Chief Product Officer of Fastmail here. I see a lot of comments here from people that don't appear to have actually tried using the app, which is a little disappointing; don't knock it 'til you've tried it! Happy to answer any questions, but to answer the main ones that are popping up:
# Why Electron?
Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.
With Electron, we can maintain a single code base across all platforms so we can move faster, and keep feature parity everywhere. More than that though, we believe it lets us build a really great experience on each of these platforms, while offering a consistent UI for our customers across all their devices. Honestly, we can never out-native Apple because by definition whatever they do is "native", even if it sucks (Liquid Glass on the Mac is … not great UX). If that's your primary consideration, you will always be better with Apple's own Mail app, so it's pointless us trying to build something in that space. (And instead we work to also make Fastmail the best service to use Mail.app with — which we believe it is!)
# Why would you use this instead of the webmail?
If you prefer to keep Fastmail in your browser, great! You can do so. But we hear from many customers that they would rather not have their email mixed in with their tabs. With a separate app you can see it in the dock, Cmd-tab to it, make it your default email app system wide etc. It also lets us integrate with the system, like the Mac menu bar and native context menus.
# Why would you use this instead of an IMAP client?
If you've ever used the Fastmail web interface you probably already know the answer, but for everyone else…
1. It's a lot faster. Compared to Apple's Mail.app for example (which is a good IMAP client!):
- It resyncs way faster when you open the app, and uses a lot less data (JMAP is so much more efficient).
- Moving between messages is quicker. With Mail.app there's often a slight lag between clicking a message and it rendering. In Fastmail, it's usually instant.
2. It's more powerful. We provide the best standards support out there, and are also working to make the standards better. But there's always going to be more that we can do when we control both the server and the client. With the Fastmail UI you can:
- Add private memos to emails
- Mute conversations to ignore replies
- Pin important messages to the top of your inbox
- Schedule messages to send in the future (and not need your laptop to be online then for it to work)
- See related emails when you open your contacts.
- Add events straight into your calendar
- And much more (https://www.fastmail.com/features/).
3. It's got much better search. (Yeah, this is kind-of just "more powerful", but I'm calling it out because search sucks in most email clients0.
# And finally…
This is just a choice. We hope this is something that some of our customers will love, but we're not backing away from our commitment to open standards and encourage everyone to find what works best for them.
A good IMAP client (in combination with my own domains) gives me freedom. I use Fastmail, I like it, and your support is great, but I don't want to tie my usage of your service to your UI. That would tie me down to your service.
So I use Thunderbird and K-9 Mail, and occasionally the Fastmail web UI to manage masked e-mail addresses etc. That is my happy path.
I want to be tied to Fastmail because of your stellar support and good service, not because I am trained to use your UI.
By the way, fastmail.com is now in full advertising mode for this new app. It's hard for potential customers to see that you support IMAP just fine. Please show potential customers that the app is just one option as you say; not a requirement. Your website currently does not communicate that message clearly.
I appreciate you taking the time to engage with your customers here. I’ll say this announcement doesn’t thrill me, as a long-time customer. I’ve been paying for Fastmail for at least six years. It may be as many as eight but I can’t find my oldest receipt.
I use Fastmail because of the excellent mail service, customer support, sieve rules to keep my inbox manageable, and because of the little details like WebDAV that I have unexpectedly found useful for things like syncing browser bookmarks. I pay for Fastmail because it has been excellent, not because I’m captive.
This app signals to me that there may be a change coming in our relationship. One in which you may start to neglect
IMAP or make it harder for me to choose my own mail client. It tells me that Fastmail might be pivoting into “growth” and treating me like a “user” rather than a paying customer. It won’t surprise me, and I can’t really say I’d be mad. Most companies get to that point. There’s probably a lot more money to be made from vendor lock-in than happy, $50 per year customers. As for me and mine, I will switch to the next small-to-medium-sized mail provider the second I get a sense that this is the direction.
I'm sorry you feel like this, but it absolutely doesn't mean that. I believe we probably devote more engineering resources to open standards development than any other company, with significant resources given to the mailmaint, calext and jmap working groups at the IETF, not to mention the maintenance of the open-source Cyrus IMAP/JMAP server. I don't know why would do that if we were trying to just keep people captive because it's hard to leave. "Your data belongs to you" is one of our core values: https://www.fastmail.com/company/values/
> There’s probably a lot more money to be made from vendor lock-in than happy, $50 per year customers. As for me and mine, I will switch to the next small-to-medium-sized mail provider the second I get a sense that this is the direction.
Just so you know, the next-best provider is Proton and they're in HEAVY growth mode at the moment. Their UI is strewn with upsell widgets.
I have no special information, but the reason I pay for Fastmail is that they don't give me any of the indications that most companies do that they'll trend towards enshittifying. The main factors that lead me to think the risk is low are:
* Despite a buyout by Opera, the company's employees bought it back in 2013. This indicates passion.
* They're privately held, so they don't have to chase quarterly earnings reports; they can focus on the product instead of the stock price.
* They've been operating in the email domain for 25 years, and their other products (TopicBox, POBox) are in the same realm technically. This isn't a company randomly throwing ideas at the wall to make money.
* They charge customers for their product, so they are not looking for a revenue stream, they already have one.
I'm also highly vigilant for companies that will screw me, but Fastmail is way at one end of my risk spectrum because of the above points. I would be astonished if they would risk alienating their core audience by shifting focus away from a good email service...after all, that's their core competency.
I would consider using this app on my desktop instead of Thunderbird primarily due to the improved search.
After giving it a spin for 180 seconds, the main nuisance for me is that I can't elect to "Always show images from this sender". I use that in other desktop clients to ensure the image blocking banner doesn't end up being subconsciously ignored by me, as it will then only show for new senders who I'm not familiar with and need to be more wary of.
Also, like all banners everywhere no matter how well designed, it's ugly. In fact to be honest... this is the main reason I want the option to get rid of it.
I can understand why you don't offer that in the web app if you're storing it server side for each customer's list of saved senders, but for a desktop app where it can be stored locally, I'd value it.
In Settings -> Mail Preferences you can choose to:
* Show images by default for everyone (the images are always proxied via our CDN, so your IP is never leaked to the sender).
* Show images for contacts by default. You can easily add new senders to contacts by clicking their name at the top of the email and selecting "Add to contacts".
Every Electron thread goes the same way on HN. Engaging is a lost cause. As a Linux user, Electron is the only way many companies even acknowledge our existence. Getting native integrations without the native UI is always going to be better than nothing.
If it wasn't for electron, they would have build it only for macos and let the windows/Linux customers with nothing. As a customer, i say it's better than having nothing.
Long time Fastmail user. Very excited for this; normally I would care if it is an Electron app but because I want the same experience as iOS/web app, it probably makes the most sense to be an Electron app anyway.
I've been waiting for a FM desktop app that provides native notifications. Will this mean that iOS notifications from iPhone mirroring will be suppressed in favour of the native app?
Why bundle as a .zip instead of .dmg?
Will search work the same with offline use?
A few thoughts (no need to respond): I want all my messages available offline (and can confirm this is a setting), I want the same interface as the iOS app and the webmail app especially since they handle aliases and catch-all aliases including replies properly.
Edit: looks like when using iPhone mirroring, it doesn't detect that Fastmail is already installed on the mac, so you get duplicate notifications.
Hi! I have been using Fastmail for the last 2 years and love it!
I don't use the web interface much, instead I use Apple's Mail.app. My only issue is that external email accounts (gmail) take some time to be fetched periodically. When I open the web interface and click on the tag, it instantly pulls the new mail in from the external account, but if I fetch in the Mail.app, it doesn't refresh the external accounts. So, for things that have a very short time period (confirmation codes), I still end up needing to open the web interface. I wonder if this would still be the case with the new desktop app?
I will take some time to set it up over the next days and try it out!
Why not make an option to use third party JMAP providers (like selfhosted stalwart)? It would help push the JMAP client ecosystem - which could really use some help…
I’ve been a long time Fastmail user and generally love the service.
I’ve got one question not about the new desktop app, but I was wondering if you’d consider adding some kind of automatic email sorting like Gmail? I feel like I’m in a constant battle marking newsletters I didn’t ask for as spam but there’s always new ones. And wish there was a feature that just automatically filtered them all in to a bucket for me.
> Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.
Just to be clear, does this mean the app is mainly reusing the already existing codebase of the web-app? How much additional work went into the desktop-app?
I like the idea of using the new app, but in the browser I can use ublock to remove the weird "Inbox Zero!" celebration. Is there any plan to allow that kind of empty inbox configuration in the app?
I'm interested, both as a Fastmail customer, and a software developer: what does this let you do that a PWA doesn't? Perhaps not become the default email client? Is there anything else?
The main thing is better integration with the OS. So no browser chrome (even as a PWA, the browser adds buttons or a toolbar over the top of the app), integration with the Mac menu bar, native context menus, the OS semi-transparent background for the frame so it feels like it belongs.
No final decision, but possibly not. Given Apple are dropping support for x86 Macs next year, it's unlikely to be something we could support for the long term.
I think you should also understand that HN is not best place for this kind of news. This is page for people posting very obscure and hacky things. People that try to squeeze miliseconds on everything they do or do things the clever way. Why we should be happy for something that is the antitesis of clever and basically could be called corpo-slop?
> People that try to squeeze miliseconds on everything they do or do things the clever way. Why we should be happy for something that is the antitesis of clever and basically could be called corpo-slop?
Or you could … just build it directly on indexedDB. That's what we did for our offline support at Fastmail, with just a small wrapper function to make the API promise based: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/offline-architecture/
The performance has been pretty decent, even with multi-gigabyte mailboxes.
The offline support has been great. I used to have to keep another mail app synced with my fastmail inbox over IMAP just in case I needed access to an email and had crappy connection. Now I can just have the one email icon on my homescreen.
> Calendar reminders will not show a notification.
This means that notifications are generated server-side and pushed to the device. I guess this is to...save battery? Wouldn't a background process work well enough, battery-wise?
A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you just pay per inbox.
> Password managers are phishing resistant. The browser plugin will not offer to autocomplete passwords on an identical-looking punycode domain.
True … but the reaction to this by the vast majority of users is to go "stupid password manager autofill not working again", and copy and paste their password out of the pw manager and paste it straight into the phishing site…
Well, IME this tends to happen on "let's be super secure and disable or otherwise break the login fields" sites, so I'm not sure these people will bother implementing actually useful security measures.
Once your next step is not necessarily a password, having just the single username input up front becomes necessary to avoid confusion. To support non-resident passkeys (passkeys on devices that can't store the username with the cryptographic key), we need to be able to prompt for the username, then offer them their passkeys to log in.
This does have the effect of making it slightly less ergonomic for just username/password input, but we did everything we could to mitigate this:
> First, I can’t do username <tab> password <enter>.
True, but we made it so you can do username <enter> password <enter>.
> Secondly, with auto fill, it requires two clicks to sign in.
True, but the way we've set it up should ensure the autofill did both immediately, so you don't have to activate your password manager twice.
The flip side is if you do use passkeys, it can be much quicker than any username/password input. For example, 1Password will show you your list of accounts as soon as the login page loads, and it's just one click to sign in.
Sorry to corner you here on unrelated topic, but I will take a chance on asking…
Why can I not pre pay my FastMail account? I have a three year subscription which ends in another 14 months. The UI indicates I will be auto renewed two days before my subscription ends. That is not a comforting margin for error in the event there is a billing issue for something as vital as email.
I can understand you do not want to let people pre-purchase infinite time, but you already offer the three year plan. Let me top it off well in advance of the expiration date, so I have ample time to resolve issues if they occur. Let me subscribe to an annual renewal, always maintaining a two year balance.
Coincidentally, checking my account now, I see my credit card on file is expired.
The short answer is our new billing platform (Paddle), which all new users are on and we're moving everyone to, doesn't support it. (We're moving from a home-grown billing solution to simplify our global tax compliance and give us support for more important things like billing in local currency.)
You can hack around it by converting to monthly billing (which will give you a credit), then immediately convert back to 3-year subscription (your credit will be used, so you'll only pay the difference). The end result is essentially identical to an early renewal.
I'd also like to reassure you that we don't immediately delete your account if renewal fails! We have a slow degradation process that gradually disables sending, then receiving, then finally access to anything other than billing if the account continues to go unpaid over several weeks. But our support team can (and do) delay this process if for whatever reason you are having difficulty making a payment and reach out to us.
I will definitely explore the monthly-conversion to re-subscribe. Thanks for the tip.
While not everyone would agree, it would be nice to see if the renewal attempt was made say a month in advance of the expiration date. My paranoid self thinks I am one long vacation + expired credit card away from losing my email.
As a rule, I try not to lean on the good graces of for profit companies. Having expectations for how long my account would be functional were I to miss a payment is a game I care not to play for vital services.
One of the benefits of Fastmail for me was the ability to prepay and be not bothered if the payment would be processed in time, works at all or whatever.
FM had a couple of stumbles for me in the last years (including shadow banning the account without any feedback at all), guess this would be the last nail for it.
Fastmail user here: you get a reminder a week or so ahead of time, and even if the payment doesn't go through, they don't shut down your account instantly. You get a few reminders. I even emailed support to ask for some time to settle my credit card and were okay with extending it.
IIRC, when my payment lapsed due to an expired card, I got plenty of time to fix the issue. In my case, the payment is taken from the card a whole month and a half before the invoice is generated (typically a different fiscal year, smh).
Thanks for the detailed response, I wasn’t expecting an official reply. I can understand the reasoning.
The mitigation is good, though I did like pressing tab and having @fastmail.com autocomplete, which doesn’t happen now unless the input box loses focus (so enter alone doesn’t work). However I’ll just get used to pressing <tab> <enter>. I am nitpicking. The implementation is excellent (particularly onboarding).
Have you contacted our support team about these issues? Both sound very unusual, and we'd be happy to look into them for you. Drop us a line at support@fastmail.com or you can create a ticket at https://support.fastmail.com/support/
We do this at Fastmail and, if I say so myself, our implementation is pretty damn good. We’ve had this for over a decade, so it was originally built for much lower powered devices.
(I work for Fastmail). I'm not quite sure what to make of this. We believe our search is generally as powerful as Gmail's, and in some ways more so (see all the things we support here: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591213-Sea...), but we're always happy to hear ideas for improvements.
> no partial matches
To make your search fast, we use an index. This means we match on stemmed whole words by default (so a search for "bus" would match "busses", but not "business" for example). We also support prefix matching, if you end with a `` (e.g. "bus" would match both "busses" and "business"). We cannot support pure substring matches. This is exactly the same as Gmail as far as I can tell (although their stemming algorithm is probably slightly different). Gmail also doesn't support prefix searches as far as I know, just stemmed whole word matches.
> no matches for spelling mistakes
I see if your result has no matches in Gmail, it applies spelling correction and shows you what results this produces instead — I agree, this is a nice feature, I'll add it to our ideas bank.
> weird indexing of some sort of email content (attachments?) that leads to a match when there is absolutely nothing related in that email
We index the contents of attachments (again, as does Gmail I believe). By default we search everywhere, including inside attachments if you just search for a word. Most users find this helpful. If you want to restrict to just searching the message content, you can do so with the `body:` operator.
> it has no idea about the context of the search to improve matches, like 'flight' being possibly related to e.g. travel
I'd love to hear more about how you expect this to work. Searching a Gmail account on the web for "flight" doesn't seem to do anything special I can see, but maybe it does so in their app?
# Why Electron?
Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.
With Electron, we can maintain a single code base across all platforms so we can move faster, and keep feature parity everywhere. More than that though, we believe it lets us build a really great experience on each of these platforms, while offering a consistent UI for our customers across all their devices. Honestly, we can never out-native Apple because by definition whatever they do is "native", even if it sucks (Liquid Glass on the Mac is … not great UX). If that's your primary consideration, you will always be better with Apple's own Mail app, so it's pointless us trying to build something in that space. (And instead we work to also make Fastmail the best service to use Mail.app with — which we believe it is!)
# Why would you use this instead of the webmail?
If you prefer to keep Fastmail in your browser, great! You can do so. But we hear from many customers that they would rather not have their email mixed in with their tabs. With a separate app you can see it in the dock, Cmd-tab to it, make it your default email app system wide etc. It also lets us integrate with the system, like the Mac menu bar and native context menus.
# Why would you use this instead of an IMAP client?
If you've ever used the Fastmail web interface you probably already know the answer, but for everyone else…
1. It's a lot faster. Compared to Apple's Mail.app for example (which is a good IMAP client!):
2. It's more powerful. We provide the best standards support out there, and are also working to make the standards better. But there's always going to be more that we can do when we control both the server and the client. With the Fastmail UI you can: 3. It's got much better search. (Yeah, this is kind-of just "more powerful", but I'm calling it out because search sucks in most email clients0.# And finally…
This is just a choice. We hope this is something that some of our customers will love, but we're not backing away from our commitment to open standards and encourage everyone to find what works best for them.
I'll try to answer any other questions as I can.