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Old 7 Oct 2021, 10:46 PM   #1
evfrson
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Another poor FastMail review

Another not so good FastMail review:

https://cybernews.com/secure-email-p...stmail-review/
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 04:26 AM   #2
TenFour
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Well, I wouldn't put too much in a review that makes a major error in the second sentence saying that Gmail serves you ads--it does not, unless you use the Promotions and Social tabs. Turn those off in settings and you do not get ads served by Gmail. I find automatic categorization like that useless since it inevitably puts things in the wrong places every day, creating more work to check your emails.

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If you're tired of the email services like Gmail that serve you ads, you will find none of that here.
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 04:46 AM   #3
evfrson
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Agree. Most such reviews have glaring errors like that and just seem to be pushing the ProtonMail narrative, trying to convince people that ProtonMail is secure/private which it is of course isn't as they log ip addresses.
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 05:43 AM   #4
placebo
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Someone linked to this review a few months ago, I seem to recall. I didn't think it was a very good review as there were several times where the reviewer came across as misinformed or ignorant and therefore not someone whose assessment I should lend much credence to.
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 06:05 AM   #5
janusz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by placebo View Post
Someone linked to this review a few months ago, I seem to recall.
Wrong recollection....
The review is dated 27 September 2021.
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 06:08 AM   #6
placebo
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It may have been updated recently, but it’s been up for almost a year now at least. Note that the comments on the review go back months.

Here’s the original thread:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=78655
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 02:40 PM   #7
FredOnline
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That is somewhat misleading, it's showing the article date as 27 September 2021.

It's when you go down into the comments, you can see that the earliest comment was "11 months ago".
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Old 8 Oct 2021, 04:30 PM   #8
janusz
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Does the article contain any factual errors/inaccuracies concerning Fastmail?
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Old 9 Oct 2021, 06:29 AM   #9
earlybird
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Quote:
Originally Posted by janusz View Post
Does the article contain any factual errors/inaccuracies concerning Fastmail?
The only valid comparison there is against Zoho. Zoho have a decent product. For my taste though, they do too much.

Everything else is apples to oranges as Tutanota is a mini company with no enterprise track record and hosting plans that are made for the simplest personal use cases and not people like me/us. Tutanota doesn't even offer IMAP, POP, CalDAV, CardDAV. It's a crippled webmail as a service. ProtonMail is the same, breaking email protocols and forcing non-standard tools on you (ProtonMail Bridge, app, webapp, etc).

My take is: If you want encryption, you do it e2e and not on somebody else's server. After you got encryption covered using client-only S/MIME/PGP, everything else is a matter of service level. Email in transit can be sniffed from a process before it's encrypted using TLS and just after it is decrypted from TLS. Real security looks different.

If the authors of the original article are so privacy focussed, they should be running their own email server with encryption at rest anyway on hardware they can trust in a physically secure place.

Regarding the price: The standard fastmail plan is way cheaper than protonmail or tutanota. 30G mail, 600 aliases, 100 domains, for these resources those two make you pay outta your ***. For example, assuming I wanted to use Tutanota's cripple email without IMAP support, to get the same, I would be paying at least 458 USD per year, whereas FastMail is 50 USD (!!) for a single-user account.

Review by money pinchers hunting for the cheapest possible freemium product not caring about using real email protocols at all. They just want an app.
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Old 9 Oct 2021, 06:50 AM   #10
janusz
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Ok, so I take that the answer to my question is "no errors in the description of FM service". Comparison with Tunanota and/or Zoho may, or may not, be fair, but that's a different story.
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Old 9 Oct 2021, 08:35 AM   #11
placebo
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I would say there are a few minor errors, such as the suggestion that using an alias sends email to that address to a separate inbox and referring to Cyrus IMAP as Cytrus IMAP. There's nothing I'd say is a glaring error.

I think the review mischaracterizes Fastmail to set up a straw man to say Fastmail sucks and you should use ProtonMail instead. It conflates security with privacy, and the argument boils down to "Fastmail doesn't support end-to-end encryption; therefore, the company is not serious about your privacy." The reality is Fastmail's selling point regarding privacy is that its business is email, not using email as a loss leader to collect data on you to sell to others. It was never "we provide the most secure email in the universe!" Yet that's the implication in the review: "Fastmail is a security-focused email service provider."
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Old 9 Oct 2021, 01:44 PM   #12
Terry
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Using .....@ProtonMail.com would be very hard to give out in a phone call.

Using fastmail.com no one has ever asked me to repeat my email address.
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Old 9 Oct 2021, 06:33 PM   #13
Berenburger
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Quote:
Originally Posted by janusz View Post
Does the article contain any factual errors/inaccuracies concerning Fastmail?
There’s no datacenter in Amsterdam anymore (if I remember correctly).
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/a...ysicalsecurity
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