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 great;
- spam filtering is very accurate: false positives and negatives are both rare;
- supporting FOSS and open standards, developing the important new JMAP standard;
- filtering of incoming emails: has a nice filter editor, and uses the standard Sieve language for writing filters, but see the corresponding negative;
- 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 my contacts and calendar are not primarily for use with my email — so that doesn't work for me;
- filtering emails: unfortunately Fastmail does not support the standard ManageSieve protocol which would allow managing one's mail filters from one's own email client [1];
- Fastmail data take-out/independent backup [2] options are poor, I discovered recently: “install a desktop IMAP email client (such as Thunderbird) 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.
[1] Sean Dague documented a very techy, fragile, hard-work, work-around. [2] I am confident Fasmail has decent backups on its own side. By “data take-out” and “independent backup” here I am referring to the ability to make myself a copy of my data, stored independently of that service provider, so that if I suddenly become unable to use the provider, due to a problem either on their side or on my side, I would have a complete backup ready to take elsewhere. Ideally this would be synchronised in “real time” so it's always up to date. One could perhaps build such a system externally, using IMAP sync software such as “vdirsyncer”, although I suspect it would work more efficiently if there were some support for it on their side.
Updated 2024-10-09: added footnote [2] explaining what I mean by “backup” there. The previous wording “backup/takeout is poor” could have been misinterpreted as doubting their own backup procedures.
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