Not that it matters, GMail has slowly become worse and worse, so I'll gladly settle for pine or mutt these days (or Thunderbird as a start). Google Calendar will likely be the only application I will miss.[1]
But Google is slowly giving me more and more reason to jump ship.
[1] Application I will miss that Google has not already killed (or is going to).
When it comes to services like email, the quality of the user interface is really secondary. The primary concern is the ability to trust that I will remain accessible through the identifier (email address) that I've spread around to many people and places over the years.
Given Google's service shutdowns, dropped support for protocols, and the horror stories of seemingly accidental account closures with no recourse, I simply cannot trust Google with something as critical as my email.
Register your own domain and sign up for the free version of google apps. I have a gmail inbox for jamie@scattered-thoughts.net but if I need to change services I just move the MX record and upload my backups elsewhere.
You can, however, get a similar effect by forwarding all your mail to your Gmail account and configuring it to send mail as your domain email address (including using your SMTP server if necessary).
fastmail.fm has made me extremely happy as a mail replacement, though I've been using icloud for calendar, so I can't speak to their replacement for that.
The only downside to the fastmail mail is you need ~200 spams learned before the bayseian filter kicks in, so the first two days were a bit "noisy" for me. After that, though, it reduced the ~10 spams per day that would make it through gmail down to 1 every other day.
I've a free account - so I open it once in a while. Had enquired some time ago and figured you guys don't host email, rather forward or sth[1]. Still that's the case?
I have also read somewhere that you provide XMPP (or not?) but there's nothing like chat history[2]. Status - etc? I'm not very much familar with XMPP as in what it supports and what not.
Why does it want to me to have a FastMail email address where as all I am going to have is a user-name@my-domain.com. That's an extra Email ID to take care of or it's useless anyway if I'm not supposed to use it other than logging in, or is it[1]^.
Looks like this is available in Family and Business account. That's odd. What's the point? Can you please provide a full side by comparison of Family - Biz - Enhanced - Premier?
Maximum attachment size is sth that ought to be at least 100MB (or 200MB in today's Internet) but that can be tolerated with Dropbox, CloudApp and all around.
One good thing is, I can use many domains in same account for just one price, this very attractive if I've read it right and seems you are a webhost too. Well, too many things.
I'm tempted but it doesn't seem to be a replacement for my mail-task-calendar-IM workflow which is very integrated and crucial.
Any words on that? And also, regarding [1]^, so you guys are nor email hosts as in email hosts now - just to confirm?
Glad to talk to someone directly at FM and not inside a support ticket.
We have always hosted email (to use your own domain you will need an Enhanced or Premier personal account, or any of the Family/Business accounts). We support XMPP fairly completely I believe; you can certainly set a status! Chat history is saved by default and delivered as emails to a Chats folder in your account (so nicely searchable by our swish new email search infrastructure).
You need to pick a FastMail username to use to log in, even if you want to host your own domain. You never have to use this email address if you don't want to.
Family and business accounts are designed for hosting multiple separate accounts (with full separate logins) under the same (normally custom) domain, all on a single bill. There are features for administrating the different accounts and a shared address book. A personal (e.g. Enhanced) account is a single set of mailboxes/login, however can be used with multiple email addresses/domains.