Fastmail
Paid email hosting service with custom domains, masked email aliases, calendars, and contacts.
Loved for its masked email aliases1234 and a fast, reliable, low-fuss service that many moved to from Gmail.56789 The most common caveat is that mail is not encrypted and offers limited privacy against legal requests101112, and some users want hosting outside US-aligned jurisdictions.13141516
Why people recommend it
Masked email · 3
Unlimited masked addresses and aliases make it easy to give each service its own address and cut off spam by deleting it.
“Deleting an alias is hands-down the quickest and most convenient way to unsubscribe from whatever drivel a company ends up sending my way”
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“I moved to fastmail about 2 years ago. It was not a super painful process, they make it easy as possible.”
Reliability · 3
Long-time users describe it as boring in a good way, consistent, and rarely down.
“I’ve been using Fastmail for years now. Easy to use, reliable, and consistent.”
“Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!”
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“We use FastMail for a business that is sensitive to email delivery time”
Speed and UI · 3
The web app is called fast and polished, with good search even on huge inboxes.
“IMO it is one of the highest quality software products in the world.”
“Fastmail has a polished UI and a great search unlike Proton.”
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“I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox”
Easy switching · 3
Moving from Gmail or another provider is described as easy, especially with a custom domain.
“Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy”
“I moved to Fastmail a couple years ago, and so far I’ve been very happy with it!”
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“I moved to fastmail about 2 years ago. It was not a super painful process, they make it easy as possible.”
Fair pricing · 3
Commenters call it cheap or fairly priced and worth paying for.
“Fastmail natively supports JMAP, is pretty cheap ($3-5).”
“highly recommend for solo devs and small teams.”
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“Worth every penny. I have zero regrets.”
Beats self-hosting · 3
Former self-hosters say it removes the work and deliverability headaches of running a mail server.
“I moved from hosting my own e-mail server to having it all served in Fastmail, and I couldn't be happier as well!”
“Nowadays I pay fastmail to worry about that bullshit.”
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“Especially when Fastmail and Proton are so cheap.”
Caveats and dissent
No encryption · 2
Mail is not end-to-end encrypted, and one legal request could expose a user's data.
“FastMail is great”
“FastMail. No encryption, but just works. I will pay for it for the rest of my life”
Jurisdiction · 3
Some users want EU hosting or avoid its non-European jurisdiction; one found it laggy from across the Atlantic.
“I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I have been using fastmail for a few years”
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“Fastmail is the "Ferrari of e-mail" services. It does everything well, or extremely well”
Spam and support · 2
Some report weak phishing filtering and poor or hostile customer service.
“their spam/phishing filtering (and customer service) have been really poor lately”
“the CEO responded with such obnoxious belligerence that I swore off doing business with Bron or Fastmail ever again”
Domain rejection · 1
Some smaller websites reject addresses outside the major email domains.
“I love this feature from Fastmail”
Rare outages · 2
Long-term users note occasional, rare service outages or delivery delays.
“Worth every penny. I have zero regrets.”
“We use FastMail for a business that is sensitive to email delivery time”
Often compared with
15 moved from Gmail to Fastmail
1 moved from Fastmail to Gmail
2 moved from Proton to Fastmail
1 moved from Fastmail to Proton
1 moved from Zoho Mail to Fastmail
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail 15 mentions
- Ask HN: What email provider do you recommend for personal email? 6 mentions
- Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com 5 mentions
- Ask HN: Alternative to Proton Mail? 5 mentions
- Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless 5 mentions
- Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' 3 mentions
Also written as FastMail. Data: fastmail.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 47
“FastMail is great”
“So far I'm more than happy with the decision.”
“I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“IMO it is one of the highest quality software products in the world.”
“I use Fastmail which has been a very boring and high quality product.”
“I’ve been using Fastmail for years now. Easy to use, reliable, and consistent.”
“I use Fastmail because they are at least honest about their limitations”
“my main email (hosted on fastmail)”
“fastmail as my mail provider”
“I use fastmail currently.”
“Moved my domain from namecheap to cloudflare that I use for Fastmail.”
“Deleting an alias is hands-down the quickest and most convenient way to unsubscribe from whatever drivel a company ends up sending my way”
“Fastmail has a polished UI and a great search unlike Proton.”
“FastMail. No encryption, but just works. I will pay for it for the rest of my life”
“Now I just use Fastmail's masked address feature.”
“I use Fastmail for some key email addresses and this works well for me”
“I use unique emails for every service I use and it works beautifully.”
“I use mail.app with my fastmail account and it’s perfect.”
“I recently switched to Fastmail.”
“I'm still on fastmail because I use *@domain.name”
I’ve been using Fastmail for years and all my accounts use unique email addresses like safeway@example.com through the catch-all option. It takes a bit of time to set everything up the way you want at first, but Fastmail supports custom sieve scripts. With wildcards in sieve, you can automatically create and apply labels to these kinds of per-account addresses without naming them all in advance. You can add specific
“Fastmail lets you do safeway@glyptodon.mydomain.example as an alternative to plus-aliases.”
“I'm happy Fastmail (made by a small company) is much better and faster than Gmail”
Maybe so, but I just assume anything I write is being read by multiple different parties anyway. I use Signal too, but I don't trust that either. Face-to-face communication (inside my portable lead chamber) is the way to go
“Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy”
“works well with Fastmail and other apps”
“I moved from hosting my own e-mail server to having it all served in Fastmail, and I couldn't be happier as well!”
“I have a fastmail account that I use for stuff I want.”
“Is fastmail better in this respect?”
“Two years ago I moved to Fastmail(they're great)”
“They do have fallback, they keep backups in the US.”
“better privacy safeguards and internal processes in place for protecting your email from their employees than FastMail”
“use individual masked emails in Fastmail per different service”
“If you are willing to take on some more risk, try Fastmail.”
“Do you know if they have multiple data centers and can fail-over when one barfs?”
“FastMail. They've working to support an EU region first class. Great uptime imho.”
“Fastmail masked email where I’m not.”
“I also recommend Fastmail instead of Google for email.”
“I love Fastmail.”
“I have been using fastmail for a few years”
“Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!”
“I'm thrilled to not have Google searching my primary email address any longer.”
“Fastmail is fantastic, I've been a very happy customer for at least a couple years now.”
“I really can't say enough good things about Fastmail!”
“I have been extremely happy with the service. Fairly priced, very fast even with a huge inbox”
“Fastmail is the "Ferrari of e-mail" services. It does everything well, or extremely well”
“I pay for Fastmail.com precisely for their unlimited aliases and masked addresses.”