FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.
FastMail's highlights for me are:
- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)
- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience
- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.
- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)
- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).
- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.
This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.
I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.
I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.
If anyone's looking for a non-US alternative to Gmail due to PRISM, according to Fastmail's company info page [1] their servers are run by NYI [2], a hosting company based in New York.
It bothers me that neither fastmail or freron have full screenshots of their interface. What reason can they have to not put a tour/screenshots section on the site?
I signed up for their free trial, and when it expired they sent me DAILY all caps messages (with no opt-out, no autologin link, from a noreply address) screaming at me about needing to update my credit card details.
I like their service & want more people to leave gmail, so I signed up to make a suppor request (which I had to verify in true listserv fashion) and wrote a ticket trying to explain how lots of people who signed up would be expecting a web 2.0 style try & buy trial, not a real subscription service that would send them bills! And those people would be turned off by their aggro emails, but didn't seem to get through to the guy on the other end.
So I think fastmail is still pretty oldschool internally (which is a good thing on the security & privacy aspects!) and would be well-served making more modern demos and explanations so they can directly suck people into a non-NSA gmail competitor that has a sweet UI with keyboard shortcuts, good searching etc.
I had no idea that FastMail wasn't free any more until just now when I thought "why can't you just sign up and see it". I've been using it since 2002, although it hasn't been my primary email for a long time. Crazy.
Even though I've used Opera for over ten years, it kinda bums me that they acquired fastmail.fm, because I don't really know where I see Opera three years from now.
For the last week, as a test run I've had a Fastmail account that I've been forwarding my gmail to and have been using Mail.app to check my email. Having been a gmail only user for so long, I totally forgot how handy it is to have emails and drafts in many different windows and how pleasurable a zero latency interface is. Granted, my email habits are a lot different and more high volume than when I last used a proper email client, but still, it's refreshing.
This is a minor nit, but most of the really interesting stuff you can do with Sieve requires the 'variables' extension, which Fastmail doesn't support for some reason. Other than that, it's really nice.
> - An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
I switched to Fastmail a few weeks ago and am as pleased with it as you. Just one question though - I can't find a way to recreate the "All Mail" folder from Gmail, where you would delete mail in Mail.app and it would end up in "All Mail". It ends up in Trash instead. Same with my iPhone - if I delete a message there, it goes to Trash, not "All Mail" like it used to with Gmail. Were you able to get this to work?
I can't see how Sieve is significantly better than Gmail rules. Reading the examples, I seem to have the ability to do everything listed, with the exception of actually rejecting messages (versus quietly deleting/archiving).
For one, it's much easier to maintain complicated rules in Sieve than with Gmail rules. This is just a function of having multiple lines and comments for rules.
I use Sieve to push a summary of certain messages to my phone (with https://pushover.net, another great service). This is not possible with Gmail rules (you can forward an entire message, but not selectively send just the subject and sender). See https://www.fastmail.fm/docs/sieve/fm-sieve-notify.html
Note that you don't have to do all that crazy spam stuff -- the build in spam filtering seems to work fine for me. The only manual rule I added was to spam anything with common Russian characters because Russian spam was somehow slipping through the filter.
That’s mostly because the email has already been accepted by the incoming SMTP server by the time it gets to Sieve, hence cannot be ‘rejected’ at the SMTP level anymore.
You can also use IMAP clients. For example I never use the gmail web interface and use Thunderbird instead. I have personal email accounts plus 3 different gmail work accounts so this works far better.
Just trying fastmail my first response is wow this thing is fast.
Using something like this, you quickly realize gmail has become incredibly bloated. And to think gmail in its time was the "fast" solution to a bloated hotmail.
I made the switch (moved 55k+ messages with http://protips.maxmasnick.com/export-gmail-to-fastmail-or-an...) and haven't looked back.
FastMail offers a similar infinite scroll feature. I was able to select and move several thousand messages through the web interface when I was first configuring it.
FastMail's highlights for me are:
- Really good, customizable "personalities" (alternate email addresses with their own SMPT servers, auto-BCC settings, etc.)
- Sieve support -- SO much more powerful than rules in Gmail, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
- Customer support that actually responds and is super helpful in my experience
- Ability to use your own domain name(s) without all the overhead of signing up for Google Apps.
- Jabber support (not in-browser, but they do have a server that works with Adium/iChat/Pidgin)
- Very fast, modern web interface. Definitely faster than Gmail for me. Good keyboard shortcuts too (very similar to Gmail's but with a few differences).
- An archive folder that works well with the archive functionality in Mail.app and other clients.
The only thing that isn't great is search. It works ok for everything but searching within messages (i.e. from/to/subject searches are fine). I believe FastMail does have support for a lot more search operators than Gmail and can search headers as well. But I'm not an expert on the power user search features for either.
This is because I actually use the search in Mail.app on my Mac, which is actually better than Gmail's search capabilities for every search I've tried (same good results, but way faster). Obviously works great with FastMail too, and I figure it's good to have a local copy of email.
I also miss a few things from the (old) gmail interface, but I definitely like FastMail's interface better on the whole than the new compose in Gmail. Things I miss in FastMail are the mainly the ability to pop composing a message into a new window with one click and sync with the address book on my phone. Neither are deal breakers.
I actually use MailMate (http://freron.com) for the majority of my email access now. It's still a little rough around the edges but being able to compose emails in Markdown and see the entire hierarchy of a thread (not flattened into one level) is worth a bit of UX pain.