Quote:
Originally Posted by evfrson
I hope you don't mind me asking but what do you find worrying about Fastmail ?
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I've had an account for over 18 years. They were a good choice if you wanted to use IMAP (before IMAP became available with most free email providers/ISPs and
http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/) became obsolete), and had reasonable prices. You had a smaller mailbox than many free email providers but you had real support, the ability to do lots of customization and avoided the potential privacy issues of the well known free email providers.
They've gone up-scale (even the cheapest plan supports CalDAV/CardDAV), and recently quietly dropped support for POP/IMAP/SMTP in their cheapest plan. After almost 20 years the cheapest plan only has a 2GB mailbox. There are free email providers with 1TB mailboxes. There is support for numerous types of two-factor authentication for webmail but they have no plans for U2F/FIDO support for email clients (I know because I submitted a support ticket about it after Thunderbird version 60.0 added support for U2F/FIDO).
All of the recent development efforts seem to be for webmail or their mobile app. I don't use either.
There are a lot of things to like about Fastmail. They're reliable, SpamAssassin/Sieve works extremely well, no conflict of interest because their main business is mail, I stopped backing up my mail because I have confidence they won't lose any, they have a support ticket system (I even once got help from one of the founders), and they're a survivor (that is not a given). I'm a moderator in the MozillaZine forums and notice many other Fastmail users there.
They're pushing JMAP as a faster/better successor to IMAP though there aren't any Windows based email clients that support it yet. I'm looking forward to when Thunderbird adds support for it (its in the version 91+ roadmap). I'm still on a legacy plan (about $16/year due to multi-year discounts). I figured I'd have to upgrade to the basic plan ($30/year) when I wanted to use JMAP. It seems now I'd have to upgrade to at least a standard plan ($50/year) and possibly maybe even a professional plan ($90/year).
I don't have any plan to switch from Fastmail at the moment but the direction they are moving is causing me problems. I'm basically waiting to see how JMAP turns out.