Why Fastmail#

Fastmail is an email provider that provides a good, no-nonsense email service. They are thoughtful about providing the best experience for their customers, and have been around for a while now. They are by no means perfect, but of the email providers out there, they are one of the better ones.

Rich set of features#

Fastmail has a large number of useful features that can make your email experience better. Here are a few ones that stand out:

They support multiple custom domains, so you are not locked into a single email vendor and can easily switch if you need to.
They have a masked email service, which protect you from spam and can be easily integrated with password managers like Bitwarden.
They have an easy unsubscribe feature.
If you accidentally delete emails, they can recover them for a week.
They have thoughtful and customizable spam filtering, so you can control how aggressive it is.

Privacy#

While not the most privacy-focused email provider, Fastmail is still better than the big tech companies. The saying goes, "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."¹ Fastmail provides the same, if not better, quality of service as big names, but at an affordable price. This means they are not incentivized to monetize your data.

Open Standards#

Fastmail pushes for open standards for email. They are a member of a few key organizations and help drive to make messaging more interoperable and innovative.²

Good Data Practices#

Fastmail wants to handle your data responsibly. They provide a lot of information on how they protect your data through security and reliability.³⁴

Concerns with Fastmail#

Union Busting Tactics#

Fastmail is based in Australia but has a presence in the US. At the end of 2023, a portion of the US-based employees unionized.⁵⁶ Six months later, Fastmail laid off 60% of the unionized employees, including the entire bargaining unit.⁷⁸ We should always be skeptical of companies that have "layoffs" after employees unionize. Fastmail has said that they struggled to collaborate with the US office due to time differences, which impacted execution.⁹ This is a valid concern, but the timing is still very suggestive of other motives.

Not Privacy-Focused#

Fastmail is not a privacy-focused email provider. They provide encryption in transit, but not on their servers. It is entirely possible for them to do so, but you will lose access to some features they provide like search and spam filtering.¹⁰ If you assume good faith, they want to provide a good product, and to do that, they need to make some trade-offs.

Eventually they may not need to make these trade-offs, and will be able to provide end-to-end encryption while still providing the features they do now. This is a ways off though. Apple, one of the most advanced tech companies, is only now figuring out how to provide end-to-end encryption while processing data on their servers.¹¹

Unfortunately, when they do figure out end-to-end encryption, they are still based in Australia, which has some aggressive anti-encryption laws.¹²¹³ These have already been abused to target journalists.¹⁴

If you do want a more-privacy focused provider, I would look into ProtonMail. Their pursuit of privacy is unmatched, but the user experience is not as good as Fastmail.