I try and only download email 4 times a day, when I’ve made time to properly address them. I found that to be an upgrade of the experience!
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There is simply nothing like hearing your phone go “Bing!” even before the order confirmation page for your purchase/subscription/download has been loaded. Nothing. :)
And, if you have security code autofill enabled, iOS uses the newly-pushed email immediately; just as with a text message, the code appears immediately to be inserted into the field, without your having to launch the Mail app in order to fetch it.
It’s 2025; push email should just be available, instead of being gatekept by the big players. We have the standards; only various silly games and doctrines prevent it from becoming the reality. But, I suspect that’s a rant for another day.
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I guess “bing” comes at the cost of being tied to the big players. You could perhaps check your mail manually and then play yourself a “bing” on a minature glockenspiel to get that dopamine effect, haptically and aurally.
Joking aside, I found it hard to break the notifications dependency, but it helps loosen the ties to the “big players”, as you call them.
I am a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned Apple Mail. Is it any good? Is the spam filtering reasonable?
Personally I still use gmail, because they were early supporters of server-side spam filtering. But I see that FastMail and Apple Mail both claim to have that (and I imagine it’s now pretty common), so maybe it’s time to try a service that does IMAP properly (unlike gmail).
I’ve been pretty happy with Apple Mail and MsgFiler - for several years - including the changes MsgFiler had to make to get back to having a very complimentary app.
David
Do you mean iCloud hosting? “Mail” is the name of Apple’s email app, which downloads from any host you specify, but it’s not a host.
Sure, as a Fastmail user for many years I can answer many of your questions.
Oh. You want business email. That’s an important distinction. I can’t help you.
TedC here on usefulness of recommendations.
The truly useful info is observations from first-hand experience. Price, features, etc is easy enough to find quickly. The truly valuable recommendations include qualitative stuff like relative promptness and helpfulness of the support and overall attitude.
I use Fastmail both as my main email address (with an @fastmail.com address) plus for an old domain that I rarely use, but for which I still want to get email that comes in.
I’d say my first-hand experience of Fastmail’s support is that I haven’t really had to use it. I had one question about the cost for adding the domain account (which I knew was included in my yearly subscription) which was asked in an online web form and answered by a human a few hours later.
But it’s been rock-solid for me.
The question was about the number of users which are included. Just one (so I get the Fastmail address plus one user in the domain account), but that was fine: I just have rules that put different users in different folders for the domain.
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Does Fastmail require the use of their Contacts (as opposed to linking to MacOS/iCloud contacts)? If so, is there any way to keep the two in sync?
Since when does any e-mail provider require the use of any particular contacts service?
Maybe if you use a web-mail interface (e.g. the Google Mail web site only uses Google Contacts), but if you use a mail app (on your phone or computer), it will use whatever contacts you configure it to use, without regard to who is running the SMTP server you use for sending your mail.
My iPhone is configured for both iCloud and Google contacts. When i send mail via Apple’s Mail app, it resolves contacts from both servers.
@Shamino I wasn’t clear. The way I read the Fastmail site is that you have to import your contacts into their environment. They describe how to do that with vCard or .csv files. I see nothing that suggests integration with MacOS.
On the other hand, their setup page says “For the best experience with Fastmail, we recommend using our web interface or the official Fastmail mobile app.” But the downloads page offers a MacOS app. (It’s only version 1.0.1, so maybe they are just taking their time keeping their web site up to date.)
To answer your question, when I first looked at the Edison Mail MacOS client some years ago, it only supported loading contacts directly into their app/environment. I wrote them at the time and they said integration with MacOS was coming, and I believe they have done so. I have not used their app.
- If using Fastmail webmail, it only uses its own contacts
- If using the Fastmail iOS or (new!) desktop app, the last time I checked the answer was it only used its own contacts
- If using any other client (as @Shamino said), no
I’ve been a Fastmail subscriber for many years, but don’t use their native clients. I use Apple’s Mail app on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, with iCloud synched contacts. It works fine.
Note that you can sync Fastmail clients to a Mac by adding the Fastmail contacts CardDAV account.
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