Quote:
Originally Posted by floatinghermit
What do you actually like in fastmail over gmail? I've tried fastmail before (back when it had a free tier), and I personally didn't feel like it was as good as gmail when it comes to the ease with which I could handle my email. I have a TON of emails, and gmail's search and labeling has always been flawless for me. Fastmail is likely not too different, but I am having a tough time seeing how it's better.
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That's a bit difficult to say,since I hardly use Gmail and I am using FastMail daily for the 20 years. One thing is that with Fastmail it's easy to have many instances in separate tabs: if you want to open an email without leaving the current view then I can just use the browser to open it in a separate tab, and then continue from there (like clicking the search field, selecting the sender's address that will already be there, and seeing all my correspondence with that person. I can sometimes have several instances of the webmail with severak different searches to have all the info I need for an email being composed in a separate tab (or several emails being composed simultaneously in different tabs. When I tried Gmail (2004) it was all restricted to a single tab, and I don't see that now it's different, except for opening conversations in separate popup windows that are limited compared to the main webmail app. But then I don;t use Gmail regularly. Another thing that I do regularly with FastMail and absolutely couldn't do with Gmail is send mail from many different addresses without having to confirm each address. This was actually limited by FastMail last year, so some usage scenarios are no longer possible, but it's still possible to send from Fastmail using all addresses in a domain without having to validate each one separately, as long as you can validate a random address in that domain. (And Gmail actually never really allowed sending from separate addresses: they always added a "sender" header that showed it was from Gmail, and conflicted with the way Outlook displays email headers, though the fault was Outlook's interpretation of the headers).
Anther major reason I didn't like Gmail is that they forced conversations, and have no folders. I use the same email store for personal and for work, and at the time I was employed by two or three separate employers at the same time, so I wanted the email stores completely separate (in separate folder and subfolders). Gmail had no separation and no concept of a subfolder. I did like Gmail's search at the time, so I forwarded almost all my email there just for being able to search there, but I don't need this anymore, since Fastmail's search abilities got much better over time (I also used Gmail's attachment previewer back then, but that's also not an issue nowadays because open office variants got much better in handling MS Office documents).
But the main reason was that Fastmail 15-20 years ago, maybe even just 10 years ago was a very personal service: you could actually reach people, and the people were the ones developing and running the service, not just customer service representatives. Browsing old threads here can show how much influence users feedback had on FastMail's development. So it was fun using a service that listens to you. They still do but not here (and having a developer sending you to the beta server to test a fix to an issue you raised 20 minutes earlier is something that not likely to happen nowadays.)