A couple months ago, I ditched GMail for Fastmail, paying for an account and linking my domain name.

Overall, Fastmail is an acceptable experience, and works well to replace GMail itself. Where it still falls a bit short is in some of the other things linked to GMail.

Pros:

  • Very snappy web interface—as fast as GMail’s basic HTML interface without sacrificing functionality.
  • GMail import/integration makes it easy to switch. In particular, I can continue to send/receive emails from GMail seamlessly to keep old accounts & contacts where I can’t change the email.
  • Custom domains are super flexible, including allowing wildcard addresses (so I can use any address I want on my custom domain with only a bit of setup).
    • I can use catchalls like “spam” or “subscriber+foo” as throwaways or to set up per-service emails.

Cons:

  • Calendar is functional, but not as convenient; in particular, there’s no support for reminders.
  • The app could use a little more polish.
    • No offline support at all—if you don’t have Internet, you can’t look at anything, including cached emails.
    • The direction of swipe-to-delete/swipe-to-archive is reversed from GMail.
    • Little platform touches like a long-press menu are missing.

Overall, however, Fastmail does what I expected it to do, and it was a painless way to slighly de-Googlify my life.