I really didn't appreciate this at all, and that's being diplomatic about it.
I'd rather have them implement something simplier like having an anniversary field for contacts and that show up in my calendar so I know when to mail anniversary cards.
While birthdays are technically anniversaries; I've never met anyone who calls a birthday, an anniversary.
Birthdays ≠ Anniversaries. Just like Squares ≠ Rectangles. (All birthdays are anniversaries, but not all anniversaries are birthdays; just like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.)
I'd rather use the birthday field for birthdays. So when I say (and I imagine 99.999% of other Americans say) "anniversary" we mean everything other than birthdays (most commonly: wedding anniversaries).
In my case, this happened just as I had opened a utility bill. First instinct: fastmail scanned my inbox and I had made a mistake paying for a 5 year subscription extension earlier this year.
The most responsive and lightweight email experience I’ve found is, surprisingly, the Fastmail web app. However, I hesitated for a long time because using a webmail interface felt like a step backward, and I dislike more vendor lock-in. (For context, I already use my own domain through Fastmail.)
But eventually, I couldn’t stand the slowdowns anymore and made the switch. I used Fastmail's IMAP importer to fetch all messages from my other accounts, added their SMTP credentials to Fastmail for composing new emails, and enabled Fastmail's Labels feature in the settings.
Everything is better now. Processing new messages and achieving inbox zero is much faster, labels are more flexible, search is nearly instant, and the resource usage of this additional Firefox tab is significantly lower than running a native email client.
New features like Memos seem useful, but I’m still somewhat wary of the increased vendor lock-in. For example, I hesitate to use their 1Password integration with Masked Emails because I’m not sure how much of a hassle it would be if Fastmail ever turns evil, and I need to jump ship and point my domain to another email host.
I churned when they stopped accepting cryptocurrency payments a few years back and the UX was still great at that point.
(I OKRification that as a form or cause of enshittification)
I hope not. I hope they are keeping it simple and clean.
> If you also use another email app to access your Fastmail account, such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird, you’ll still have access to your memos. You’ll find them in the Memos folder, as a reply to the message your memo is attached to.
It looks like I still have some notes in Fastmail from testing it out back in 2016. I thought IMAP as sync/storage was an interesting idea at the time, but didn't get around to using it. At one point I was considering it as a backing store for recipes.
Yeah, I've used this in the past to let family mark domains / addresses for email whitelisting. Needed some finagling because the notes are quoted-printable HTML but easy enough to feed the info into rspamd via redis keys.
If I am scheduling something I have a lot on my mind including the contents of the calendar and the email, possibly other emails, other things on the computer and other things that are just in my head. Seeing the calendar and the email simultaneously is the foundation for this. There are work-arounds but these are flawed in their own way. I hate opening multiple email windows in Outlook because if I do it seems Outlook is going to keep opening them forever every time I open Outlook.
Myself I use eM client as a front end for Fastmail.
My preference is that email and calendar are two entirely separate apps, because I have my calendar open for about half of the emails I compose, and the remainder of my calendar usage has nothing to do with email at all. This is one of the reasons I've stuck with Apple Mail + Calendar through the years.
I’m not sure if I understand what your issue is, but it seems like it’s possible to do this.
I generally agree that the workflow could be improved though.
What about using the calendar app of your os (or another?) to be able to switch?
Seems they are just normal mails in a special location. Shouldn't be that hard for other clients to implement this.
Offline mobile app would be very nice!
Notes with attachments and inlining of images would be super helpful. I think their Notes product have a huge potential.
An advantage of the "reply-to-self" is that the notes would be stored in GMail itself and are viewable on all your devices, including ones without this hypothetical extension.
I guess the extension can also emulate an editing feature by deleting the old version of the "note" email and creating a new one..
I have wanted a feature like this before and worked around it by replying to the email but sending the reply only to me.
- It is not possible to prepay anymore. I used to have at least a year's worth of credit to make sure the account doesn't lapse if I get incapacitated on renewal time
- If a paid account stops, the email address eventually becomes up for grabs for someone else
- The monthly calendar view does not scroll smoothly anymore. Instead it now jumps to full days or months and it makes scrolling through it a badly jagged experience. It used to be so smooth and the best calendar view of any service, ever. Now, it's just as annoying as everything else.
- The calendar view now greys out the month that isn't current. Again making scrolling through the year a worse experience.
I'm sure there are justifications for all changes. But for me things like this make me go from "Fastmail is awesome!" to "Meh, it's email and it's alright". Saying that as someone who has been a paying user for many years.
