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October 15, 2008I have used almost every big pay email provider on the planet and although have only recently become a Fastmail user, have fallen in love with it. Fastmail is frickin’ fast and it’s loaded (LOADED) with features that could have only come from actual hardcore email users rather than the marketing team. I could go on for pages about the things I like about Fastmail, but I’ve decided to pare the list down to the top three things I like about it:
Personalities
Most mail providers and email client have some form of Fastmail’s ‘personalities’. A personality is an identity where you can set your return email address, your name, your organization and such. When sending or replying to an email, you can choose a personality to send from which basically boils down to being able to maintain multiple email addresses from one email client. Handy, but not revolutionary. Fastmail’s personalities have an extra feature in the personalities function which kicks butt. I can specify a folder in which to save emails sent from this personality rather than saving it all in the big old Sent bucket.
What’s cool about this is that I have some clients who have issued me an email address from their domain so that in the rare situation where I have to communicate with their clients directly, I seem to be part of their organization instead of some schmoe contractor. With Fastmail’s personalities, I can store all the emails I send in that client’s email folder. This puts all my incoming and outgoing correspondence with these clients in the same folder which makes searching and grouping things very easy.
Auto-purge folders
I manage a bunch of servers and a handful of remote backup systems. Due to that, I receive 50 or so emails each day which are just routine reports or monitoring alerts. These emails have value for 48 hours or so, but then they’re just so much garbage hanging out in my folders. Fastmail folders have a variety of configurable attributes and one of those attributes is auto-purge. I filter my alerts and reports into a folder that is auto-purged every 14 days. That cuts down on the size of my mail folders exponentially and keeps things moving quickly.
‘Ham’ folder
Another attribute that can be set in the Fastmail folders it a ‘learn as ham’ attribute. Ham, for the unititiated, is the opposite of Spam. Ham is good email that you want to keep and in order to properly train a bayesian spam filter, there has to be a mechanism to tell it when it has made a mistake and misclassified a good email as spam. With Fastmail, this is as simple as creating a folder and setting the ‘learn as ham’ attribute. When the Fastmail spam filter misclassifies something, simply drag it from the spam folder into the ham folder and Fastmail will learn from that mistake. When I was using Rubox not only was there no way to retrain the spam filter, there was also no way to mark email as spam from my email client. I had to actually log into the web interface to do that. Yech!
There are a ton of other features that I like about Fastmail such as the IMAP merge which easily brings your IMAP email from your previous provider over to Fastmail painlessly and the new web interface (try http://www.fastmail.fm/newweb), but these are the top three that I am really enjoying right now.
Alex King has a longer (albeit older) list of Fastmail features.
Fastmail has a 2 week money back guarantee so if you’re in the market for new, fast, and groovy email provider, check them out by clicking here (my affililate link).
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Fastmail is great! I just do not trust Gmail, plus I don’t like ads.