Fastmail – Email & Calendar

I've been a Gmail user FOREVER. However I ONLY use it to send mail from my own custom domains. That process has always been a bit janky at best but I had it working. Then I read that they are getting rid of the "send as" alias feature for free accounts. Even workspace accounts are somewhat more limited than I liked. Down the rabbit hole I went. Someone recommended Fastmail, so I started researching and experimenting along with several other solutions including just using the email service I could have with my web host since I already pay for that anyway. The more I dove into Fastmail the more impressed I was. I loved everything about it. It just feels smoother, better, more elegant, customizable, and well thought out in every way. I was going to wait and see if/when my Gmail aliases stopped working before jumping to another service, but after dipping my toe in, I just made the jump yesterday. Now all my domains are here and it feels like home. The whole process was easy. Importing all my mail, contacts, filtering rules, and domains. Syncing my contacts with my iPhone. GREAT documentation on everything including setting up the DNS records at Cloudflare. Hopefully I never need to switch again because Fastmail absolutely rocks. Just really, really impressed. I haven't even had to deal with support yet to find out how that is.

UPDATE:Aug2024-Dec:Lately it has been hanging a LOT, requiring forced app restarts. Both iPad and iPhone. Particularly common after the app has been idle for a while. Prior to this year, it had been stable for years. It must be great given that I’m here merely to gripe about a small thing. Gripe: It takes way too many clicks to copy the address an email was sent to to the clipboard. I use disposable email addresses mostly (unique to each recipient, so there are hundreds) so I’m constantly needing to do this. I can see each address while scrolling through emails in a thread. but it’s: Click to expand tap, tap to show details (Yeah, NO, it’s not on this giant menu!??!) (NO, at this point or the last, I can’t long tap on the address either - that works in some other apps but in this one, that gets me almost nowhere as selecting and copying is impossible or really difficult and unpredictable that way—And my recollection is it was easier back in pre- iPhone 4 days but that’s an iOS issue...) Note: Discovering through trial and error that there is no quicker way to accomplish the task takes way, way more steps than shown here! tap for menu Tap for more Tap for copy

I have been a Fastmail business user for a couple of years and what the major selling points for me was the privacy and the fact that the services just worked with my native iOS apps. For example push works natively. Their web interface has been reworked from when I first started using it, I think it’s a lot better than even GMAIL.All that said, there are a few things that could be improved upon;First on the website, when you have the entire conversation in a thread it looks out of place, it’s just poorly designed. They reworked much of the site to be modern and efficient but this looks like a throwback to Horde. If you aren’t old enough to know what Horde is, be thankful.As for iOS’s native apps, they allow you to download profiles for your Apple devices to set everything up. This is really nice as it can be cumbersome to set it up manually, however if you have aliases that you use to send from, iOS doesn’t allow this with profiles, it does if you set up Fastmail manually. Not sure whose issue this is, Apple’s or Fastmail?As for this app, I like their app but their calendar feature is lacking at least one key component for me to not use it which is the ability to click on an address and have it open up the maps app. Why this omission is beyond me. If it had this, it would be my daily driver on iOS.In the end I like Fastmail, it’s a great service, I just hope they work on continuing improvements to make the app and the service better.