You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)
Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that.
Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.
Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?
i set this up for my fastmail account a couple weeks ago.
go to settings -> aliases and create an alias for *
this also allows you to write from any email address in your domain (when composing, change the sender dropdown to your *-alias, and the 'from' line appears and is editable
Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.
It's incredibly smooth and powerful to use that feature. Set up some folders and it will auto-sort things based on the e-mail address, including sub-folders (e.g <parent>.<subfolder>@<username>.fastmail.com). It will also fall back on placing e-mail in the <parent> folder if there is no <subfolder> present.
I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.
The worst I've dealt with is a site that allows + within an email address for signup but not unsubscribe. They've been hitting my spam folder for years now...
Just in case you haven't tried it, I have found that about 80% of the time, they have some frontend JS regex that blocks the form, but using the wizardry of one's choosing, if you managed to get the email address posted to the endpoint, all is well.
Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.
OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure?
A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...
Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.
This is no good when you want to use the fastmail domain for the aliases. Ever since the twitter @N theft[1], I've learned to never use a custom domain email when signing up for anything. It just increases your attack surface. I prefer to leave it to fastmail to protect their own domain from hijacking.
You could forward all mail from a Gmail address to Fastmail, and then use username+service@gmail.com for each service you use. Might be considered security through obscurity, but if nobody knows your actual email domain except for the Gmail address, less likely to have it attacked. Goes without saying to protect that Gmail account at all costs though.
If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.
ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.
As a service, it's fantastic. The only issue I've had with Fastmail is if you ignore a new email notification on their Android app, you won't receive future email notifications. Not a huge problem, unless you're receiving time-sensitive emails.
If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already.
It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
It only feels unlimited. It's actually limited to 600 aliases, which I think is good to avoid one account getting thousands and depleting the usable namespace for other users.
I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up.
The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.
> Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc.
FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap.
On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres).
If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.
Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me.
Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in 2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label on it.
I'm looking forward to it! It's the only thing I need to achieve an acceptable WAF, and finally get her to actually use it rather than keep using GMail.
The price seems reasonable to me. Bear in mind that they are much smaller than any popular free email provider because they charge.
Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS.
However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts.
Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.
Wow. I've just been poring over the Fastmail website, reading about all their features, and wondering what the catch is, i.e., the price seems astonishingly low for everything Fastmail offers. I'm totally signing up.
I found it expensive as well in the past. Depending on your needs, you could look at Posteo.de and Fastmail.org. They're around half the price of Fastmail's lowest pricing tier, but have differences on number of aliases and a few other things. If you need a lot of aliases, Fastmail may be cheaper. Storage space, no ads, commitment to privacy are similar.
They offers lots of configuration and customization with that price. Maybe you mean somebody offer a simple, straightforward product with no customization at a lower price?
Unfortunately they have stopped accepting credit cards. They now only take bitcoin and bank transfer (and cash by mail and some other non international stuff)
That's a bummer. I checked now and found that it does accept PayPal and a couple of other options (where it may be possible to use a credit card without having an account), but those come with additional privacy issues.
