Fastmail vs Google apps

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by TenFour

I am reminded of a fairly large organization that in an emergency used its email marketing system to blast out a warning to everyone in the group to shelter in place during a terrorist incident, and letting everyone else know that they were safe but wouldn't be responding to messages. The system would have alerted everyone within minutes, but I wonder how many messages were filtered into the "Newsletters" folder?

IMHO, using email for any critical, time sensitive communication is just wrong. Email, however it is configured, is not intended as an instant message system. Normally, I would expect a business to have everyone's mobile number, and a group SMS seems a much better idea for critical announcements. Even that is imperfect, as SMS is not a guaranteed delivery system.

[TenFour]

IMHO, using email for any critical, time sensitive communication is just wrong.

Knowing the situation described above it happened during an emergency--not planned. Someone knew that they had the entire email list ready to go and could send out an e-blast within minutes, if not seconds. In a pinch you use what you have. In any case, the point being there are many reasons that are not emergencies that you might get that one email in a year you want to see sooner rather than later, and in my experience with filters you do miss important things. I am blessed that the quantity and frequency of my incoming email is not enough to bother me, and I feel no compulsion to open most of them right away.

[owl]

I'm testing out FastMail mainly because of privacy concerns.

FM can't compete with Gsuite/Google Apps for 3rd email functionality it seems, which is disappointing.

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=71499

[JamesHenderson]

Originally Posted by TenFour

Another argument for another thread, but I think sieve filtering is a huge waste of time. Gmails spam and junk filtering are nearly perfect, in my experience, and let everything else flow into your Inbox.

Each to their own, I guess. I file into 5 folders and find it very useful.

I filter into a couple of folders that makes my life very much easier as it separates what needs to be looked at quickly from that that doesn't. My filtered inboxes are:
- INBOX (personal emails from friends and anything genuinely new)
- home (utility bills, bank statements, shopping receipts and orders etc)
- work (anything to do with work outside of my works email, professional institutions, LinkedIn etc)
- tech (anything to do with tech; hardware, software, tech forums, PC, NAS, peripherals, etc)
- list (general misc. subscriptions)

Only the INBOX folder makes notifications.

It is very rare to get false positive/negative spam through Fastmail (at least for me).

[edit: removed a half sentence that made no sense]

[JamesHenderson]

Originally Posted by BritTim

IMHO, using email for any critical, time sensitive communication is just wrong.

Could not agree more.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by JamesHenderson

Each to their own, I guess. I file into 5 folders and find it very useful.

Five! Goodness, that's restrained. I use FM for about half of my current email traffic and - having just counted the named-by-me folders in my auto-generated Sieve rules can tell you that there's about 100 such folders here.

They're mainly for mail-lists, and many of those are low traffic.


The rest of my email is elsewhere on a roundcube webmail system, and there there's about 400 separate folders specified in filter rules.

In both systems the folders are in hierarchies according to types of mails, broad areas of discussion etc, with subfolders for specific subsets.

There's other folders too, not directly targets for filtering, but - especially on the roundcube system I find folders that contain more than a few hundred mails are slow to open. For those I keep previous years' traffic (or in some cases previous 3-month or 6-month sets of mails) in dated subfolders.

In both cases, "Inbox" is where stuff goes if it is not filtered elsewhere.

I only need to scroll through the folder list to find out if what sorts of new mail have arrived, and I can (and do) completely ignore subsets of new mails if I've not got the time/energy to look at them. If they were all in one huge mixed folder I wouldn't be able to do that.

I also rarely have to search for specific mails as I already know which folder they will be in.

Both the folders and the filter rules that manage them are named carefully, again making it easy to find, for example, insurance-related ones, or mail lists, or whatever.

[JamesHenderson]

I basically didn't want to look through too many folders, but still wanted them grouped so I made these "areas" that seem to work for me.

It's entirely possible that I get a lot less email than you, of course

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by JamesHenderson

I basically didn't want to look through too many folders, but still wanted them grouped so I made these "areas" that seem to work for me.

It's entirely possible that I get a lot less email than you, of course

If I had to look in folders to see if they had new mails in them, it'd be a disaster ... but both FM's webmail system and Roundcube indicate whether new mails have arrived in folders, so a folder with sudden new mail stands out from a list of many with no new mails.

Having said that, scrolling through lots of folders - which I probably do twice a day just to make sure I've seen all of those that have new mail - is a bit of a pain. But it's still simpler than dealing with a mish-mash all in one of a handful of folders.

I used to use a mail client (no longer maintained) which could be configured to percolate numbers of unread mails in subfolders up to parent and grandparent folders ... which made this approach easier. One could see a status/count change in a top-level folder and drill down to the actual subfolder that contained it.

The roundcube system is currently getting about 73 emails per day (I know because the provider bills according to total traffic per month, and if my use exceeds a threshold then the volume will matter). I keep an eye on the monthly totals to see if I'm getting close to the threshold. The worst it's been, around a year ago, was 139 per day. I'm not sure what the FM daily count is, but as it doesn't affect billing it doesn't matter to me.

I don't read all of those mails; in the mail-lists I only read the threads that seem interesting. As threads tend to go off-topic, I sample a few mails in long threads to see if those that started off uninteresting to me became interesting later on.

[JamesHenderson]

Originally Posted by JeremyNicoll

If I had to look in folders to see if they had new mails in them, it'd be a disaster ... but both FM's webmail system and Roundcube indicate whether new mails have arrived in folders, so a folder with sudden new mail stands out from a list of many with no new mails.

Yes, that's how I do it. I also set those folders to "hide if empty" so everything is very obvious (to me).

I use the Fastmail app on my iPhone and Fastmate on my Mac.