I’m considering moving the family email domain from a local small mom and pop provider up in the DC area to something more corporate as mom and pop are getting old and probably want to retire soon. The bigger impetus is that they recently switched from a Barracuda device to ProxMox for spam filtering and according to them with ProxMox only the mom and pop email addresses get filtered…our custom domain email (which feeds directly to the mom and pop email inboxes) completely bypasses the filter rather than the previous Barracuda which filtered everything.
We get a daily email from ProxMox (and got one from the Barracuda before) with quarantined email so that we could deliver/whitelist/blacklist/delete the quarantined messages.
We’ve already got Fastmail.com accounts but they don’t send out a daily quarantined email to users and they really want you to use their web page or custom app to read your email…neither of which we are interested in. We prefer to have all our email come in to Mail on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS and would like to continue to get a daily quarantined message listing.
Is anybody using a service that does this already and are they any good…I hate to reinvent the wheel if somebody else already knows the answer.
Not interested in gmail or any of the other ‘free’ services…because you become the product for those. We’re happy to pay for quality email service…and while we don’t have anything against Fastmail…their push to the app or web isn’t really the way we want to go.
Just to throw a thought into the mix, after years of relying on (and paying extra for) the third-party spam filtering service my hosting provider offered, it became unreliable. Following others’ suggestions on this forum, I stopped their spam service altogether, and installed SpamSieve locally. This has proven to be extremely reliable and easy to use.
That’s only true at the Basic account level. Higher account levels have full support for IMAP and SMTP, and there’s no funny stuff like with Gmail.
And the Basic account no longer exists, though people might be grandfathered in and not notice. Fastmail changed their pricing structure for the better earlier this year. There are now actually discounts for two users and a six-user family plan. The six user plan is only $11/month (annual basis). They auto-converted the two users on my regular account to the Dual plan, extending the renewal date which was a nice surprise when I went to renew. (I’d seen the notice, but it flitted out of memory.)
I use Tigertech.net. I’ve been very happy with the email hosting there. While they don’t send a quarantine email, I believe their spam filters are very effective. Their extensive online help pages are superbly written and go into a lot of detail on just about any topic you’d have (and they’re freely available without being a customer).
They have a lot of integrity and bend over backwards to give everyone a fair deal. No set up fees or lock-ins of any type. Their email-based tech support is top-notch and they gladly answered a bunch of my questions before I signed up.
$11.95/month (paid annually in advance, with full pro-rated money back refund if you’re unhappy) gets you 100 mailboxes with all the fixings, plus web hosting. They are also a fully accredited domain name registrar, so you can have them handle all your domain and DNS details as well.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the price I quoted also includes the domain name registration fees for each year, so you’re essentially getting a free .COM domain (or a few other TLDs like .NET) and they let you configure your WHOIS domain privacy at a very granular level (all at no cost).
Installed Fastmail app on iPhone again, for about 2 minutes. The main problem for me is it only uses the Fastmail contacts database. All my contacts are managed by macOS Contacts. I have no interest in changing that.
This has been a very helpful discussion because I’m looking for a new email server. It’s answered some of my questions, but I have some more.
I’m now using AppleMail to process a few accounts in my personal domain, three Google accounts, an iCloud and a few forwards. I have years of archives in “OnMyMac” on Apple Mail, so I want to keep all my accounts together. Everything is in IMAP. How does FastMail deal with secondary accounts on Gmail, iCloud in addition to those in my personal domain?
How much control does FastMail give you over spam filtering? I have been using SiteGround, but its spam filtering is erratic; lately it has been putting whitelisted mail in spam, and it’s handling of mail from mailing lists is inconsistent.
How hard is it to reach a human with problems? SiteGround starts with AI which rarely gives correct instructions and the last human I reached did solve the problem but said they normally didn’t cover Macs. (That’s not just SiteGround; I rarely get any useful information from AI “help”.)
How does FastMail deal with secondary accounts on Gmail, iCloud in addition to those in my personal domain?
To Mail.app or any other client, Fastmail is just another imap account. Your domain on fastmail uses aliases for the different usernames, e.g. user1@example.com, user2@example.com. You can have any number of aliases on your own domains. By default, all of your aliases go into your fastmail inbox (you can set filters to move them elsewhere). When Mail logs in to the fastmail account, they’ll all show up in your Fastmail inbox.
If you want the other accounts to be in fastmail, you can have fastmail fetch the mail from those accounts, and either mingle them all in the inbox, or set up separate folders for them. I used this for several years before moving my domains there.
How much control does FastMail give you over spam filtering?
Not enough, but no worse than any other service. You can whitelist by having a sender in your contacts, set the spam score that goes to the spam folder, and choose to handle backscatter differently. For spam-free nirvana on any system, you need SpamSieve. It’s worth it’s weight in gold, though I’m not yet caffeinated enough to calculate that…
I have the fastmail go to Spam filter set to 13, high enough to eliminate any false positives (so far), and the delete immediately set to 40. Spamsieve running on a mac doing server duties deals with the trickier calls, which go into a separate folder on the fastmail server. This way I pretty much only need to look through the marginal calls. Then I select all of that spam and let fastmail have it for training. One key to getting spamsieve to work really well is to train in on good mail as much as you do bad mail, which is something server side spam schemes don’t do; they only train ‘good’ if it’s already been marked ‘bad’.
That said, fastmail, just like every other server I’ve used, will lose some mail. Not all mailing list messages, including tidbits, make it through and I expect a few others don’t. Some mail will be delayed by ‘graylisting’ which makes a sending server try again later if it isn’t configured properly or shows other signs of spaminess. But fastmail does better than when I was doing minimal filtering on my own server, and my blood pressure is much happier.
How hard is it to reach a human with problems?
Easy. They have a support page for their ticketing system, and real humans doing the support. I haven’t needed it often, but a few months ago I had an answer that needed some log checking in about two hours, with a couple of faster back and forths for some clarification.
Fastmail has a 30 day free trial, no credit card needed, though with some limitations:
I started looking seriously into FastMail and came up against some things that seem unsuitable for my particular use case.
I was troubled by their attitude that “Most of the time, getting a message from someone you don’t know is just a mistake, or spam.” As a free-lance author and journalist, I want people I don’t know to contact me.
Their description of their email management made me wonder it my email archives are compatible with their system.
If I saw any way to contact a human on their web site, I might try to contact them and ask, but so far I have been unable to find one that doesn’t involve starting a trial. I don’t expect one size to fit all email needs, and it looks like FastMail doesn’t fit mine.
If you’re referring help article Getting emails from unknown senders, I read it as simply an explanation of why you might get an email from someone you don’t know. People who are less knowledgeable about how email works don’t know all this. They may assume that it is all spam, or worse, that spam is not spam because how else did they know your name?
I checked the Fastmail settings and do not see a setting for “blacklist all mail that isn’t from someone in my contacts list”. What it will do, however, is whitelist email from someone in your contact list, even if it would otherwise score above the threshold for spam. The spam thresholds are configurable.
You’re right that it looks like you need to have an account to create a support ticket. But I think anyone can send an inquiry to support@fastmail.com. In my experience, companies are happy to answer questions that may lead to a sale.
Thanks. That’s the help article I read, and I may have over-read it. It surprised me because I saw they were pitching business accounts who would be looking for new customers.
I am getting rather irritable with the mail situation at Siteground. Not only do I have to check the spam folder at least daily, but they don’t offer choices of what to do with each spam other than Delete or Move to InBox; Whitelisting requires going to another page. I have not found any way to adjust spam thresholds at Siteground.
When I find myself with some more time, I will see if I can get any reply from support@fastmail.com. I have large email archives, it’s not clear to me how they would work on Fastmail. But you’ve given me some hope.
I have a small Fastmail account, so I just keep my archives in macOS Mail.
FWIW, the spam capabilities with Fastmail are…
Move messages with a SpamAssassin score higher than [ x ] to Spam folder
Permanently delete messages with a SpamAssassin score higher than [y]
Mark spam as read (or not)
Specify hosts that forward email to Fastmail, used by SpamAssassin to find true source of message. (This doesn’t always work)
Handle backscatter by a) do nothing, b) move it somewhere, or c) discard. You can tell it which other SMTP servers you use besides Fastmail
You can create custom Sieve code to apply mail rules before the spam processing takes affect; normally it is Spam first, then rules
“Personal spam filter” (see below)
Personal Spam Filter just means training of the system to recognize spam vs. not-spam, based on message you have received. This influences SpamAssassin.
For example, it has learned from 6,160 Spam messages and 87,558 of my not-Spam messages.
You do this by telling it that certain folders contain spam or not-spam. For example, I have it set to learn the contents of the Spam folder as Spam, so that messages that macOS Mail moves there, or I move there manually, are considered Spam.
And since I’m very aggressive in removing Spam from my Inbox, I have it set to consider mail in that folder is Not-spam. Fastmail advises against this
What you can’t do is pick and choose which spam blocklists are consulted, or say that any messages from certain countries are spam (rather than just block the domain entirely).
I’m currently getting about 4 spams per day. Spamcop for the win!
This is very helpful and encouraging.
I keep my reasonably current Apple Mail files (usually the past year) in the InBox, then move them to ON MY MAC files, which sounds like what you’re doing. I normally trash unwanted mail (including legitimate stuff) immediately, but hold the trash for 30 days.
Are you using SpamAssassin in addition to FastMail’s filter? Do you think its necessary?
I am getting somwhere around 25 emails flagged as spam daily. Maybe 5 are really spammy, and 10 are ads from companies I have dealt with in the past. The remaining 10 are mainly press releases or false positives, some of which are obviously false (e.g. an MIT Technology Review renewal reminder) and a few of which have been Whitelisted at the email or domain level.
I’ll definitely check with FastMail once I have time to do the job properly. Thanks again.
You can set up custom expirations by folder, for example I have rules that move messages to an Ads folder, which then auto-delete after 60 days.
Reminds me of my stepfather, who was extremely aggressive about deleting mail from his Inbox. He didn’t understand that his iMac had huge amounts of disk space. So he’d print out the messages he wanted to keep, then delete them.
One day he called me and asked if it was possible to recover his airline tickets that he had deleted without printing first.
I stopped worrying about Inbox space after I got my first 30 MB hard drive for my MacPlus, but I do delete the useless part of my email. What I worry about is not disk space, but being unable to find anything in my email files.