fastmail v google mail

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I’ve been using FastMail for the last few years to look after my personal email.  I have several domains where I receive email and they all go to one fastmail account.  It’s always had everything I need, with a nice snappy web interface and IMAP access which I can use to collect mail on my iPhone.

Recently however, I’ve become more and more invested in Google, using Google Calendar and Google Contacts to keep track of my diary and maintain my address book.  This works great for me, as I can synchronise these things with my iPhone via push notification (meaning that if I update a contact on my phone the changes are synced to the Google “cloud”), and if I really want, to my desktop PC, albeit in a rather non-elegant way.

For example, these things recently meant that when I had to recently reset my iPhone (due to some problems I was having at the time which turned out to be hardware and didn’t actually need a reset), to get my calendar, contacts and emails all working on the phone again all I had to do was configure the accounts on the phone and magic, contacts and calendar items appear and mail starts being delivered again.  No backup/restore nonsense.

I’m searching for an “all under one roof” solution I suppose.  My buddy Chris used to use FastMail (that’s how come I do now, he recommended it) but now uses Google Apps, and is a real Google convert (he even has the crappy G1 Google phone, the fool).

The key features I suppose I need are mail, contacts, and calendar.  Mail and contacts I really want in one place because when I write a mail, I want to be able to select the contacts from within the app I’m working from.  What brought this home to me as being inconvenient recently was when I sent out an invite for a party.  Because my contacts are in Google, I selected them in my Google Mail account and copied/pasted them into FastMail so I could send the mail.  That is ever so slightly madness – I just shouldn’t have to do that.

So, mail.  FastMail does a great job with its IMAP implementation and the web interface is pretty neat.  Because it’s IMAP it lives with folders, whereas Google uses labels – I’m coming around to the idea of labels, it seems to make sense.  Also, if search works properly, I shouldn’t really need to worry about “filing” emails.  I think Google has search fairly well covered.

FastMail has a neat feature which I like, and to be honest, if Google had this I might not even be considering which way to go.  I get spam.  Everybody gets spam.  To help me track where my spam is generated from (so I can call the company up and call them names, ultimately to no end of course), I assign a unique email address to every company I deal with.  E.g. – all my WordPress mail goes to wordpress@mydomain.com, my Amazon emails all go to amazon@mydomain.com.  This works really well, as now when I get any junk mail I look to which address it’s been sent, and then I can decide how trustworthy a company is based on that and therefore whether I’m likely to deal with them again in the future.  If I need to deal with that company, I’ll email from that same address so as not to confuse matters.  This is the deal breaker – Google doesn’t let me do that – easily.

In Google Mail you can sort of do this, but you have to define the email address first (no need in FastMail) and then prove that you own it via a verification process involving them sending an email to that address, and you confirming via a link.  Why, Google, do I need to prove to you that I own amazon@mydomain.com when we went through a verification process for mydomain.com when I signed up for Google Apps, proving I own the whole damn domain?

Email filtering, either via filing into folders or applying labels is pretty much tit for tat.  Both do it, so this is not a problem in either system.

Contacts then.  FastMail sucks at contacts.  It uses, as most email implementations seem to, a proprietary contacts system that you can’t sync with anything, easily export to/import from anywhere.  This is annoying, and email providers the world over take note – you really suck at this.  Why can’t we all use some joined up working to allow us to easily sync contacts (and calendars) across all platforms without me doing anything smart.  Don’t Make Me Think.

Google, also sucks at contacts (you didn’t see that coming did you?).  It is totally lacking in detail.  I need more fields Google.  Where they win though, is that you can at least sync with your iPhone (or Android phone, if you must).

Calendars, well FastMail doesn’t do calendaring so this is another Google win.

Oh yeah, I should mention that FastMail costs me money, and Google Apps is free.  This doesn’t bother me so much, as it’s not expensive, but it is a consideration.

Reading this back, I’m leaning towards Google, if it wasn’t just for that darn outgoing “from” address thing.  What I’ve also just noticed to my annoyance is that it I export my contacts from my Google Mail account and try to import them into my Google Apps account, the pictures are lost.  This is stupid Google, fix it – it’s from Google to Google dammit!

Ideally someone at Google will read this, think “oh, how could we have been so stupid, this Tom chap is so correct” fix things, make me president of Google and we’ll all live happily ever after.  You never know.  Ok, you do.

  • http://chrisroos.co.uk Chris Roos

    The G1 is awesome. Fact.

    Anyway, what other fields do you need in the contacts that Google doesn’t provide? I just had another look at google contacts (you can access a standalone version of the contacts using http://www.google.com/contacts/a/) and you can add custom fields which should be all you need, no?

    You might already know this but Google Mail supports IMAP too.

    Ciao.

  • http://channeltom.com tom

    Your link to the contacts bit doesn’t work, I think you needed to add the domain on the end.

    Looking at adding a new contact just now, it would appear as though most of the things which I thought were missing are actually now there – birthdays, URLs, IM etc. I’ve also just noticed that you can dynamically resize the input boxes, which is amazing. The only thing I might complain about now is the fact that the address fields are not specific enough, meaning that synchronisation with another device or service which will likely have fields like Town, County etc is unlikely to be seamless.

    I knew Google Mail supported IMAP, I’ve used it that way before (not sure if that’s how the iPhone does its magic either).

    Also, the G1 is rubbish. Fact. Fact.

  • http://chrisroos.co.uk Chris Roos

    Hmm, is there an option to notify people when a post gets other comments? I just had to come back here to see whether you’d replied.

    I didn’t notice at the time but wordpress handily stripped the domain part of the url I posted, because I used the left/right ‘arrows’ (< and >). I think you also need to enable that in google apps admin dashboard thing (in case you hadn’t already).

  • http://channeltom.com tom

    I don’t think you can change the URL for Contacts yet as it is in beta.

    Just took a look and I don’t think I can enable anything to email you when replies are made to your comments – that does rather suck. ANyone who knows different let me know!

  • David

    Hey there Tom,

    just read your review about FM. I’m currently also a very heavy user of FM and certainly concur with some of your critics e.g. the non-existent calender in FM or bad contact integration.

    I sync my contacts and calendar via Hosted Exchange, but that probably isn’t a good solution for you or everyone for that matter, because it costs a few bucks extra.

    In any case, have you tried Zoho? They pretty awesome, almost every they have, such as online spreadsheet is way better than what google has (according to my exp. and the NYT). Try them out.

    Here are the main advantages:

    - Free
    - unlimited storage for email (POP, IMAP is currently in beta and if you drop the support an email they will enable that for you – free of course ;-) )
    - good calendar integration
    - contacts
    - IM
    - They also have a variety of third-party integration of apps
    - Notes
    - Notepad (where you can paste links etc.)
    - Presentation
    - Import all your data (mails, notes, PPT, XLS etc,) into Zoho
    - even a personal WIki
    and so much more…

    http://www.zoho.com/

    Oh, and I’m not a representative of Zoho either! Just to make that clear ;-)

    Best regards from Germany
    David

  • http://channeltom.com tom

    Hi David,

    Thanks for the comment, I’ll certainly check out Zoho.

    Tom

  • Oneneglaply

    Excuse me for writing off topic but which wordpress theme do you use? It looks interesting!

  • http://channeltom.com tom

    Hiya,

    No problem, it’s called blue chronicals and is by dreamtemplate.com.

    Tom

  • Sam Thorley

    You took the words right out of my mouth. I have email on Fastmail and contacts on Google which works fine on iPodPhone but not so good on Fastmail web interface, where there are no synced contacts. And I use the alternate address in Fastmail like you do, so i don’t want to loose that. And I do feel a little creeped out at the thought of Google handling my email. Now there is iCloud for the contacts, but Apple being Apple, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to retrieve my contacts from the Apple Empire if i want to have an Android tablet for example.