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I've been trying FastMail for the past two months or so and have been very impressed; it's actually better than GMail in many ways. Most importantly to me, it seems to be quite a bit faster than GMail for me.

One problem I've had is with their spam filtering. I've marked everything spammy as Spam (some 800 messages so far), but I can't figure out how to get things marked as non-spam (so that the personal database gets enabled). I've setup auto-non-spam folders and a lot of messages get routed into those, but they're not being counted as non-spam. I've also moved a few messages manually, and they also don't get counted.

2 comments

I'm interested in quantitative evidence of "faster". I have 1.5GB of mail in gmail that I sync to fastmail and gmail is significantly, noticeably faster for me. Especially search.

I am skeptical of performance claims especially by people (not referring to you, but to the author of the post) who think mail.app is fast. Mail.app needs several seconds to do things that gmail does in 50 milliseconds, like load a thread with 100 posts, or free text search.

If you use a custom Sieve script, you can definitely whitelist certain addresses, domains, subjects, body text, etc. Google "fastmail sieve" for more info on this.

Also, if you haven't talked to support about this, I'd definitely recommend it. They've always been super helpful with me.