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Fastmail vs Proton

Keep your email private while upgrading to great search, super speed, leading open standards support, and so much more.

If you’re paying for email, naturally you expect a secure, private, ad-free service with personal support if you need it. But with Fastmail, you get so much more, at an even better price.

  • Great search, and your full email history. Our migration tool let’s you pull in all your email history so you have access to it in one place, wherever you are. Powerful search turns it into a gold mine of information, so you can make email your electronic memory.
  • Masked Email to protect your privacy. Get a unique email address for each login and your real address will stay private, stopping companies from tracking you across the web. We even offer seamless integration with supporting password managers such as 1Password and Bitwarden.
  • Leading open standards support. With Fastmail you can get full JMAP, IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV support, which means you are free to choose your favourite apps — or even use more than one — and they all stay in sync. It means you can integrate your address book and calendar with everything else on your phone. And it means you can easily migrate your data somewhere else should you ever need to.
  • Super speed. At Fastmail, we live up to our name. We built Fastmail to be lightning quick from the bottom up, because your time is too important to be spent waiting on email to load. Almost every action is instant — no more lag on every click. And it stays fast, even for seriously large mailboxes.

Building a better internet

We don’t just make a better email service. We also make email better for everyone with our work advancing open standards and leading industry co-operation. Your support helps keeps the internet open, and stops email becoming just another closed messaging service owned by big tech.

Moving made easy(ish)

Unfortunately, Proton doesn’t support open standards for us to import your email directly server-to-server. But we’ve made it as easy as we can. Here’s what to do:

  1. Download Proton’s Import-Export app. Follow their instructions to log in to your old Proton account and export the mail you wish to keep as an MBOX file.
  2. In your Fastmail account, go to Settings → Migration, and choose Proton and HEY, MBOX files.
  3. Click Upload files and select the MBOX files you wish to import. From here, you’ll see the names and sizes of the MBOX files that will be imported. On the right side, there is a drop down menu titled Destination where you can select a destination folder for the emails to be imported into. (The destination is set to the Inbox by default.)
  4. Click Start import.

You will need to keep the browser tab open while the import is in progress. If you have to stop the import, you can resume it at a later time by reimporting the same MBOX file. Messages that have already been successfully imported will not be imported again, so you do not have to worry about duplicates.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Does Fastmail offer free accounts?

    No. We offer a free, no-obligation trial so you can make sure Fastmail is right for you, but we proudly charge a fair price for a great service. As a paid-only provider, we only serve you, our customer. This means we have no split loyalties, no mining of your personal data, and no ads, ever.

  • Is my mail encrypted at Fastmail?

    All data is stored encrypted on disks inside locked racks, on machines owned and managed by Fastmail. Communication between our data centers, servers and your devices is always encrypted at the highest level, with full support for the latest standards including TLS 1.3 and Perfect Forward Secrecy.

  • Does Fastmail support end-to-end encryption?

    Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or S/MIME in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users, while the trade-offs are significant.

    End-to-end encryption is not just a checkbox. To work, it requires both sender and receiver to support it, and have a secure and private way of exchanging keys. This infrastructure simply doesn’t exist right now. Adding end-to-end support in our webmail also provides little extra security against server compromise, as the code doing the decryption is itself deployed from the server. Meanwhile, the trade-offs are severe: if the server can’t access the contents of the email it can’t offer fast, full text search. It can’t show message previews efficiently in your inbox. Spam checking can’t analyse the content. If you lose your private key, we can’t help you recover access to your email history.

    Ultimately, if you trust the server then end-to-end encryption doesn’t add any extra security (as emails are already encrypted at rest and in transit). If you don’t trust the server, you can’t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you don’t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.

  • Does Fastmail respond to law enforcement data requests?

    As an Australian company, we are required to respond to requests made through Australian law enforcement, and forbidden (by the Australian Privacy Principles, section 6) from disclosing information to foreign authorities. All requests are checked for legal validity before being actioned. We only respond to warrants for specific user data, we do not provide any kind of dragnet access. Our data transparency report shows how many requests we actioned each year.