Looking carefully through the FastMail site, I’m wondering about tradeoffs. Like Neil Laubenthal I would prefer having Apple Mail running my email on my Mac over a web app. However, Fastmail claims to have a very powerful search which I find very attractive because I am not happy with Apple search on Sonoma (and have no plans to upgrade in the near future). Has anyone compared Fastmail search with Apple Mail search?
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Fastmail works fine with Apple Mail on both iOS and MacOS - that’s how I use it.
That said, like Gmail search, Fastmail search is a lot faster than on Mail.app, but honestly search on Mail.app is good enough for me. If it doesn’t find what I am looking for I always know that I can go to the web site.
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Fastmail web search is pretty quick…but since iOS and iPadOS don’t keep the whole Mail account local search on those has always been slow and terrible. Even waiting while it reaches out to the IMaP server it usually fails. I wish you could specify folders or the entire Mail account contents to be stored locally on iWhatever devices instead of only on macOS.
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I would prefer having Apple Mail running my email on my Mac over a web app. However, Fastmail claims to have a very powerful search
What you use to read or search mail isn’t either/or. You can connect any number of imap clients such as Mail.app on any number of different devices, and still use the web interface at the same time. I mostly read mail on the web interface because they have a plaintext option which Apple abandoned years ago. But I also have Mail.app running on an el capitan mini server as a backup, thunderbird on my main sierra mac (redundancy in all things practical), and have fastmail set up on all of the iThings.
I prefer the search in Mail at least for old versions of Mail (haven’t used it past mojave). The web search is fine for most things, but lacks some of the more advanced Mali search functions. So I search using whichever client is most convenient at the time.
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I have been a FastMail customer for many years, and I virtually always access my email via Apple Mail/ iOS Mail/ iPadOS Mail when I’m on my Apple devices. I do sometimes use the FastMail app on my phone – I believe it’s just a wrapper around the web app interface – when I need to do a particular search or find a mail folder somewhere in the depths of the hierarchy and iOS Mail just can’t quite handle it. I also use the website from my work Windows VM and from my Mac when I need to do admin stuff (editing mail rules, managing other users on my domain, and so on.)
That’s part of the beauty of IMAP – it’s client-agnostic, so you aren’t tied to one vendor’s specific web app.
Dave
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This post is off-topic.
Yes! And iCloud content in Folders, too. I have over 220 GB free on my iPad, and it helpfully offers to “Offload Unused Apps” so I could save 5 GB. What I really want is to use some of those 220 GB to store what I consider to be important information (Files, Mail) so I have it when I don’t have an internet connection. Not everyone has the always-on, high-speed connection that Apple assumes.
Thanks for letting me rant.
iMazing might allow you to drill down into your iPad files and folders and manipulate them… just a thought. Patrick
I just looked at PO Box and it is now part of FastMail. Pobox is now part of Fastmail | Fastmail
My effort to move my email to FastMail was foiled – at least for the time being – by an unfriendly interface at Network Solutions, which holds the name for my personal domain. I was trying to move the Email server from Siteground but leave my web site there. After about three hours of futzing around and other work to so, I gave up.
I take it you mean that you couldn’t figure out how to update the DNS records for your domain. I find it easiest to use Fastmail’s DNS servers. It’ll have the email hosting set up, and you can then point the A and possibly AAAA records for your website to Siteground. The only thing you’d need to do with Network Solutions is tell them which DNS servers are responsible for your domain.
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If the mail server is moving but the web site isn’t then, you probably want to change the MX record and leave the A records alone.
Sure, if you want to continue using the current DNS servers. You’ll also need to update SPF, etc. But if you change to Fastmail’s DNS servers as I was suggesting, the basic mail configuration will already be set up for your domain, and you just need to add the A record to point to your website.
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And get a better registrar! If you’ve got control over your domain, move to a registrar who won’t treat you so terribly. I use Joker for registration (that was the registrar my former webhost chose, and I never changed, even though their prices are less competitive than they once were), but lots of people have fabulous things to say about Hover. And I’m considering moving to Cloudflare for domains myself (I already use them for DNS) when my expiration dates come closer. There’s no need to put up with Network Solutions. Really!
Thanks for the suggestions. Network Solutions will not allow me to move my Email, and says that will have to be done by Siteground. FastMail says that won’t work, although I’m not sure why. I agree the simplest thing probably might be to transfer the registration, but I wonder if splitting email from web hosting might cause other problems. In any case, that will have to wait; I have wasted enough time on this project already and need to get other work done.
After all my problems, I would recommend avoiding Network Solutions. I also recommend avoiding SiteGround for email; their spam filtering is awful, whitelisting does not work reliably, and about half of my spam is false positives.
There’s some kind of misunderstanding here, but I’m not sure where.
If you (or Network Solutions) thinks “moving your mail” means migrating the contents of your mailbox to a new server run by another company, then I’m not surprised they won’t do it.
But there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to simply change your DNS MX records (and any other security records needed for that to work) so a new server (run by FastMail) is now the one that should receive your domain’s mail. That’s a trivial thing for any DNS provider to do and Network Solutions, as one of the oldest companies in the business, definitely knows how.
If they say they can’t do that, then either they don’t understand what you’re asking or you’re talking to a hosting salescritter when you need to be talking to a DNS support engineer.
(Once the new mail server is running, you should be able to configure a mail app with each servers’ IMAP interfaces and then drag/drop the mail to copy/move it on your own.)
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I just heard from FastMail saying they had initially misunderstood the situation and that because my name records at Network Solutions point to Siteground, the DNS records have to be updated at SiteGround before the mail can be transferred to Fast Mail. It was FastMail’s mistake and they apologized and offered to help me fix it.
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Thanks for the update. I didn’t realize that NetSol doesn’t do their own DNS hosting. I assumed that, as one of the oldest domain registrars, that they provided their own DNS as well. I clearly assumed wrong.
But if DNS is third-party and not provided by NetSol, now it all makes sense.
The Network Solutions tech I talked with said that all they do is domain name registration; everything else is outside. I was also surprised; I thought their “default” was something in nouse.
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Just to be clear about this, Network Solutions absolutely delivers the whole enchilada. In fact they are renowned for upselling you aggressively on all the stuff you don’t want from a registrar—web hosting, email hosting, DNS hosting … As the grandaddy, they’ve got a complex about being the one-stop shop. Here’s a page on their DNS hosting:
https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/dns.jsp
Registrar services, DNS hosting, web hosting, and email hosting are all separate functions and can be served by different entities. They are often not, but that’s a convenience. In particular, it is common for a registrar to offer a DNS host. And that DNS host can often be configured to automatically route your mail to some forwarding service operated by the registrar, so you can get your domain’s email elsewhere, at some other account. Likewise, a web host will often ask you to change your DNS delegation to them (it’s often called “nameserver” or “third-party DNS”), since it makes setting up services easier, but nothing about the way they operate requires you to do this if you are willing to manually configure them by entering records into your existing DNS host.
FastMail will host your DNS for you if you want, as well as your email. Just tell Network Solutions (and again, I highly recommend getting out of that prison someday) to delegate your domain’s DNS to FastMail’s DNS servers. Then tell FastMail’s DNS servers where your web host is, by adding the address records for your web host.
Or you could take the slightly harder (but also probably more comfortable) route, of telling your web host, who is currently hosting your DNS (not the default for Network Solutions—this is something you or they set up) about FastMail’s mail servers.
You should choose who will host each function based on your level of comfort and/or the features and costs they offer.
CloudFlare currently hosts my DNS; they insist that they will not serve you if you don’t delegate your DNS to them, but that’s OK, because I like CloudFlare’s services and using them is completely optional once you have DNS delegated to them. Joker (my current registrar) offers DNS, but I don’t find it nearly as functional. Both Joker and CloudFlare let me set up email forwarding, but I’m not using that because I’m either self-hosting email or using iCloud (and when I did use those forwarding services, I found CloudFlare’s to be superior). I no longer have a web host, but the IP address of my home Internet connection is dynamically registered with CloudFlare so I can find it, even when it changes, and so secure connections work without errors.
You’ll figure it all out …
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As far as I can tell, the default hosting services offered by Network Solution were from a third party, or perhaps a subsidiary. And after this fiasco, there’s no way I would have Network Solutions handle hosting. I will deal with moving my domain registration later.
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