Top all-time · #700
Fastmail
Company blog · fastmail.blogsecurityproductivity
Fastmail is the company blog at fastmail.blog, writing about security and productivity. Since 2018, 93 different Hacker News readers have linked it 134 times, most often “Australian privacy laws”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fastmail's blog as a reference on JMAP, email search, format=flowed, PGP, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and Australia's access and assistance law. Most links are cited as support rather than praised.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Australian privacy laws13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2018-09-10
- Advocating for privacy in Australia9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- /2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-07-25
- /open-technologies/jmap-new-email-open-standard/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-01-23
- Format=flowed: the little standard that couldn't quite make it4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-06-04
- /advanced/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-25
- /2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-memory/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-21
- Bitwarden now integrate Fastmail masked emails3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-09-13
- Moving our privacy advocacy forward to protect Australia and you2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-01
- /2014/04/10/when-two-factor-authentication-is-not-enough/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-28
What Hacker News says?
FastMail hasn't been part of Opera for over 5 years now, since well before Qihoo bought most of what was left of Opera: https://fastmail.blog/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-staf...
Comment linking /2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-staff-purchase-the-business-from-opera/
on “Google Is Eating Our Mail”Submitted Making email more modern with JMAP as a story · 327 points
HN discussionyes, and it makes the gmail API look like a toy https://fastmail.blog/open-technologies/jmap-new-email-open-...
Comment linking /open-technologies/jmap-new-email-open-standard/
on “Ask HN: Gmail account security”Submitted Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know as a story · 297 points
HN discussionBeing a stateless protocol is the big one, for mobile. There’s more: https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/23/jmap-a-better-way-to-email/
Comment linking /2014/12/23/jmap-a-better-way-to-email/
on “Mozilla VPN”Submitted Fastmail – 20 Years Old as a story · 233 points
HN discussionThat legislation would affect things for a service like ProtonMail, but although it’s ill-conceived doesn’t affect Fastmail: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...
Comment linking /2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabill-australia/
on “Mozilla VPN”Submitted Advocating for privacy in Australia as a story · 229 points
HN discussionOur search is built on top of the Xapian search engine. We blogged about the underlying tech a while ago. You can sign up a free trial and have a play pretty easily. https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/01/email-search-system/
Comment linking /2014/12/01/email-search-system/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted JMAP is on the home straight as a story · 193 points
HN discussionLots of people are "under GDPR". Us for example :) https://fastmail.blog/2018/05/24/gdpr-is-here/
Comment linking /2018/05/24/gdpr-is-here/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted A new look, logo, and website for Fastmail as a story · 63 points
HN discussionApart from the "users lose their passwords all the fricking time" problem (seriously, before we implemented https://fastmail.blog/2017/12/06/security-account-recovery/ , lost password was always in the top 3 most common support requests of the week report) Impementing per-message-encryption would turn us into a dumb blob store. The whole point of FastMail is the value add - fast search, ability to deal with a lot of…
Comment linking /2017/12/06/security-account-recovery/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted Moving our privacy advocacy forward to protect Australia and you as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI think this post from FastMail says it better than I do: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/ Here are some arguments: 1. if it's encryption in the browser via a web interface, then it's not secure; the moment a web form asks for a password that can be used to decrypt your data, that's the moment your alarms should go off, because in spite of the claimed E2E encryption, their security might actua…
Comment linking /2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted Fastmail vs. ProtonMail: A Comparison as a story · 20 points
HN discussionFastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1]. They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server. [1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-... [2]: https://jmap.io
Comment linking /2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-push/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted Choose Email for Remote Productivity as a story · 16 points
HN discussionFastmail’s specific response: https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi... That in short, the A&A bill is about breaking end-to-end encryption, which Fastmail has never had anything to do with. It’s scary-sounding legislation, and I reckon it’s misguided at best, but it honestly doesn’t affect all that many businesses [note I’m saying businesses rather than people ; many affected businesses will b…
Comment linking /2016/12/10/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/
on “Don't use third party auth to sign in”Submitted Australian privacy laws as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI agree with this so much that I even wrote about it recently! https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivi... Snir David writes well. One point that I think is missed in the "chats and video calls" is that you don't have situational awareness of whether the other person is busy like you do in person. It's the same as the problem with taking phone calls when driving a car as compared to talking to pe…
Comment linking /2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivity/
on “Written communication is remote work super power”Submitted Bitwarden now integrate Fastmail masked emails as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI weighed this for awhile because it was a concern for me. I finally did end up moving my organization off Google Suite to Fastmail and I haven't looked back. Australia's government sucks ass, yes. But Fastmail seems focused on its product and has been conveying their positions and opposition to such legislation. Google does not do this, they run Google Suite like it's an automated hobby project. I'm quite certain t…
Comment linking /2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/
on ““My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe””Submitted Fastmail: Masked Email Now in More Places with Bitwarden Integration as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIt would be great if it was so easy. Sadly it’s not, because format=flowed is ignored by many email clients. See also: https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/587 Also this article: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/ The only solution is HTML and multipart emails. Edit: added link to article
Comment linking /2016/12/17/format-flowed/
on “Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal”Submitted Fastmail Accounts Blocked in Russia as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAlso potentially interesting to people that like the idea of format=flowed, an bit of an explanation of why FastMail doesn’t support it: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/
Comment linking /2016/12/17/format-flowed/
on “Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal”Submitted FastMail: Australian privacy laws as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt's a shame that I don't think I can ever recommend Fastmail, because I had some really old @fastmail.fm accounts that were grandfathered into their free plan [1], but got deleted because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to log in within the 120 days grace period. [1] https://fastmail.blog/historical/changes-to-fastmail-service...
Comment linking /historical/changes-to-fastmail-service-levels/
on “Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email”Submitted Fastmail–Send Later with Scheduled Send as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
