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by wiradikusuma·4y ago·view on hn ↗
Google is not just email. It's the email client. It's the calendar. It's the calendar integration with email. How do you replace those?
3 comments
> How do you replace those?

These days? Pretty easily!

Fastmail also has an email client, and a calendar. The calendar is integrated into its email service too. And the calendar integrates really well with iCal / CalDAV. I find fastmail syncs calendar entries between my apple devices more reliably than apple's own icloud.

The big hole in fastmail's offering is that they have no replacement for google docs & spreadsheets.

Microsoft Outlook + 365 (as others have suggested) also does pretty much everything gsuite does.

One thing I like about Fastmail is the ability to serve static web content directly from the “Files” section of their apps/website.

Since they already manage the domain for email, spinning up static sites at subdomains is really easy and really nice.

This is a huge feature for me. I had set up my EE consultancy and even though I'm no longer doing any side work the Fatmail hosting feature allows my to keep a professional-looking static site for no extra cost with a place to post periodic blog updates and even the beginnings of a niche knowledge base. I love it!
I almost did this, but they don't have rsync access to the Files space. It's really nice with a static site being able to use rsync to just update the changed files.
I use ncftp from a CI/CD job to push my files to Fastmail; it has a sync option

Edit: I’m pretty sure the sync options are part of the put command

I'm a new fastmail customer. Fastmail doesn't control my domain how does this feature work?
Fastmail recommends setting them as the DNS nameserver for your domain. If you do that, then they'll automatically add any records needed to host websites with them. (They'll also set up records for stuff like DKIM and SPF for you, which helps your email stay out of spam filters.)
> they have no replacement for google docs & spreadsheets

I'm happy about this. Those are really complicated apps to support; they'd have to spend a ton of time and money and dedicate new teams to them (even if they "just" hosted OSS alternatives) which would raise the cost of my subscription and take away from their core competency (e-mail). And it may result in proprietary features, making it a lock-in device.

I don't mind losing out on bundled document editing apps, etc. by not giving my email money to Google or Microsoft, but I do wish the smaller providers saw email and calendars as two sides of the same service as I do. I use Migadu for email, but their calendar offering is still in beta and very primitive. So I use Fruux, to support a small open source company. But i've had support messages completely ignored by Fruux and the cost of paying for 2 micro services feels disproportionately expensive.
And Google Photos.
That’s not part of Workspace and it will continue working.