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jhollington · 31 Jul 2015, 01:33 AM

So to bring the thread back onto topic....

I've been on and off with FastMail for about nine years, alternating between Gmail and my own mail server, but I think I'm pretty much back for good at this point. When I signed up back in 2006, I remember telling many of my techie friends and colleagues that FastMail pretty much offers everything you would ever likely need to do with your own mail server without the aggravation of running one yourself

Mind you, one thing I discovered as I moved into the iOS world that FastMail couldn't do for me was push e-mail. While I wasn't about to move over to MobileMe (later iCloud) just to get their broken implementation of it, as Exchange ActiveSync solutions through Google Apps and other third-party apps came into vogue, I started experimenting with those. In the end, however, I still preferred a native IMAP solution, and figured I could use OS X Server (which supports iCloud-style push) and hack together my own solution to get that working (which I did).

Of course, that still leaves the hassle of running my own mail server, which while fun also had the disadvantage that I could never quite reverse-engineer my push code to work much beyond OS X Lion, which meant I was also running an ancient version of Dovecot. Tried to update it a few times manually, but could never quite make it happen successfully. Also, probably at least partially due to the version of Dovecot in use, IMAP-based search was never particularly great or reliable -- something FastMail had figured out how to address two years ago.

I'd come back to FastMail a few times over the years, and in fact had always maintained a paid "Enhanced" account through it all, but I always missed the instantaneous push support that my own mail server gave me. However, that was really the only thing missing, so with the news a couple of weeks ago that Fastmail was bringing native push for iOS devices, and my discovery that they had done it properly, that became my last hurdle to overcome, and I've finally come full circle and back to what I consider to be the most flexible and open-standards-based mail service I've ever had the privilege of using.

31 Jul 2015, 01:33 AM	#364
jhollington Essential Contributor Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 371	So to bring the thread back onto topic.... I've been on and off with FastMail for about nine years, alternating between Gmail and my own mail server, but I think I'm pretty much back for good at this point. When I signed up back in 2006, I remember telling many of my techie friends and colleagues that FastMail pretty much offers everything you would ever likely need to do with your own mail server without the aggravation of running one yourself Mind you, one thing I discovered as I moved into the iOS world that FastMail couldn't do for me was push e-mail. While I wasn't about to move over to MobileMe (later iCloud) just to get their broken implementation of it, as Exchange ActiveSync solutions through Google Apps and other third-party apps came into vogue, I started experimenting with those. In the end, however, I still preferred a native IMAP solution, and figured I could use OS X Server (which supports iCloud-style push) and hack together my own solution to get that working (which I did). Of course, that still leaves the hassle of running my own mail server, which while fun also had the disadvantage that I could never quite reverse-engineer my push code to work much beyond OS X Lion, which meant I was also running an ancient version of Dovecot. Tried to update it a few times manually, but could never quite make it happen successfully. Also, probably at least partially due to the version of Dovecot in use, IMAP-based search was never particularly great or reliable -- something FastMail had figured out how to address two years ago. I'd come back to FastMail a few times over the years, and in fact had always maintained a paid "Enhanced" account through it all, but I always missed the instantaneous push support that my own mail server gave me. However, that was really the only thing missing, so with the news a couple of weeks ago that Fastmail was bringing native push for iOS devices, and my discovery that they had done it properly, that became my last hurdle to overcome, and I've finally come full circle and back to what I consider to be the most flexible and open-standards-based mail service I've ever had the privilege of using.