Fastmail has a feature in beta allowing you to add a private note to your emails. That was something I liked in Hey and seemed like an obvious feature once I saw it. The note text is searchable.
The current beta also pastes only basic formatting into an email, which is what I want 99.9% of the time when composing email.
Very happy with my move to Fastmail. I have moved my wife’s email also, primarily because I can apply rules based on a sender’s membership in a gropu. That made it much easier to set up Hey-like Feed folder, Action Required filing, etc. Highly recommended.
Certainly, and hopefully my spelling will be better. I can create a group in Fastmail contacts (e.g., The Feed) and add senders to that group. Examples of those are newsletters that I want to read but not necessarily immediately, ads from companies such as Hue and Sonos that I want to see but are not urgent, Total Wine offers, etc.
With one rule, I can keep those out of my inbox but still retain the messages for when I feel like going through my “feed”. The rule is If Sender is a member of the group TheFeed, then Add Label TheFeed and Archive (gets it out of my inbox).
In Apple Mail, I would need to repeat that rule for every sender as you can’t base a rule on membership in a group list. In my case, I have 110 members in that group, so I would need 110 rules! Which in practical terms means I wouldn’t implement this workflow.
Another benefit is that the rules are server side so I don’t need to leave a Mac on to process the rules.
I did the same with my wife’s email as she subscribes to multiple email updates from multiple realtor firms. The volume would overwhelm her inbox and cause her to overlook important emails (which is why I was willing to pay to add her to my Fastmail account!). I just put all the realtors in a group and she reviews the listings every 2 to 5 days.
This idea is totally stolen from the Hey app and was implemented by numerous bloggers back in the day when folks tried Hey and then moved back to more traditional clients. I don’t remember where I read this first so as to give proper credit, but I didn’t come up with it on my own.
Yeah! I implemented this Hey style filtering in my Fastmail account after reading one of those blog entries a while back. It’s fantastic.
Another Hey rule suggestion which I love is if the sender is not in my contacts their message will be filed into a folder named “screen” for future action.
The Fastmail contact group functionality makes filtering easier by removing the requirement to set up a unique mail rule per sender.
You are correct. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think that option existed when I switched over to Fastmail a few years ago. But clearly, you could implement this now if you are willing to leave a Mac running to process the rule.
When I tried to implement this in iCloud rules, this criteria is not a choice.
