TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: Fastmail

  • FastMail FTW revisited

    On yesterday’s post about FastMail I made sort of a jargon related error when talking about aliasing.

    When I speak of aliasing I mean being able to send out your e-mail as any e-mail address you wish. With the account I have at FastMail that allows me to have 8 ‘personas’ in FastMail’s parlance. However, Rob, one of the top dogs at FastMail was kind enough to send me the following tips…

    Do you know about sub-domain addresses? If you have the username sam@fastmail.fm, or even an alias myalias@fastmail.fm, then you can send email to:

    anything@sam.fastmail.fm

    or

    anything@myalias.fastmail.fm

    And it will go to your account. Whenever I have a webform to fill in, I use an address of the form:

    companyname@robm.fastmail.fm

    Over time, I can see which companies have been selling my email addresses, and if needed, block them via a rule. Unfortunately it’s usually not an issue, the spam filter gets it all anyway.

    Additionally, if you send to:

    xyz@sam.fastmail.fm

    And if you have a folder named “xyz” (or “XYZ” or “xYz”, eg capitalisation not important), then email will go straight to that folder. Useful for mailing lists.

    There are hundreds of other little tricks like that in FastMail, it’s just hard to document + find them all sometimes! 🙂

    Thanks, Rob. Not only are these tips extremely useful it also shows how great FastMail’s customer service is. I don’t think I’ve ever heard from anybody at Gmail.

  • FastMail FTW

    For the past week or so I’ve been comparing other free services to Gmail and extolling Gmail’s virtues. However to be honest with you I actually stopped using Gmail for the most part after I wrote the first post. I didn’t mislead you dear reader because I did not switch to a free e-mail service. I just went back to a service I had been using since 2002, FastMail. I like FastMail so much I actually pay to use it.

    The reason I love FastMail so much is it’s old school e-mail. No Ajax to bring things to a grinding halt. Most importantly when I delete my e-mails from FastMail I know they’re deleted, unlike Gmail. I’m usually not one of those privacy zealots but I find it a little creepy that even if you delete your emails from Gmail they’re still not ‘deleted’. And personally I never cared for the conversation mode of Gmail. The fact that you could not turn it off was, well, a turn off.

    FastMail doesn’t have unlimited aliasing but has enough for my needs.

    Fastmail also does one thing that Gmail doesn’t. Multiple signatures for different aliases.

    It also has a plethora of available skins including my favorite Infinite Blackness.

    The main reason I stopped using FastMail to begin with is because I couldn’t be notified of my FastMail from the iGoogle start page. Now there’s widget for iGoogle that checks your POP mail so now I can.

    It was fun Gmail, then you got too slow.