Paid email

I paid for email service for the first time. Fastmail is getting rid of their ‘Guest’ (ie free) accounts. I’ve had an account since β‰ˆ2002. I remained under the 26MB limit for that whole time. I don’t use it for much, but some of the contacts are important. I didn’t want to have to deal with changing them and risking missing some.

Their plans seem a bit expensive to a miser like myself who’s always had $0 per month email before this. Luckily, they gave me a 50% discount as incentive. With a three year plan, that made it less than $2 a month. Just low enough to seem not-too-bad. I have three years to decide if their regular price is worth it.

Pluses I see of going for it:

  • don’t need to change address contacts / services have
  • privacy / security focused, a good balance for regular users
  • can hook my domains up to them and have them all go to the same account
  • more advanced controls and higher limits than Dreamhost (my webhost)
  • file storage that can be used for backup, static websites, etc
  • can use them for DNS if I want
  • spread risk of problems with one provider

Minuses:

  • costs money
  • no labels / tags like GMail (folders are for the birds) and no plans to implement them anytime soon
  • takes a bit more setup than Dreamhost (my registrar)
  • I’m considering using something like mailpile to store my email, lessening the importance of the mail service it goes through
  • long term lock-in for good price