Is anyone using Fastmail with tags instead of folders and a 3rd party email client? What do you use and how is it working? How compatible are tags with the client? I assume that Mail.app w/ Mailtags will not recognize the Fastmail tags, but maybe (hopefully) I’m wrong. I’m too nervous about messing things up to try something out.
Where do you see tagging in Fastmail?
https://fastmail.blog/2020/06/15/fastmail-labels/
(I use neither tags nor folders; I believe in “Pile, don’t file” for email)
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Oh I see - never seen that before.
But I’d hesitate to start labeling too much as it creates duplicate local copies.
That’s the bit I’m really wondering about. They make it sound like it is all dealt with on their end, but I’m nervous about it. I really like the concept of having the same copy of a message show up in multiple places, so I want it to work, but…
All my email in one folder would make my head explode. (Crap! I think I just gave away my supervillain weakness.)
You could always add a user to your account and try it out for <30 days for free.
I went to Fastmail to avoid the chaos gMail creates with its labels in a standard imap system. I love tagging, but I’m going to stay away from this one.
I’m in the middle of the trial, but I’m hesitant to set anything up in a client. I’ll have to set up a garbage email account to play with it. Maybe I’ll do another Fastmail trial, but without my domain.
I wasn’t planning on going to tagging when I started the Fastmail trial, but I’m starting to really get into it for other things and thought “why not try it here?” Consistency between tags in various places would be nice; like having a master tag list that can be used by all apps, but Apple is not turning their ship onto that course.
I think storing your email long term in a mail service is a bad idea. It’s not as secure and emails are easily corrupted. Plus large mailboxes tend to have many more issues.
I only ever have 12 months of email in my email client. The rest gets archived to hard disk where tagging and labelling is more easily done. I have 80K emails in Eaglefiler (macOS) and can find any email in seconds.
So far Fastmail has been very reliable.
Still I also store my mails locally (using MailStore Home; Windows only).
Thank you for mentioning EagleFiler. Might be useful when I finally migrate to macOS on all my systems.
I’ve been considering migrating older data to DEVONthink, but I’ve been too on again off again with it to do it, yet.
I think I just experienced this first-hand. I set up a Fastmail account in Mail.app and none of the folders had any messages in them. Oddly, the folders were all there and had the correct unread message count for each folder, but no messages. Looks like that’s a bust. Might be fine if you are starting from scratch, but I’m not going to go that far.
Edit: To clarify, the Inbox had messages, but no other folder, either custom folder or standard built-in (Sent, etc.), had any messages at all.
Update: I went ahead and contacted FastMail. We re-setup things and all looks good. There must have been some setting I missed. I’ve been using tags the last several days and am comfortable with how they are handled. If I ever have any issues, the web interface is pretty bomb-proof. I just hate the limitations of web interfaces (delete key that deletes email? nope).