FastmailReviews of fastmail.com

For me, the best email service without zero-knowledge encryption.

It's a very good service overall. Very customisable and configurable, works well as a GMail replacement. My only issue is that if you enable grouping messages together by thread, any new messages received in the opened thread will be marked as read automatically, so you can easily miss emails.

Overall, I’m generally happy with Fastmail. A paid email service isn’t for everyone, but if you really want to own and take control of your inbox, then you should consider them. I moved away from a mix of Gmail and web host email, and for what I needed, their standard plan is perfect for me. I get to use my own domains and create up to 600 aliases – whether I’ll ever use half of that is another thing. Every mailing list and company gets its own unique alias, I also set up a throwaway alias every so often. And if any of these aliases are sold on, taken in a data breach or otherwise misused, I can immediately shut it down. Even those clever companies that block Mailinator and other disposable addresses can’t do anything against this. The web interface is adequate, it has a few visual flourishes, but it’s nothing to get excited about. Their apps are nothing more than wrappers around the website, they make the service usable but are crash and reload too frequently. Support has been okay, I’ve had a few queries and most have been answered well and in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve also made a few simple suggestions for improvement. Here’s just one I suggested way back: A keyboard shortcut help screen. On YouTube try hitting shift-/ (that’s the question mark) to see an overlay showing all the playback shortcuts. Anyway, they answer politely enough but they’ve never added any of these simple tweaks to their own “Feel Good Features”. I get the feeling Fastmail don’t really care too much about customers. Maybe they think their service is good enough and there’s not much direct competition, so why bother? They’re not entirely wrong right now, but who knows? I might still be a paying customer in 5 years, or I might well have jumped to something else, it’s really up to Fastmail.