Why customers trust Fastmail

We’ve been providing email since 1999. Over 25 years later, we’re still here, still independent, still employee-owned, and still focused on one thing: giving you the best email experience possible.

But we know trust isn’t built by what a company says about itself. It’s built by what customers say when they’re talking to each other. So we went looking. We searched numerous reviews, forums and tech blogs to understand what people think about Fastmail and why they choose to stay. Here’s what we found.

You’re the customer, not the product

This phrase came up more often than any other when people spoke about us. Across all of the forums and reviews we searched, the single biggest reason people trust Fastmail is the simplicity of our business model: you pay us for email, and we provide you with feature-rich email. It’s that simple.

When a business you deal with makes its money by serving you, not by selling your data to someone else, trust naturally follows.

Real humans, real support

This is the theme that surprises people most. At a time when reaching a real person at a tech company feels increasingly rare, all our customers can raise a support ticket and have that ticket directed to a real person. We saw in the forums that one of the most upvoted reasons for choosing Fastmail is that if something goes wrong, you can reach a real person without needing to write a viral blog post to get attention.

History — we have been around since 1999, and we aren’t going anywhere

Email is infrastructure. People always want to know that the service they have trusted for decades will still be there tomorrow. Fastmail’s history, dating back even before Gmail, is a consistent signal of trust across all reviews we found.

Innovative features such as Masked Email and aliases changed the way many people manage their online identity

Our alias feature and the Masked Email integration (with 1Password) are among the most frequently celebrated features across the reviews. Customers can have many aliases, and create a unique email address for different services, subscriptions and vendors. This was seen as transformative for many users; they were able to identify which companies sold their data, be able to isolate spam to a single disposable address, and maintain different accounts for personal and professional use — all from one location.

Across the reviews we read, custom domains and aliases came up repeatedly as the tipping point — the features that turned consideration into a decision to switch.

Speed and usability — “It is fast, clean and just works”

Our name isn’t a coincidence. Reviews across Trustpilot, Capterra, and Hacker News all describe the web interface as noticeably faster and lighter than Gmail’s. Add to this that there are no ads, our users have a clean, focused interface where the only thing competing for your attention is simply your actual email.

Open standards mean freedom

Our tech-savvy users value our commitment to open standards — IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV and now our very own JMAP protocol. We are also a major contributor to the open-source Cyrus IMAP project, providing a dedicated team of developers.

What this means for all our customers is that you are not locked in. You can use different email clients such as Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook. If you ever decide to leave, your data and your domain go with you. In short, your email works with virtually any app, and it belongs to you — not us.

Why does any of this matter?

We didn’t write these reviews. Our customers did — on open forums that we don’t control, in conversations we weren’t part of. The themes are consistent — people trust Fastmail because we are transparent about what we do, honest about what we don’t do, and focused on keeping their trust every single day.

Your email is personal. Your email is important. You deserve a provider that treats it that way.