Ask HN: Is anyone using Fastmail for their business?
Hi all,
My dad and I run our family business that is highly email reliant. We are currently using GoDaddy's grandfathered unlimited business email plan (yes, I know), and it's been pretty bulletproof for around 15 years, but we want a modern web interface and more control. We only need email, calendars, and contacts for 5 users, so Fastmail is an option we are considering.
Is anyone here using Fastmail for their email-heavy business or profession, and if so, what's your experience been like? Have you felt restricted by Fastmail's lack of cloud integrations and other services that Google Workplace and and Microsoft 365 have? Any issues with uptime, deliverability, and support, especially given the latter is email only?
Any feedback is appreciated!
94 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThe one problem I've faced is my Fastmail email address ending up in the spam folder of friends and family and having to explain to them how to prevent that. I think that may be a leftover from the days when Fastmail offered free accounts. A bit annoying, but definitely not a deal breaker for me.
There have been some instances where both the fastmail domain and my business domain ended up in Spam for the receiver but that is less than a handful of times and I used Fastmail via Nodemailer as a proof of concept for a newsletter service so (ab)used the service without any issue.
ie:
Mobile client that does contacts/calendar/notes/drive
Mobile setup was really easy on iOS with a policy
Drive lets you host a static website or photo gallery
Custom domain catchall
Proton needs a bridge to use any client but theirs. DMARC/SPF/DKIM was a pretty easy setup for both. Proton is missing mobile clients for their new apps (drive/calendar). Its nice they give you another GB of storage a year, a VPN, and a bunch of the nolog/encryption niceties.
I'm on their ~$50/year Standard Plan so that I can use it with my own domain names. I point my domains to FastMail's nameservers, and it automatically configures all email-related DNS settings. It can be setup to accept mail to arbitrary addresses, so I now use service.tld@my.tld when I create accounts on other websites, which can help with filtering or seeing who is leaking my info. Any other type of DNS record can be manually added, so I can still generally point my domains to my GitHub pages.
I can recall only one outage since I've been using the service. I use their web client and Android app (which is just a thin wrapper around the web client). They are not glamorous, but they are functional and feel snappy.
One thing to be aware of is that FastMail is based in Australia, which I believe has some backwards laws with respect to Internet privacy.
Not too worried. I only use email for signing up and all that. Not really a friend/family communication took anymore. Just want to get away from google.
I like the idea on the domain catch all because some sites won’t accept + anymore.
My only complaint is that their mobile app is basically a webview of their webmail. This means that it does not work offline. The good news is that because they support standard protocols the mobile app is not the only option. On iOS the default Mail, Contact and Calendar apps work out of the box.
I am quite confident when I say that Fastmail will be a huge step up from GoDaddy.
None.
> Have you felt restricted by Fastmail's lack of cloud integrations and other services that Google Workplace and and Microsoft 365 have?
No, but this also really depends on your use case. Do you want to add employees and share resources like in Google Apps with mailing lists, calendars, storage? Then it's probably not the right provider for you. If it's just about "regular" email then there should be no issues.
On a separate note, really love their integration with 1Password + Masked emails:
* https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...
* Shared mailboxes work well enough.
* Deliverability seems good.
* UI is good. IMAP is good.
They do email, calendars, and contacts, and they do it well. :)
Very happy with them. It is easy to create aliases and rules, they have phone and iPad apps that are simple and snappy. The pricing is reasonable too.
In my opinion it is a feature that they only do email (and calendar, contacts, as you say), instead of an office productivity suite.
+ Calendar sharing in the organization is opt-in, so it can force more coordination to make a meeting. Maybe that's a good thing?
+ Other peoples' calendars often appear in the same color as mine, so if I have somebody else's calendar in my view I might think I've been invited to a ton of meetings.
+ Email contacts are weird in a way that I can't quantify. With gmail, when I hired somebody, I often ended up with both their personal email and their work email in my address book. Gmail knew to default to the work email after they were hired. Fastmail does the opposite so I have to remember to delete my new employees' personal emails from my contacts so that I don't accidentally send invites to the wrong address.
All that said keyboard control of fastmail is cooler than gmail and the rules are really fun to work with. I like that you can use sieve rules with it. In fact the lack of tight integration makes it easier to use different services for different things. No longer do I have to unselect "make this a google meet" link or whatever that was.
Is this not achieved by Outlook, Thunderbird or other desktop email clients? I cannot stand using web based mail clients. I know OP wanted webmail, but I'm just curious if anyone else has achieved a good UX with a desktop client / Fastmail combo.
I’ve tried all email clients, either their Office365 integration sucks, or their Gmail integration sucks, or their performance sucks, or their compatibility sucks, or their UI sucks, and more frequently than not they suck in multiple of these dimensions. They also almost always lack calendar integration, which implies I need to get back to a webapp extremely often anyway.
I have surrendered, just give me a good web app and I’ll manage.
For work I use web Outlook (we're MS based). On top of that everything goes through box.com which I find quite good. Usually I have three tabs open in my browser (Firefox). Calendar, Email and Slack. Works pretty well.
I haven't used it in a couple of years but I really liked it for Gmail.
Meanwhile in my employment they turned off IMAP for security reasons, so I'm forced to use the Gmail web interface and it is not up to the task of the volume of email I receive at all.
From the research I've done, Fastmail seems to be the only non-Exchange, non-iCloud option to get push notifications in Apple's mail clients, which is a huge plus.
But the iOS Fastmail app is really good, so I use that on the phone.
Fastmail works well for small business (at least). The limits are high, and there are a lot of features that Gmail doesn’t have.
I don’t use the FM calendar, so I can’t speak to that.
I’ve found their file storage very helpful in moving data between disparate platforms. You can even set up small static websites.
It a real issue though. There aren't really any amazing email clients out there, but I guess that also means different things to different people. Development seems to have stopped after Gmail arrived, which is weird for someone like me who thinks that the Gmail interface is confusing.
If it wasn't for the fact that the majority of emails are HTML these days, I suppose Mutt or Alpine are good email clients.
Quite dislike the gmail UX, esp. regards t threads and composing new email :(
Before moving to Fastmail, I was a gmail user for about 10 years.
To each their own :).
- Both desktop and mobile apps are miles ahead in terms of smoothness compared to GMail (though I stopped using it a long time ago, so that comparison could be outdated).
- I'm proxying my GMail inbox and parking my own subdomain email for wildcard addresses. No problems here.
- I have a bunch of saved searches that I revisit regularly.
- Calendar work well with auto adding events from incoming mail.
- Not using contacts book too much, I just know that it's there but I'm mostly autocompleting recipients if needed.
- Recently they added scheduled email sending, that was the last feature I was missing.
I don't think I had to fall back to GMail even once. Fastmail just says what it does and does it well.
Can you explain how to do this?
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278022-Us...
Use a "wildcard alias" to receive any e-mail sent to a custom domain:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...
This is mostly for personal use, but I do have a sole proprietorship too and wouldn't have an issue using it for "real business".
I’m now using apple iCloud+ for all of this as it is basically free for me anyway and everything works offline.
This is awful especially since data can be spotty on mobile, but I noticed other mobile mail apps have this issue. I prefer when my email client caches the emails so it doesnt matter where I am, I can at least look at a historic account of things.
POP is a real disaster if you have multiple clients trying to use the same mailbox. There is no way to sync message state (read,unread,flagged,replied,...) across clients. Clients randomly delete mail from the server side.
They have standard protocols for accessing all the data they store. Exporting everything can be done by connecting a client with IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV.
> And there is no notes API.
Notes are available as IMAP and JMAP messages.
As for notes via IMAP that must be new because it said in the documentation to copy and paste the notes out.
Being able to pay for _just_ email from a company that isn't also harvesting my mail contents for ad targeting and search relevance is honestly a huge relief to me. When I have to discuss something sensitive via email -- think medical care, financial deals and other business secrets, even hobbies and interests that I wouldn't want blasted across the Googleplex -- it goes to Fastmail, every time. (And yes, I know about encrypted email and tried to do everything with GPG signatures + payload encryption for years...along with re-sending 99% of those messages b/c the recipient could do literally nothing with them.)
For business use I'm also a big fan of their mailing-list-esque offering Topicbox (https://topicbox.com). It lets me opt-in particular outside trusted vendors and collaborators for ongoing discussion w/o having the bring them onto our domain, keeps a permanent archive of our discussions, and hosts public mailing lists for newsletters, customer discussions, etc. just as well.
Disclaimer: I am not a Fastmail employee, marketing partner, or affiliate, and I have always paid full price for my service. They're just damn good at email and one of the last effective defenders against the GOOG/MS duopoly's centralization of email and IMHO worthy of regular public recommendations for that. (Self-hosting is fun and fine for personal domains where deliverability is a nice-to-have, but for business purposes I need something that _works_ and am willing to pay for that.)
> Being able to pay for _just_ email from a company that isn't also harvesting my mail contents for ad targeting and search relevance is honestly a huge relief to me.
GMail (consumer) stopped scanning your mail for ads personalization five years ago [1]. IIUC, the paid version already wasn't (never did?).
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
I appreciate that this is probably true, but ultimately I moved all my personal email from Gmail to Fastmail for a similar reason. It honestly feels good to pay someone for the service to improve the chances that our incentives are aligned. It's hard to believe my incentives will ever be aligned with Google when they are notorious for slurping up every ounce of user data they can find for the purposes of ad targeting.
Their track record [1][2][3] does not show a positive or improving trend, so when Google asks me to take them at their word that they are not doing something that would make them more money, I cannot reconcile that with their prior behavior.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-googl...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/google_facebook_antit...
I use shared labels heavily when onboarding my assistant for him to respond to emails (from his own email) and to assign emails for him to look at.
Recently we lost connectivity from our colo to their IMAP endpoint and although I already knew it was some BGP cluster-f, I pitched in a support ticket just to see what would happen. Received a reply noting the known BGP cluster-f peering with <our transit provider> and providing the exact time that connectivity had been restored. Can't expect much better than that. They actually responded quicker than our transit provider did.
Based on the other replies, it seems like i was unlucky so I may give it another try.
It's also not possible to block a contact if you have previously communicated with them without first deleting the contact from your address book. Why FM can't just do that automatically (and indeed, why it is a requirement in the first place) I have no idea - but it is really annoying.
Lastly, as someone else said, calendar colours frequently conflict.
So overall, it works - but lacks polish. It's almost like they don't dog-food their own app.
On the plus side, the data import from google was very fast and worked flawlessly for mail. We ended up in some confusion over calendars which I don't know the finer details of, however.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278282-La...
Have you tried enabling labels? IIRC Fastmail defaults to a "folder" system, but you can switch to GMail-like labels, and a message can be in multiple labels.
Then it's just a matter of adding that email to the shared "Expenses" label.
IMO this is much better than duplicating emails.
I'm seeing this kind of complaint a lot and I wonder if people that need this kind of business level functionality considered that Fastmail is not a CRM solution. Its designed for email and it has very limited features for contacts and calendar. IMHO if you want that level of control you really should be using a full on CRM solution like ZohoCRM.
Basically any company is going to turn over any data they are legally required to do so. The US is not that much different. Plus the US has a law that says any data older that 6 months does not need a warrant! I see a law was introduced to prevent that, but I could not tell if it passed the Senate and was signed.
They have a cool protocol only they support, but the push API is restricted to Fastmail-only clients, so you can't create your own script that tells you when you have new mail.
It's been a year and still there's no movement: https://github.com/fastmail/JMAP-Samples/issues/7
I would treat them as any other mail provider; use IMAP and SMTP with your own client, only use the features built into the protocol specs, use a custom domain. By not leaning heavily on custom features you can change providers quickly, and there's fewer things to break. Also, you should probably mirror all your mail to a different provider so you have a backup in an emergency.
- Upside: Having a catchall account where I see all email which didn’t reach any existing mailbox.
- Upside: Google doesn’t have our data.
- Upside: Excellent service, and we can talk to a human when we have an account question.
- Downside: Everyone has a personal gmail account anyway for Google Spreadsheets or for the Chrome synchronization (and Chrome will nag you till no end).
https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/request-from-french...
Its more likely a government honey pot for criminals and political dissents.