Comment by pawelduda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pawelduda | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Fastmail for 3-4 years. I don't think I've had a single complaint during that time. A few points I remember from top of my head:

- 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ahead in terms of smoothness compared to GMail (though I stopped using it a long time ago, so that comparison could be outdated).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.

Does their mobile app support push email, rather than polling?

Yes it does.

But notifications do not actually download messages. This means that pressing a notification opens the app, but shows a blank page for a second or two while downloading the message. This was annoying enough that I stopped using their mobile app for a native client.

Dang, that's annoying— you'd think pre-downloading pushed emails would have been a standard feature for like the past twenty years, given how Mike Lazaridis used to talk about that in speeches and keynotes as one of his, like, critical insights when directing the engineering of the original BlackBerry units, like "hey guys, what if we waited to buzz the device until the message was fully downloaded and actually ready to read?"

They also support native Apple iOS push notifications (not just for new mail, but also edits/deletes IIRC), so their integration with Apple's native iOS mail app is outstanding. Been using FastMail that way for years and it's been working flawlessly. About the only time I use the Fastmail app is when I want to reply to an email sent to a catch-all address and reply from that address (haven't found a way to do that from the native Apple mail app).

> I'm proxying my GMail inbox and parking my own subdomain email for wildcard addresses. No problems here.

Can you explain how to do this?

Fastmail can fetch new messages and send mail through Gmail:

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...

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