Is anyone using Fastmail for their business?

Our company is closing in on 100 employees and we use Fastmail. We don't miss the cloud integrations that google workplace, etc. have, but I personally do miss the UI and UX polish that gmail had.

+ Calendar sharing in the organization is opt-in, so it can force more coordination to make a meeting. Maybe that's a good thing?

+ Other peoples' calendars often appear in the same color as mine, so if I have somebody else's calendar in my view I might think I've been invited to a ton of meetings.

+ Email contacts are weird in a way that I can't quantify. With gmail, when I hired somebody, I often ended up with both their personal email and their work email in my address book. Gmail knew to default to the work email after they were hired. Fastmail does the opposite so I have to remember to delete my new employees' personal emails from my contacts so that I don't accidentally send invites to the wrong address.

All that said keyboard control of fastmail is cooler than gmail and the rules are really fun to work with. I like that you can use sieve rules with it. In fact the lack of tight integration makes it easier to use different services for different things. No longer do I have to unselect "make this a google meet" link or whatever that was.

Fastmail is great, but the only issue I have, in case some Fastmail engineer is in this thread, is that they should open up their JMAP push API already.

They have a cool protocol only they support, but the push API is restricted to Fastmail-only clients, so you can't create your own script that tells you when you have new mail.

It's been a year and still there's no movement: https://github.com/fastmail/JMAP-Samples/issues/7

I've been a Fastmail customer for...8 years? 10? I dunno. A long time. Initially I just replaced my self-hosted personal domain email as deliverability to e.g. Gmail dropped off a cliff for anything _not_ run by a BigCo. Fastmail, despite not being "big" in the Google/MS/Yahoo sense is expertly-run and established enough that I generally get messages through. (Delivery failures I see from FM-hosted addresses usually have to do with age of the _domain_, not anything about their email infra.)

Being able to pay for _just_ email from a company that isn't also harvesting my mail contents for ad targeting and search relevance is honestly a huge relief to me. When I have to discuss something sensitive via email -- think medical care, financial deals and other business secrets, even hobbies and interests that I wouldn't want blasted across the Googleplex -- it goes to Fastmail, every time. (And yes, I know about encrypted email and tried to do everything with GPG signatures + payload encryption for years...along with re-sending 99% of those messages b/c the recipient could do literally nothing with them.)

For business use I'm also a big fan of their mailing-list-esque offering Topicbox (https://topicbox.com). It lets me opt-in particular outside trusted vendors and collaborators for ongoing discussion w/o having the bring them onto our domain, keeps a permanent archive of our discussions, and hosts public mailing lists for newsletters, customer discussions, etc. just as well.

Disclaimer: I am not a Fastmail employee, marketing partner, or affiliate, and I have always paid full price for my service. They're just damn good at email and one of the last effective defenders against the GOOG/MS duopoly's centralization of email and IMHO worthy of regular public recommendations for that. (Self-hosting is fun and fine for personal domains where deliverability is a nice-to-have, but for business purposes I need something that _works_ and am willing to pay for that.)

Fastmail does one thing and does it very well. Their webmail is light and snappy, they offer standard protocols (IMAP, caldav...) so you can interact with it with third-party software. During my single interaction with their support I had an answer within the hour.

My only complaint is that their mobile app is basically a webview of their webmail. This means that it does not work offline. The good news is that because they support standard protocols the mobile app is not the only option. On iOS the default Mail, Contact and Calendar apps work out of the box.

I am quite confident when I say that Fastmail will be a huge step up from GoDaddy.

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.

The biggest problem we faced, migrating a couple of months ago, was the discovery that you cannot duplicate an email to a folder, you can only move the original. The means, for example, you can't have a shared folder for the submission of expenses whilst retaining the original receipt in your own folder.

It's also not possible to block a contact if you have previously communicated with them without first deleting the contact from your address book. Why FM can't just do that automatically (and indeed, why it is a requirement in the first place) I have no idea - but it is really annoying.

Lastly, as someone else said, calendar colours frequently conflict.

So overall, it works - but lacks polish. It's almost like they don't dog-food their own app.

On the plus side, the data import from google was very fast and worked flawlessly for mail. We ended up in some confusion over calendars which I don't know the finer details of, however.

Disclaimer: I used to care enough about problems to write to support. I got canned responses to the point where I have stopped writing to them.

I am two years into Fastmail. Fastmail's web UI is meh.

I find that when I accept invites from customers, and then move the event from eg. my Billable calendar to Sales, the event is listed as "No response" -- when I respond again, the customer is sent another accept.

Showing other people's calenders gets confusing due to the default choice of colours.

The iOS app does not work offline.

The default SPF records are much too relaxed. I could understand if they just didn't enable SPF by default but allowed you to enable sane records.

You only need to scratch at the surface to find problems: https://internet.nl/site/fastmail.com

I could go on.

Yes, obviously no problems -- Fastmail is the gold standard for indy email hosting. I don't want "integration" from my email provider. Their web client is so good I have stopped using native imap clients. On mobile I use the native exchange client with my own service that proxies to imap, so I can't say anything about their mobile support.

Recently we lost connectivity from our colo to their IMAP endpoint and although I already knew it was some BGP cluster-f, I pitched in a support ticket just to see what would happen. Received a reply noting the known BGP cluster-f peering with and providing the exact time that connectivity had been restored. Can't expect much better than that. They actually responded quicker than our transit provider did.

Pretty happy fastmail user - business of 2. I migrated away from gmail to avoid the possibility of being locked out without recourse.

I use shared labels heavily when onboarding my assistant for him to respond to emails (from his own email) and to assign emails for him to look at.

I was. No problems with it at all other than the native iOS Fastmail app was useless without a data connection. You couldn’t do anything offline. Also it’s difficult to export all your data from calendars and contacts. And there is no notes API or back capability at all.

I’m now using apple iCloud+ for all of this as it is basically free for me anyway and everything works offline.

I have been using fastmail as a single personal account for the past year or so, so I don't have much to add to your technical assessment. However, I have been considering changing providers because of the political position of the Australian government. I've done a cursory search just now and can't find anything to back up my opinion, but my impression is that they have a pretty permissive stance on gov't access to data or just crappy Internet privacy laws, which I disdain. I have been thinking about making the jump to protonmail as my provider instead.

Aside from the closed JMAP push API, my only complaint is that the spam folder doesn't work as you'd expect in IMAP. Specifically, moving a message to the spam folder doesn't influence the spam detection algorithm, as it does in the Web interface. To achieve this in IMAP, you must create a 2nd spam folder that is specifically configured to behave this way, which is really stupid.

I worked at a company that used Fastmail for ~150 employees. In my personal experience, the email side was rock solid and support was both responsive and helpful. I miss Fastmail's extremely fast web interface and handy features like being able to create smart folders from saved search queries.

Calendaring would have been fine for a smaller company, but it was not suitable at our scale. This is mainly because there's no way to make your free/busy status visible to everyone in the company, so you ended up having to manually share your availability with each person you might want to meet with.

Our sales / marketing / recruiting folks lamented the lack of integration into their external CRM tools, but I'm not in that field so I can't speak to it directly.

Similarly, our IT folks didn't like how it was a separate account system to manage, instead of integrating into some other SSO system or being a source of truth for SSO itself... but again, at a smaller scale that's not a problem.

I love FastMail but I had to stop using it for my business because emails sent to Outlook would regularly bounce. I contacted support but their replies often took a week so I gave up.

Based on the other replies, it seems like i was unlucky so I may give it another try.

Love fastmail and use it to run my small business. While lacking in some integrations, it's not a huge deal since my CRM integrates with inbound emails to BCC addresses. In regards to system availability, have no qualms around uptime and support. In the 5 years I've used them, only 1-2 major incidents where email was inaccessible during the outage.

On a separate note, really love their integration with 1Password + Masked emails:

* https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

I don't find Fastmail to be a super reliable provider, their docs aren't thorough, device support is minimal, and their customer support is a bit lacking. Spam filtering seems iffy. Also bizarre that their mobile client doesn't cache mail.

I would treat them as any other mail provider; use IMAP and SMTP with your own client, only use the features built into the protocol specs, use a custom domain. By not leaning heavily on custom features you can change providers quickly, and there's fewer things to break. Also, you should probably mirror all your mail to a different provider so you have a backup in an emergency.

I have moved with personal and business email from Gmail to fastmail.

My main problem with Gmail was that often emails from two unrelated customers where joined in one conversation and I have mistakenly confused who I am communicating with. That happens if two unrelated people send an email with a title "problem with x" or "bug report". That hasn't happen in fastmail yet.

One thing I am missing is Google search through email. Even though I have migrated emails from Google I still sometimes fallback to Gmail search over old emails.

> Any issues with uptime, deliverability, and support, especially given the latter is email only?

None.

> Have you felt restricted by Fastmail's lack of cloud integrations and other services that Google Workplace and and Microsoft 365 have?

No, but this also really depends on your use case. Do you want to add employees and share resources like in Google Apps with mailing lists, calendars, storage? Then it's probably not the right provider for you. If it's just about "regular" email then there should be no issues.

Using Fastmail with company of 5.

- Upside: Having a catchall account where I see all email which didn’t reach any existing mailbox.

- Upside: Google doesn’t have our data.

- Upside: Excellent service, and we can talk to a human when we have an account question.

- Downside: Everyone has a personal gmail account anyway for Google Spreadsheets or for the Chrome synchronization (and Chrome will nag you till no end).

I use both a lot, so here are some thoughts comparing Gmail with the Fastmail web client:

- Fastmail has a slightly buggy rich text editor, but it's pretty feature rich, including full bidirectional language support. It's not as slick overall as Gmail's, but it's overall usable enough to not make me want to switch to Gmail.

- mail search is not as slick as Google's, which is like world-class search smarts applied to just your inbox. Fastmail's is still pretty good, just not able to compare. Advanced search is also clunkier in Fastmail in various ways, and takes an extra click to get back into when you have to refine an advanced search.

There are two features in Fastmail web client that Gmail web client does not support (that I'm aware of) that I would not want to live without: (1) Edit as New, and (2) Send a Copy.

Yes. Pretty happy with it.

* Shared mailboxes work well enough.

* Deliverability seems good.

* UI is good. IMAP is good.

They do email, calendars, and contacts, and they do it well. :)

I've been with them for maybe five+ years now. Very happy with them for email, calendar and contacts. Which is what I want from them.

This is mostly for personal use, but I do have a sole proprietorship too and wouldn't have an issue using it for "real business".

I administer a website + MX for a friend who runs a solar panel installation business for a number of years now... they've been very happy with their domain being hosted on fastmail.

I’ve used it for the past 5 years without any issues at all.

Been considering Fastmail for personal use so I’m keen to hear others opinions. Proton seems good too but worried I can’t use the apps I want to use.

I use them. Once every 2/3 years maybe they are under attack for half a day and the email cannot be accessed.

Very happy with them. It is easy to create aliases and rules, they have phone and iPad apps that are simple and snappy. The pricing is reasonable too.

In my opinion it is a feature that they only do email (and calendar, contacts, as you say), instead of an office productivity suite.

I use Fastmail for my business, after moving there from Namecheap's solution "Private Email". Haven't had a single issue or hiccup, pricing model is straightforward, and I have multiple domains/accounts all under one umbrella and management plane.

I do! It's just me an my cofounder, we love it.

Privacy focused, good shared calendar.

The UI is not always my cup of tea but I still choose it instead of Google or other services just because of the product mission.

Try mailbox.org, with cloud integrations and an amazing support team.

I peeked at their website and didn't find if there is a way to send an email from a web app. Do they have an API that makes that easy? (or at least doable?)

Why wouldn't Google Workspace suffice? If you need something more private, try ProtonMail. They're great too, and support all the things you need.

have you tried Zoho mail...we are using it for our business.

we use zoho mail and it seems pretty good for our needs.