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Andrew Marder

Goodbye Gmail, Hello Fastmail!

/ 2 min read

Table of Contents

If you’re looking to leave Gmail, I think Fastmail is the best option for most people.1 This blurb from Fastmail captures why I left:

Free email isn’t really free: you’re paying with your privacy. As a paid service, we only serve you, our customer. This means we have no split loyalties, no mining of your personal data, no sharing it with third parties, and no ads, ever.

Why did I choose Fastmail? I scraped data from 421 IndieWeb pages to see what mail servers were most popular. Fastmail turned out to be the most popular provider on the IndieWeb! How does it compare to Gmail?

  • Fastmail’s search is nearly as good as Gmail’s.
  • Support for custom domains is superb - shoot me an email at andrew@andrewmarder.net!
  • I agree with Jon Henshaw who says Fastmail is the “best alternative to Gmail and iCloud for email, calendars, and contacts!”

Proton Mail

I spent four months using Proton Mail as my personal email provider. Here’s why it didn’t work for me:

  • Search is limited by end-to-end encryption (E2EE). I want to be able to search the full text of emails from my phone, not just the to, from, and subject fields.

  • I needed a way to see my work and personal calendars in one place. There was no way to do this with Proton Calendar.

  • Proton’s approach to encryption works well for communication between Proton users, but it doesn’t play nice with users outside the Proton ecosystem who also use encryption.

Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users, while the trade-offs are significant.

Migrating from Proton Mail to Fastmail was a bit of a pain. Let me know if you’d like to hear more about that, and I can update this post with details.

Conclusion

I’ve been using Fastmail since January 24, 2026. Overall, I’m very happy with it. I’ll update this post as I learn new things.

Footnotes

  1. If you’re super technical, you might prefer Migadu. I chose Fastmail because I want integrated email, calendar, and contacts out of the box. Migadu focuses primarily on email. ↩