I really like FastMail. But I'm going back to Google's Gmail after almost two years of being a FastMail User.
Why? Have I fell off the proverbial rocker?
Rising costs
I own a personal domain that I use for e-mail for myself and a few other family members. When I originally migrated from Gmail to FastMail in May 2013, I only had 2 active accounts on this personal domain. As of this writing, I'm up to 4 accounts. A few of these accounts are on the $40/15G plan and a few others are on the $20/1G plan. There's also the obligatory $5 master user account for any family-based plan on FastMail. These are of course yearly costs. Both $40/15G accounts use much less than 15G. One is that 2.5G, the other at 1.1G. FastMail does not offer an option to add extra space without moving into the next tier unfortunately.
Being Canadian, the falling Looney hasn't helped matters. I'm now at a cost of $125 USD per year, which as of this writing is approximately $160 CAD. Will $160/year break my back? Absolutely not. I use e-mail a lot, but that's not the only cost.
Spam
FastMail's spam filtering is good, but it's not as good as Google's. FastMail even offers a unique feature where you can designate 2 special folders to help train the Bayesian spam filtering engine. One folder where you move spam mail that was not filtered by the engine so that it learns to filter in the future and another to train the system to recognize certain e-mails tagged as spam (false positives) as good e-mail. Anyone familiar with SpamSieve from C-Command Software will feel right at home, as FastMail uses a very similar spam fighting engine.
However, even with these engines, spam still gets through. I use a singular email address for personal matters and have a few other, older e-mail addresses being forwarded to my main one. I will often get 3-5 (or more) spam messages a day appear in my Inbox, whereas with Google, I'd rarely receive one.
An option would have been to use MailRoute which has been recently sponsoring quite a few tech Podcasts. However, MailRoute's options are $29.99 USD per year, per e-mail account. Unfortunately, MailRoute does not provide any bypass options, meaning that if you're using a custom domain and have 4 e-mail addresses at that domain (like I do), you must pay for MailRoute for every address on that domain. This would mean my MailRoute costs would be $29.99 * 4 EQUAL_SIGN $120 USD a year (another $150 CAD).
Adding both FastMail and MailRoute would bring my e-mail costs per year to about $300 for 4 accounts.
Third party apps
There are some very interesting new takes on e-mail these days. Specifically, Mailbox has been on my radar since it launched a few years ago. Unfortunately I have been unable to use it due to Mailbox being compatible with only Gmail and iCloud accounts. A few weeks before this migration, I had the app running on a separate Gmail account and could understand why this app is getting so much attention. The ability to swipe and archive e-mails (and mark them as read while doing so) is a boon to processing a volume of e-mails quickly. The ability to swipe an e-mail to a list (and use IFTTT to send e-mails from that List to my OmniFocus inbox) is another great reason to use Mailbox with Gmail. Finally, having scheduled e-mails and lists is also a fantastic option (but one that is available is other apps such a Dispatch and Outlook).
Speaking of Outlook on iOS, I'm a big fan as well. I use it exclusively for my work e-mail and have been very satisified with it. I had some issues with my personal e-mail and the spam filtering. It would often place e-mails in my Inbox that were actually in my Spam folder. Meaning I would have to delete the e-mails from the Outlook inbox in order to get rid of them. This really defeats the purpose of having spam folder. Opening a support ticket to Microsoft did not yield the expected result. Instead, Microsoft indicated this was by design, although I can't imagine it being so.
IFTTT integration
Gmail supports all kinds of external integrations that are simply not possible wih FastMail. For example, the popular web-automation service, IFTTT allows you to automate e-mails coming into your Gmail account with various other services. For example, a shipment from Amazon or other service can be added to the excellent iOS Deliveries app automatically. You could even recreate VIP notifications directly to your iOS device using IFTTT's Gmail and iOS push notification integration. Searching the IFTTT website for Gmail integrations yields thousands of possibilities.
I'm also a heavy OmniFocus user and being able to create a special list in Mailbox, attach that list to IFTTT and have any e-mail added to that list be automatically added to my OF Inbox has been a feature I've been looking to have for some time now.
On privacy
I am fully cognizant of Google's shady history with respect to privacy in general. I don't voluntarily use many of Google's services and recently changed all my default search engines to DuckDuckGo, thanks to the integration with iOS 8 and Yosemite. Do I still have a little voice nagging me that going back to Google could be a mistake? Absolutely.
However, when weighing the points I've outlined in this article with the fact that a big part of me doesn't care as much about the privacy of my own personal e-mail (really, there isn't a whole lot of confidential information in there). I end up thinking to myself that the benefits outweigh the cons of having your e-mail indexed and added to Google's ever growing mass of information on me.
A final word on FastMail
I still love FastMail and would easily recommend them to anyone I know. It is by far the best e-mail provider I have ever used and the web interface is head and shoulders above any other service (including Gmail). I would reconsider going back to FastMail in the future if their pricing model changed, their spam filtering got better and Mailbox started supporting IMAP (seriously, Mailbox is almost reason alone to use Gmail or iCloud).
Will I live to regret moving back to Gmail? Unlikely. I'm a small fish in a very big pond. But if that pond suddenly gets a lot smaller, I won't have to think twice before I move back to FastMail.
Who knows what the future may hold.