You should only really care about JMAP vs IMAP if you’re planning on creating an email client.
I’m a Fastmail customer, but the biggest problem I find is that other services don’t hook into them.
Often 3rd party apps will support Gmail / M365 / iCloud, and despite Fastmail being compliant with open standards of CalDAV/IMAP, these other service don’t program for that.
So I am stuck on a standards-compliant island named Fastmail.
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Gmail receives about 1.8 billion unique visitors a month, Fastmail receives around 2.6 million. If you were a 3rd party app developer which would you spend your time and money to support?
It’s not a matter of who’s best, it’s who has the greatest following.
There are a few subtle but important features that pulled me back to Gmail after my stint with Hey. I had considered Fastmail and several others as well, but ultimately they all fell short because they couldn’t overcome Gmail’s ubiquity and these details:
- Native snoozing
- Native Send Later, Undo Send
- Peerless search and spam filtering
Taken together, these things really improve my experience of email and the latter in particular saves me having to even think about involving another service like Sanebox or even bothering with labels and folders. I can’t think of a single occasion where I wasn’t able to find an email in my Gmail history via search so why would I make more work for myself with labels and rules and folders?
As for ubiquity, I enjoy knowing that if a new email client emerges, I’ll almost certainly be able to try it out in case it does a better job than the native Gmail app for my needs. And in the meantime, the native app allows me to access those features without having to involve another third party and their servers or on-device processing to replicate the same functionality (snooze, send later, etc.)
It was a step backward in terms of privacy, sure, but as Wayne said, “email privacy” is a bit of a one-sided concept.
Anyway, I love the idea of making a current version of this chart so I just wanted to bring up a few of those additional quality-of-life features that Gmail/Google Workspace offers that make a difference for me.
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I’ve added an unused, but hoped to be used, domain to iCloud Custom Domains and it’s been simply good. My main reason for wanting to use my iCloud email is because when you setup a new machine or device the mail setup is part of iCloud setup, and I’m one of those guys who likes to start with fresh installs every year or so.
The only implementation detail I haven’t been able to figure out yet is that I added the domain for my iCloud family but I’m guessing that because they aren’t running the beta, even the beta.icloud.com doesn’t give them access to my domain yet?
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Thanks for all the thoughts, folks. Updated the table… and we’re quickly running into the limits of Discourse’s ability to display tables, heh.
There are some open questions and, of course, debate and offer suggestions or additions as you see fit.
A few replies:
@jec0047’s got it. Functionally it seems insignificant, but the difference leads to some weird behaviours in email clients. Non-“label”-supporting email apps seem to handle a lack of labels by copying messages into two different folders at the same time. I don’t quite understand the nuances here.
However, I hate the idea of moving threads into folders. Labelling is great because it’s lossless. If you only have folders, the only way to categorize a message is to move it or copy it, and that is a scary thing to me: either the message is no longer where it once was or you have redundant messages.
This is a great point. I’ve never once considered using Namecheap-hosted domains’ email features, although I suppose I could. I’m not sure what my hesitation is, but it’s there.
Thanks to this comment and @karlnyhus’s, though, I’ve added a column for IMAP-based mailboxes from hosting providers.
Like @anon41602260 said, though, that costs money. Just like the Google Workspaces subscription I currently use. If I could switch to iCloud Mail, which I’m already effectively paying for, I’d save ~$8/month.
Are there differences between these providers’ support for calendars and contacts? Is there any way Fastmail handles contacts and calendars differently from iCloud or Google’s offerings…?
I know Gmail doesn’t allow serverside filtering of contacts by contact groups, for instance.
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Welcome. Keep in mind that it can take a up to 72 hours for MX record changes to update through the system.
@ryanjamurphy Gmail has excellent real time customer support through their Chat which is better than any other service on the table. It cost $20 a year (can be shared with up to 5 other family members) and is part of the Google One program that gives you extra storage, photo editing features and importantly customer service.
And HEY does have Labels 
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Other hey ? marks answered:
- Support is human–responses within minutes to hours are typical (probably equal to Fastmail)
- Has spam filtering; it’s okay
- Sent email recognized as spam could be another Seems Fine?(?)
- No send later
I really like this thread.
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Very good table and useful discussion… I am a FastMail user and have frequent problems with false positives from their Spam filtering. This includes messages from my bank, Marriott, and United Airlines simply not being delivered… I write to them they investigate and sometimes they find the messages other times they don’t. I have had to resort to having these messages sent to both Gmail and Fastmail and invariably the Gmail always shows up, not so with he Fastmail messages. I am so frustrated I am considering moving to ProtonMail. Any Reason you didn’t consider ProtonMail in your comparison?
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I’d be happy to add it, of course. I don’t know anything about it at the moment but perhaps others can share its strengths and weaknesses?
I would say that “Labels” for “hosting provider” should be “depends”, IMAP have support for keywords but it’s up to those who runs the server to turn it on/off. If your email client support IMAP keywords then you have “labels”.
For server side filtering it should also be “depends”. It might not be as easy to use as for example Gmail but …
For aliases I would say “depends”, the hosting companies I’ve used over the years have all supported it.
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Making a note to myself for the next chance I get to update the table: Fastmail does support labels! It’s a preference in Advanced Settings → Preferences under the heading Labels.
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Be aware that in Fastmail, using labels precludes the use of folders
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@Nick_Fulgham Good point. It’s an exclusive-or preference—can’t have both, technically speaking. Practically, however, Fastmail seems to provide some “move”-type functionality for its labels that allow you to treat a label as a folder if you wanted.
In other news: for the technically-minded, I found a neat writeup where someone used Fastmail’s JMAP protocol to (sort of) add Hey’s Focus and Reply feature to the Fastmail interface.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/08/18/implementing--focus-and-reply--for-fastmail/
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That is neat! I really enjoyed some of Hey’s features but couldn’t get past some of their choices. For anyone trying this, you might want to take notice of this bit:
- it’s storing passwords in local storage, which I think is not a good security practice.
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I’m always trying to follow on the topics regarding e-mail. I am still not thrilled that I use an @gmail for many things in my life. I have thought about custom domains for my family. But at the end of the day, these practices really just work for me. I keep considering switching over fully to a G Suite Workspace with a custom domain for the family. But, most likely, my family will continue to use @gmail. It’s simple and works for them. The concern over custom domains/email workflows (if you are the IT person in your family, like I am in mine). Even with the most detailed of instructions for when I am gone, someone will forget to pay something, or someone in the family will get scammed and locked out of a domain.
As far as features go, I love Gmail/G Suite handling on e-mail coupled with the Spark client. To use the phrase of Apple in this one, ‘it just works’.
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Some argue that Fastmail is not as secure as it’s touted:
This is not the only article making these points.
I tend to move all my email into Devonthink and work from there, so I only ever have a few days of email on my server. Devonthink is much easier to work from and link to your email there, plus the search is really good. Email I need on ios goes in a synced DB and links created on macos to my email in Devonthink work on ios.
I think email clients are a poor repository for email archival purposes and so only see it as inbox and move it from there ASAP. On this basis it doesn’t really matter who I use as it doesn’t stay there long, plus I don’t need much space.
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The author of that article seems to think “secure = private”?
(not properly separating security and privacy)
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