won't be easy to guess your emails, something like .
A reminder to use an email server that allows you to use different email accounts per service. For instance, fastmail allows using subdomain addressing such as fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html
For instance, an email sent to my email address of would arrive the same as or whatever. They all arrive on my inbox all the same
If it gets compromised or leaked I can simply block the entire subdomain. This also allows for stronger protection on automated data protection (as is only used on that particular service, and the hacker has no way of checking what other services I've used the domain on)