For the past week or so I’ve been comparing other free services to Gmail and extolling Gmail’s virtues. However to be honest with you I actually stopped using Gmail for the most part after I wrote the first post. I didn’t mislead you dear reader because I did not switch to a free e-mail service. I just went back to a service I had been using since 2002, FastMail. I like FastMail so much I actually pay to use it.
The reason I love FastMail so much is it’s old school e-mail. No Ajax to bring things to a grinding halt. Most importantly when I delete my e-mails from FastMail I know they’re deleted, unlike Gmail. I’m usually not one of those privacy zealots but I find it a little creepy that even if you delete your emails from Gmail they’re still not ‘deleted’. And personally I never cared for the conversation mode of Gmail. The fact that you could not turn it off was, well, a turn off.
FastMail doesn’t have unlimited aliasing but has enough for my needs.
Fastmail also does one thing that Gmail doesn’t. Multiple signatures for different aliases.
It also has a plethora of available skins including my favorite Infinite Blackness.
The main reason I stopped using FastMail to begin with is because I couldn’t be notified of my FastMail from the iGoogle start page. Now there’s widget for iGoogle that checks your POP mail so now I can.
It was fun Gmail, then you got too slow.
The Trench Reynolds Report 