Own-Domain Email with Fastmail – Pros and Cons
Since going own-domain a few years ago, I chose Fastmail for email and Gandi.net for DNS, both of them for their FOSS-friendly credentials and no-nonsense decent standard-based offerings with APIs and docs etc., suitable from casual home use up to business use.
My brief assessment of Fastmail for my use case. Positives:
- general reliability and speed have been fine;
- supporting FOSS by developing important new JMAP standard;
- exceptionally good webmail client but see negatives about it;
- exceptionally good config settings UI and associated docs.
Fastmail negatives:
- webmail is proprietary, in a world desperately needing a decent FOSS webmail client;
- webmail only stores email contact addresses in their own address book, whereas I host my own personal CardDAV/CalDAV address book and calendar elsewhere (in my Nextcloud) and use them for other things like mobile phone calls and other mobile apps — these days they are not primarily for use with my email — so that doesn't work for me;
- Fastmail data backup/takeout is poor, I discovered recently: “install a desktop IMAP client to make a local sync of your mail, and visit these various pages to download your various other data in various ways.” Ugh, yes, really.
That all said, for now I'm sticking with Fastmail for my mail hosting.
Which mail client, then? Proprietary software, and the kind of “soft lock-in” associated with it, irks me so much that I stopped using Fastmail's lovely-to-use webmail after a few years. Currently I use these freedom-software mail clients: K-9 Mail on (degoogled) mobile, and Mailspring desktop-webmail client (pretty decent, better than Roundcube/Rainloop/Snappymail), and I am also coming back after a break of several years to Thunderbird on desktop, now that it is enjoying a bit of an overhaul and a revival.
Follow/Feedback/Contact: RSS feed · Fedi follow this blog: @julian@wrily.foad.me.uk · use the Cactus Comments box above · matrix me · Fedi follow me · email me · julian.foad.me.uk Donate: via Liberapay All posts © Julian Foad and licensed CC-BY-ND except quotes, translations, or where stated otherwise