Oh Oh, wait a Minute Mister Postman (reliable E-Mail Providers)

November 6, 2009 3:04 AM

I've heard only good things about Tuffmail and Fastmail but I'm looking for recommendations on reliable E-Mail Providers with data centers in more privacy-minded countries (which excludes some parts of Europe and the US).

I am looking to consolidate my different webmail accounts in one central repository. I'd look to access the server via IMAP/Exchange.

Storage space would be an argument, at best I could just let all my mail accumulate and pay for additional storage space.

Reliability trumps everything, especially the fact that there are backups/the venture won't disappear with all my written goodness.

Bonus: what is the "feature" called where I could keep the sender-address of the account that a certain e-mail arrived on when I respond to it using the "mother-account". I guess its more of a bug of the SMTP protocol, but could I "exploit" is using Apple Mail in combination with any provider?

posted by mathiu to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I can heartily recommend FastMail as I've used it to host my family's email accounts for the past several years. It is very reliable and they are constantly making improvements. Just this week I received a notice that they've upped the storage quotas (again) and lowered prices. They have a quite wide variety of type of accounts and the neat thing is that you can mix/match. So, for example, my 2nd grader's account has very low limits and mine has the maximum, but it's all considered the same account for billing purposes. Also, their new mobile interface is quite good (particularly on the iPhone).

The administrator features are very strong, as is the ability to manipulate emails within an account. Search is particularly strong. I switched from a plain-jane webhosting account a few years ago and sliced off the email side of things to FastMail. I've come to rely on it as a knowledgebase of sorts: If I have something I need to save or will have to reference later, I just email myself a quite note and put in a few keywords. The search is just that good and quick even within a single huge inbox.

I use Apple Mail.app on IMAP with the FastMail account to keep things in sync and have mail.app setup to download a local copy of everything as well - just in case...

Can't address your privacy issues, but this may be of interest:

FastMail.FM's people are Rob Mueller and Jeremy Howard, plus two non-executive directors, and contract programmers. We are located in Melbourne Australia, we use IBM servers hosted by NYI in NYC US, with a backup email server in Norway. We have been working on FastMail.FM since 1999.


I've got no connection to FastMail other than being a very satisfied customer for several years now.
posted by webhund at 6:53 PM on November 7, 2009