After 5 years with Proton, I moved to Fastmail this week.
Proton was okay, but never really lived up to the hype that got me there in the first place. Proton Mail itself works fine, it includes the features we’ve come to expect from every email provider. Its search functionality is really bad though. It is understandable given the product’s emphasis on security, but also annoying to work with every day.
Its other services (Calendars, Drive, Pass) would need some serious love to become truly useful and competitive products. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t seem to be able to dedicate enough resources to be able to move the needle with those products.
And then in the past year,
- The company started emailing surveys asking if I was interested in AI. I don’t think that should be the company’s priority right now. I understand the need to communicate on the matter, but I’d rather see the team communicate on improvements around search, around a better calendar, or a Pass product that can replace my 1Password subscription. When I need AI, I turn to experts on the matter.
- There were multiple outages within a few weeks, which was odd. Growing pains maybe? It’s annoying when you’re trying to access your emails.
So I moved to Fastmail. An australian company with its servers in the US. Is that better for my privacy? Definitely not. Will I regret the move? Hopefully not. Do I enjoy the move so far? Yes, the email interface is a lot faster, and search just works!
Publishing this today, I’ll post again if I move to a different provider in the future. At least by having my emails under custom domains, it’s relatively easy to move!
@jeremy when planning the move away from proton, did you consider email providers based in the EU, too?
I did, to some extent. I would have preferred a EU-based provider, but it was more important for me to pick a company whose specialty is email. I don’t want to pick a hosting company that also does email on the side, because I want to ensure that the service I pay for is fully focussed on improving it’s email service while maintaining excellent deliverability (which is a job on its own imo).
That ruled out Infomaniak for example.
I looked at Tuta Nota bud read some bad reviews on the service quality.
Are there some EU email providers you’d recommend?
@jeremy @swoonie people recommend mailbox.org from Germany, although I haven’t used them myself
Yeah, it was on my shortlist. I eventually ruled it out because it doesn’t offer a mobile app or a modern web interface. It seems to be geared towards folks happier to use IMAP and their own mail client on desktop and mobile.
@jeremy I switched to Posteo a couple of weeks ago, for emails, my calendar and contacts. Works really well so far, they have very good & detailed help pages. I do all the synching across devices through IMAP and c*DAVThey offer strong encryption options if that’s what you’re after; I’m not an expert on those though.Their web app is good – whether it’s “modern” I can’t tell…
@jeremy I understand you. From your comment about “having my emails under custom domains, it’s relatively easy to move” made me think you were looking for flexibility of not being tied to a particular company's app. Happy emailing!
I had tried Postel.bzh a few years ago (they resell mailo). The tool clearly wasn’t close to competing with other popular email providers on the market. It’s still true today imo. The webmail interface, the mobile apps, and the overall service is clearly not at the level of what you expect from an email provided in 2025. It’s a pity because I like the idea of a French email provider. I was really happy to see Postel popping up a few years back!
I suppose if you’re happy with your own email client and IMAP, and don’t need too much complexity from your email provider, mailo could do the trick.
Do you use them yourself? Are you happy with the service?
@jeremy I’ve been a paying customer of Fastmail for over ten years now, I love it. I was a paying proton customer, too, from their very first week – but their recent moves totally turned me away.
@jeremy I'm curious to hear how this move works for you. I'm not unhappy with Proton but can't say I'm happy either. The feature I found I like most is the SimpleAlias tool they brought into the product, but I figure that probably isn't rocket science to recreate (and/or pay for just that).
Is SimpleLogin what you had in mind? Fastmail offers something similar, called “Masked email“. It can be hooked into 1Password. I must say I didn’t really use that feature with ProtonMail, but since I had to set everything up again with Fastmail, I hooked one of my secondary domains to that Masked email feature, and will be using it when creating accounts via 1Password.
So far the experience with Fastmail has been pretty good.
I’ve been using Fastmail for several years now and I love it. My favorite thing is how it makes it super easy to handle email from multiple domains in one inbox.