Thoughts on FastMail

Recently I’ve been looking to move away from Google’s free services to solutions that, while paid, might be a better fit for me as well. There’s also the fact that Google has a tendency to shutter their services. Throw in privacy concerns and the slow influx of ads into their best services like Gmail and there has been no better time than now to look at moving on.

The first step in this plan was for me to start moving away from Gmail and look for alternatives as Gmail is the service I use the most from Google. I’m speaking about paid alternatives rather than just moving over to Microsoft Outlook or Yahoo Mail which would just be the lesser of two evils and would defeat the whole purpose of moving away from Google by merely giving my personal data to another large corporate entity.

This is where I stumbled upon FastMail. FastMail offers everything I’ve come to value about Gmail such as fast search, good organization and being able to use it across multiple devices. Where it excels above Gmail is that it is blisteringly fast and has a wonderful HTML5 site that is perfect to browse and use on both a table and a smartphone. The tech guys at FastMail are far more helpful than anything that Google calls support. They’re quick to respond to any queries you may have, and they are constantly improving their service and offerings. Coming from years of Google’s automated responses and blissful ignorance of any problems bar those that take their site completely offline this was a breath of fresh air for me!

The fact that FastMail also allows you to use your own custom domain and has some rather good pricing tiers makes it a great alternative to using Gmail. Throw in the fact that you get a 60-day trial without having to give them your credit card details and using a service like Gmail becomes rather ridiculous.

FastMail gives you a wealth of options to tailor your email as well and even offers to check and manage all your other accounts, so you don’t need to worry about hopping between sites if you’re someone like me who has multiple addresses spread out on the internet. I’m actually using FastMail as the catch-all account for my Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and blog emails, and I’ve found it remarkably easy to set up and use.

Best of all, FastMail works 100% with any email client due to their IMAP support which Google also supports but with many of its own idiosyncrasies which can cause problems with most email clients.

Competitive pricing, no ads and plans to suit most users are the cherry on top. Definitely a highly recommended service for people looking to have more control over their emails and rest easy knowing that their information isn’t being sold to advertisers.

• Tech