Fastmail vs. ProtonMail: A Comparison

This kind of misses the entire value of Protonmail - that they encrypt all of your data at rest using <i>your</i> key, not theirs.<p>&gt; Fastmail’s email search features also allows you to search for emails based on their content or attachments; ProtonMail’s search function doesn’t let you search through email contents unless you ask it to download all your email to your browser’s cache.<p>That&#x27;s inconvenient, but entirely the evidence that they&#x27;re storing your data correctly. If they could build indexes of your email contents, that would defeat the purpose of private email.<p>At the end of the day, if Fastmail gets breached they take <i>everything</i>. If Protonmail gets breached they take email datetimes and subject lines.

It is really unfortunate that they have written such a biased article, because it&#x27;s completely unnecessary. I think the article is correct that fastmail has a much better usability story due to it just being a regular email service. However, Protonmails whole raison d&#x27;etre is that they do on server encryption which they can&#x27;t even decrypt themselves. It gets swept completely under the rug.<p>They could have just come to the conclusion that if you want ultimate &quot;privacy&quot; and be sure that no one can read your emails &quot;at rest&quot; take Protonmail if you want features take fastmail. That would have been a fair assessment, the way it&#x27;s written now just makes it come across as a advertisement piece. Maybe they feel customer&#x27;s moving to Protonmail.<p>P. S.: I say this as a happy fastmail customer

As a huge Fastmail fan and user: This was a bad post, and if the CEO is rolling around the comments today: Just delete it.<p>ProtonMail and Fastmail serve very different threat models, and glossing over the differences between end-to-end encryption and not is disappointing. I <i>choose</i> Fastmail because my threat model isn&#x27;t particularly concerned about the company&#x27;s servers or government intrusion, but for the folks who do need to worry about that, Fastmail <i>isn&#x27;t</i> a good option, and even a Fastmail blog should be willing to plainly and openly admit that.<p>If anything, Fastmail should even <i>encourage</i> people living under oppressive regimes or involved in sensitive whistleblowing activities to consider ProtonMail... even if they then use Fastmail for everything else.

I guess you’ll have to look elsewhere than the Fastmail blog for an unbiased comparison.

so, when fastmail compare fastmail and protonmail they (surprise) end up concluding that fastmail is better.<p>might be, but I&#x27;d prefer to hear it from someone else.

I&#x27;m a longtime fastmail customer, and I like the service, but they still have no answer for Australia&#x27;s Access and Assistance Bill, aside from all the other privacy disadvantages they have against Protonmail.

<i>Fastmail’s email search features also allows you to search for emails based on their content or attachments; ProtonMail’s search function doesn’t let you search through email contents unless you ask it to download all your email to your browser’s cache.</i><p>Doesn&#x27;t this imply that Fastmail has access to the decrypted contents of messages?

Judging by the content of the article, the title should have been: Why Fastmail Is Better Than ProtonMail.<p>Not necessarily a bad thing. I genuinely don&#x27;t know which is better. But under each heading there are three paragraphs talking about Fastmail and one for ProtonMail, so I wouldn&#x27;t exactly call it <i>balanced</i>.

A nice comparison. The tipping point for my choosing fastmail over protonmail was that protonmail limits custom domains to a single domain. I have multiple domains and want(ed) the ability to setup email for all the different domains in a single place.

Give me e-mail, calendar and contact delegation and I&#x27;ll switch from Office 365 in a heartbeat.

definitely gonna trust the comparison done by Fastmail right!