In an age where big tech companies dominate our digital life, it’s more important than ever to take back control. In this series of posts, I will describe several essential services to which I migrated after years of enjoying “free” sweet convenience, opting for more user-centric paid solutions. Because as we all know, if something is free, it usually means that we are not using a product but we are the product.
First service I replaced in this journey of mine was my email provider. As you probably can guess, I said goodbye to one of the well-known email giants—Gmail, owned by Google.
But why?
Gmail was always a reliable service for me, and I never had an issue with it. However, what started to worry me was privacy. Yeah, I know, I can already hear it: “You’re just Mr. Nobody, who cares about your email?” or “If you are not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t worry when someone is going through your emails”.
But still, why should I let the biggest online ad company in the world go through my emails and serve me ads all over the internet based on their findings? Because yes, Google was doing exactly that.
And this prompted me to switch my email provider from Google’s Gmail to Fastmail exactly 11 years and 6 months ago, on July 22, 2013 ( Even I was surprised at how long ago it was as I searched for my “welcome” message from Fastmail 😅). Google’s Gmail let go of such practices several years after but I never looked back.
Focus on email, no other BS
Many people during the “Gmail exodus” decided for Protonmail, which offers end-to-end encryption. However, this didn’t make sense for me, as my emails would be sent 99.9% of the time to somebody without Protonmail, and thus encryption would be compromised on their end anyway.
After a lot of research, I settled on Fastmail, which was offering the privacy I was striving for. It is backed by a trustworthy Australian company focusing on email services and no other funny stuff for 25 years.
Fastmail provides me with a lightweight and incredibly fast web interface, complete with all the bells and whistles you can expect from advanced email provider. The level of customization and organization is huge. With features like labels, snooze, memos, scheduled send, and undo send, I think they will please everyone.
The lack of any current AI craze inside my email inbox is a blessing from my point of view. I don’t want to have any summarization or reorganization done by who knows what algorithms. I prefer to read my emails and organize them by myself.
On my iPhone and iPad, I am using dedicated Fastmail apps, which have their pros and cons. One of the biggest cons is the missing offline mode, but I read that it is coming soon, fingers crossed.
As I didn’t want to be locked into another email provider, I decided to use my personal custom domain as a backup plan in case something goes wrong with Fastmail in the future. A big plus of using a custom domain is the ability to use up to 600 email aliases, which is great for organization and spam control. Fastmail also provides automated generation of masked emails, and similar functionality is available as an integration with the popular password manager 1Password.
So how much?
Fastmail, which includes email, contacts, calendar (dedicated 50GB storage), and small file storage (an additional 10GB), costs me 60€/year. It is possible to lower the price with a 2-year or 3-year advanced payment plan. I have been a Fastmail user for over 11 years and I am not throwing any referral links at you, so this can only mean one thing… I am a satisfied customer </insert happy Pikachu.gif>.