Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870988

Points: 35

# Comments: 14

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296681

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

(You can also read more on our open source and standards work at https://www.fastmail.com/company/open-source/)

Yes.

> How much additional work went into the desktop-app?

About 4 months work for 2 developers (but with both of them handling other things that arose during that time too).

# Why Electron?

Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.

With Electron, we can maintain a single code base across all platforms so we can move faster, and keep feature parity everywhere. More than that though, we believe it lets us build a really great experience on each of these platforms, while offering a consistent UI for our customers across all their devices. Honestly, we can never out-native Apple because by definition whatever they do is "native", even if it sucks (Liquid Glass on the Mac is … not great UX). If that's your primary consideration, you will always be better with Apple's own Mail app, so it's pointless us trying to build something in that space. (And instead we work to also make Fastmail the best service to use Mail.app with — which we believe it is!)

# Why would you use this instead of the webmail?

If you prefer to keep Fastmail in your browser, great! You can do so. But we hear from many customers that they would rather not have their email mixed in with their tabs. With a separate app you can see it in the dock, Cmd-tab to it, make it your default email app system wide etc. It also lets us integrate with the system, like the Mac menu bar and native context menus.

# Why would you use this instead of an IMAP client?

If you've ever used the Fastmail web interface you probably already know the answer, but for everyone else…

1. It's a lot faster. Compared to Apple's Mail.app for example (which is a good IMAP client!):

   - It resyncs way faster when you open the app, and uses a lot less data (JMAP is so much more efficient).
   - Moving between messages is quicker. With Mail.app there's often a slight lag between clicking a message and it rendering. In Fastmail, it's usually instant.

  - Add private memos to emails
  - Mute conversations to ignore replies
  - Pin important messages to the top of your inbox
  - Schedule messages to send in the future (and not need your laptop to be online then for it to work)
  - See related emails when you open your contacts.
  - Add events straight into your calendar
  - And much more (https://www.fastmail.com/features/).

# And finally…

This is just a choice. We hope this is something that some of our customers will love, but we're not backing away from our commitment to open standards and encourage everyone to find what works best for them.

I'll try to answer any other questions as I can.

The performance has been pretty decent, even with multi-gigabyte mailboxes.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485124

Points: 933

# Comments: 529

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457252

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

You can hack around it by converting to monthly billing (which will give you a credit), then immediately convert back to 3-year subscription (your credit will be used, so you'll only pay the difference). The end result is essentially identical to an early renewal.

I'd also like to reassure you that we don't immediately delete your account if renewal fails! We have a slow degradation process that gradually disables sending, then receiving, then finally access to anything other than billing if the account continues to go unpaid over several weeks. But our support team can (and do) delay this process if for whatever reason you are having difficulty making a payment and reach out to us.

True … but the reaction to this by the vast majority of users is to go "stupid password manager autofill not working again", and copy and paste their password out of the pw manager and paste it straight into the phishing site…