Email Where You Are the Customer, Not the Product

March 9, 2015 1:25 PM

What do people think of the different non-free email providers these days? (e.g. fastmail, pobox, rackspace)

I don't want to be the email product anymore, I want to be the email customer.

It seems like fastmail, pobox, and rackspace are the big three that always come up. In years past, fastmail has gotten very positive reviews on Ask - but I was wondering if people still feel that way and if anything has come along that's better since then?

Stuff that looks good about fastmail: web interface looks slick and clean (no ads!), want to use my own domain, and the aliases/subdomain/plus addressing seem better than what pobox and rackspace are offering. Also, fastmail's ability to organize incoming mail with rules seems better.

Basically what I'm asking - is there any reason to not just go with fastmail for email?

posted by Mjolnir to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Fastmail is unreasonably good. I've been a customer for ten years - very few problems. Can't speak of any others as FM was the first I've tried and I've always been satisfied.

You didn't mention mobile but the FM web presence works well even on every smartphone browser that I've seen it on.
posted by southof40 at 1:37 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I went all-Fastmail a few years ago and I still love it.
posted by isthmus at 1:39 PM on March 9, 2015

And when Fastmail has a problem they are very upfront about it and keep me updated. Before Christmas last year they had a fascinating series of blog posts about their operation. IT pr0n of the finest. Love them!

And you choose from a huge amount of different domains with them.
posted by nostrada at 1:41 PM on March 9, 2015

I really like pobox; I started using it a couple of years ago when it looked like my other non-free email was going to go belly up. Good customer service and no problems at all.
posted by holborne at 2:16 PM on March 9, 2015

Fastmail has a header-rewriting feature which works great with a custom domain name.

SMTP force From — This is only available for your default personality. When ticked, we will rewrite your From address to match this personality whenever you send via SMTP, no matter what the email client sets.

This lets me give my [e-mail] info to the regular Mail app on my iPhone but have all email look as if it came from [e-mail]. Incoming email isn't forwarded to Fastmail which hurts the ability of spam filters to work, but goes directly to Fastmail by setting up the MX records at my DNS host.

I switched about a year & 1/2 ago. The only tiny complaint I have is that you have to be on the $40/year tier to use your own domain. Mine is just for me, but that tier has 15GB storage and up to 100 domains while $20/year offers zero. How about 1 domain and 1GB for $30/year?
posted by morganw at 3:16 PM on March 9, 2015

Rackspace hosted exchange is nice. Office 365 is also nice. The best part about those systems is everything syncs like gmail across all platforms but you're paying instead of being the product.
posted by deezil at 3:23 PM on March 9, 2015

I've had Fastmail for 18 months, and 0 complaints.
posted by wotsac at 4:27 PM on March 9, 2015

I have been using Pobox's email forwarding service for nearly two decades now, and I was happy with it. After the demise of Apple's MobileMe service, I switched to Pobox's hosted email, and I've been equally happy with it. There have been a couple of outages, but they've been short, and I haven't lost anything. I do have my Pobox mailstore account set to also forward stuff to Gmail, for an archive and access if Pobox's IMAP/webmail is down, but I haven't needed to use it.
posted by brianogilvie at 4:59 PM on March 9, 2015

I use Fastmail with my own domain. A while back I wanted to set up a vacation auto-response, but only for one of my email addresses there. The default setting was to send one to all of them, so rather than go through manually and set all of them to off (around 100 addresses), I opened a ticket with support. Not long later, they had completed the task for me.

I have other, similar stories, but suffice to say, the Fastmail support is what keeps me paying my subscription!
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 5:42 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've used pobox email forwarding for 10+ years. very happy.
posted by H21 at 6:34 PM on March 9, 2015

I hate Rackspace with a fiery passion right now. I am slightly biased because I just spent a very long time trying to include a simple graphic in a mass e-mail to no avail and because I am frustrated that it deleted some e-mails that I was too absentminded to save from a few months ago. I also find even more minor things (like having to add a BCC field or click over to contacts instead of just being able to click a button to add a contact from a sent e-mail) irritating about it. I am very irritable and unforgiving about e-mail systems, so YMMV.
posted by cheerwine at 11:31 PM on March 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've also been using fastmail for a long time (around 2004?) and no problems with it. I'm hoping to be able to pay for an account there soon.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 2:43 AM on March 10, 2015

Came here specifically to rail against Rackspace for making formatting issues as nightmarish as they were in late 90s webmail. Seconding the hell out of cheerwine.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 10:35 AM on March 10, 2015

I've never used pobox's hosted mail, but have been using their forwarding since roughly forever with nary a hitch.
posted by tangerine at 1:55 PM on March 10, 2015

I'm using Hover's email offerings. Really cheap, and they basically do all the set up for you. You have to register your domain through them, but that's definitely not a bad thing. Fast, no downtime, passable web client (modified RoundCube). The only issue I've had is the spam protection gives around a half-dozen false positives a week.

If you're looking to go this route, and want to save a bit, dig around on the Relay FM or 5by5 sites. Hover regularly offer coupons through them for 10% off your first purchase.
posted by sincarne at 10:17 AM on March 11, 2015

Fastmail is and always will be the best. However, when Opera Software temporarily owned the company, registration was free. I still have a grandfathered free account. Fastmail is the way to go.
posted by Grease at 9:05 AM on April 4, 2015