Fastmail Reviews

Fastmail comes with thorough email features that let you do everything you need, while still offering a user-friendly and straightforward interface.

When it comes to the interface, you can define the layout through the five themes available as well as hide the reading panel. Depending on your taste, you can choose between group messages or have each email displayed separately. You can also pin emails to have the most important message at the top of the inbox, create different folders, email rules, and attach emails. Speaking of attachments, Fastmail has a built-in storage space where you can upload any document from your computer to use it as an attachment later. Besides that, it’s also possible to attach files from Dropbox too.

Fastmail has a snooze option that can be enabled when you need to focus on the task at hand or you have the option to schedule it ahead of time. Though, if you are going to be away from email for a longer period, you can always leave an out-of-office message. On top of that, if you ever send an email by accident you’re given 15 seconds to press the undo-send button, and it’s like it never happened.

Thorough built-in calendar

The built-in calendar is a solid feature. The interface is clean and easy to use, and it’s possible to add calendar subscriptions such as the ones that will automatically insert all holidays for the entire year. On top of that, it’s possible to create multiple calendars that can be seen as a group or separately and enable multiple time zone support.

Fastmail states that its users’ data is always private, which seems to be a little bit of a stretch in our opinion. Though we believe Fastmail won’t sell the users’ data to advertisers, it does not provide end-to-end encryption.

Although an Australian company, Fastmail has its servers located in the U.S., which is far from perfect for ultimate privacy advocates. Yes, the email provider indeed specifies in its privacy policy that it will only answer to Australian court orders. However, since Australia is part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and therefore will help the U.S. if needed, there is no 100% certainty that if the American government wants to have access to emails from Fastmail, it won’t be able to.

As a GDPR compliant company, Fastmail has a vast and thorough privacy policy, explaining how every piece of your personal data is used and processed. On the one hand, it’s great to see such transparency but on the other hand, the privacy policy may end up being too long to understand it fully. Briefly, Fastmail logs some information about you depending on how you are using the product. Some examples of data collected are IP addresses, address book, calendar, uploaded files, content created and received, among others.

This information can also be shared with third-party companies that help Fastmail to manage its business. Though it needs your consent to do so, and the email provider works hard to keep your information away from unauthorized access and destroys the data when it’s no longer needed.

Fastmail is available for desktop through its browser version and has apps for both Android and iOS. Unfortunately, there is no software available for desktop. However, it’s possible to integrate your Fastmail email with other email applications such as Outlook.

The mobile version of Fastmail comes with the full pack of features that you get on desktop. You will be able to do everything on your mobile phone, from sending emails to setting up your out-of-office alert. More impressive than that is the way Fastmail can maintain the clean design and user-friendliness with the mobile app, even when offering so many features. Nevertheless, although we do understand that the mobile app doesn’t have the option to change the layout, it would be nice to have the options to change the theme – we’d especially like to see a dark mode in the future.

Fastmail comes with three different plans that you can choose from – Basic, Standard, and Professional. With Basic, you already get the ad-free email usage, calendar, contact list, mail import, and expert support. However, to get the most out of Fastmail, you will have to upgrade to the higher tiers.

One big difference is the amount of storage you get. While on Basic you only get 2GB, with Standard the amount grows to 25GB, and Professional to 125GB. Other differences between Basic and Standard are the possibility of using the snooze option, group calendars, and getting your own personal domain. Finally, Professional brings some administrative features since it’s targeted for teams of five or more.

If you decide to go for an annual subscription Basic will cost $2.5 per month and the Standard version $4.17, saving you around 17% every single month. Better yet, Fastmail offers a 30-day free trial so users can try the product before committing to a purchase.

Although Fastmail runs on a customer-centric strategy, for a paid service, the customer service is not excellent. It does not offer 24/7 support or live chat. Moreover, though present on Facebook, there is no way of contacting through Messenger. However, the company is active on Twitter and addresses users’ issues there.

Besides Twitter, the only way to get help is through the FAQ page or by submitting a ticket. We do have to say that the FAQ page is meticulous, and you will find most of your questions answered there. From common issues to security, Fastmail tries to answer all users’ needs with a quick search without the need to even send an email.