Moving from Hey to Fastmail

Was looking for a Gmail alternative, several months ago, and had to pick between these two.<p>I went with Fastmail and am very happy.<p>Tons of aliases that are easy to use, the UX is actually _much better_ than Gmail.

I don’t get Hey.<p>I feel like it does too much magic with my inbox.<p>Much like social media, I don’t want some algorithm to selectively decide what messages I see and what I don’t. I want to be able to see All messages, in a chronological order.<p>Having concert tickets not arrive in my inbox that I need because some magic is happening due to the sender being a first time sender to me is just frustrating.

I love how a bunch of the &quot;headline features&quot; of Hey are effectively replicated with taking the time to make a few rules in another platform. I tried Hey at the peak of it&#x27;s pre-release hype, but just like Basecamp, it&#x27;s just a really mediocre experience in a sea of options.

IMHO, services like Hey is for people who don&#x27;t know how, or don&#x27;t want to bother, to set proper inbox rules (it has many other features for sure but organizing emails is one of the biggest selling point as far as I see).<p>But for me, I just want a reliable, dumb, boring email service without any &quot;smart&quot; features. I will decide what to do with every type of incoming emails myself. Fastmail gives me exactly that.

I&#x27;ve also been using HEY for a year of personal email, and just renewed my subscription.<p>I spend a lot of time organizing and managing email at work. I have multiple inboxes, hundreds of tags, filter rules etc.<p>When I tried HEY for my personal gmail, it just felt like a breath of fresh air. They were wrapping friendly UX around the realities of modern email. It wasn&#x27;t &quot;work&quot; to manage my email.<p>I recognize their system is limited if you <i>want</i> to do that stuff - not sure I&#x27;d use HEY for work yet - but if you&#x27;re inundated with email (as I was, having a gmail address dating back to beta), they do a great job of making it manageable without any effort on your part.

I also implemented a vaguely Hey-inspired system in Fastmail a year ago and it&#x27;s been good.<p>One tweak that&#x27;s really helped me: when I filter things to &quot;The Feed&quot;, I also use the filter to snooze them until 6pm, so I only get mailing list emails once at a day.

Just this week I started looking into Gmail alternatives (as well as de-Googling myself as much as possible) and while I haven&#x27;t pulled the trigger on anything yet, Fastmail is looking like the top contender at the moment.<p>Hey was on the table for a bit, but no matter how much I read about their alternative workflow, I just don&#x27;t understand how it would be an improvement over my typical method of archiving emails as I get through them. My email is essentially just a to-do list. Once I&#x27;ve dealt with something, into the archive it goes, and I don&#x27;t think about it again unless it shows up in a search result when I&#x27;m looking for something later.<p>I&#x27;ve just never had a problem with it so I don&#x27;t see a need to reinvent the wheel and learn a new method of using email.

Every time I read this type of post I get amazed at how primitive my use of personal email is.<p>No folders, no tags, no rules. Just inbox and read status.<p>Ditched gmail for iCloud a few years ago. Simple, cheap, well integrated.

I still pay for Fastmail, yet I route all messages over to HEY. There&#x27;s just no replicating the UX (Fastmail&#x27;s web UI is…suboptimal…and I&#x27;m thoroughly over using Apple Mail). And there are a <i>ton</i> of neat little touches throughout HEY beyond just the immediate filtering of incoming messages. It&#x27;s simplistic to think you can just add a few rules on some other system and you&#x27;re done.<p>I seriously thought about quitting after the Basecamp fiasco, but ultimately realized my entire email workflow is now centered around HEY and it&#x27;s greatly improved my quality of life. So I use it like I use any other online service from a company I don&#x27;t particularly like. _shrug_

For everyone who likes HEY’s workflow and wants to use it with Fastmail, Big Mail just launched this week and looks promising. I haven’t tried it yet (and no connection), but planning to give that combination a whirl when I have some time. Very curious if anyone else already has.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getbigmail.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getbigmail.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; I researched several different services that could provide a good enough service for a reasonable price and ended up settling on Fastmail.com.<p>The author also talks about saving a lot of money every year. There are cheaper alternatives to Fastmail that support custom domains and have a focus on privacy. Mailbox.org and Runbox.com are a couple of them. There are more.

I signed my wife and I up for Hey as soon as they offered a business plan, and although it&#x27;s kind of expensive we&#x27;ve been very happy with it. But it&#x27;s good to know that someone has tried the off-ramp.<p>Besides the simple routing, I just like the Hey app interface across macOS&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;web. The Gmail app never played nice with sending from my custom domain, and I will never subject myself to Apple&#x27;s buggy mail app again. So I&#x27;m curious if there are other mail apps Fastmail users like on iOS&#x2F;macOS.

Hey is an awesome email client on a terrible email server and Fastmail is an awesome server with a terrible client. I only wish there was a standard protocol we could use to mix and match!

I’ve been very happy using Helm home email server and it’s made me a bit of a snob about hosted Gmail alternatives - these companies still have access to all your email and while I am not a big fan of Google’s business model I’m personally not comfortable having my email on any corporate server.<p>(No affiliation with Helm just a happy customer for more than a year and hoping they succeed.)

I love Hey. Completely revolutionized email for me. I hated it before, now it’s a joy to use. It’s really cool this guy documented and shared all His steps to switch over to fast mail.

My takeaway -- I can replicate some of Hey features in GMail, sweet!

I found the process of VIP&#x27;ing my contacts in Fastmail beyond tedious.