Put a digital label on your emails for a full understanding of what’s in your inbox.

If you love using a label-maker to get organized at home or work, then you’ll love labels in Fastmail, where you can label emails to see what you got. Add labels to a message to show what it is without having to open it.

Bring in Gmail accounts and we'll set up your labels automatically. Or use Fastmail rules to apply labels for you. Either way, it’s easy to get started with labels that will keep your inbox neat and tidy.

Use labels to categorize mail in your inbox

We know people prefer to handle their mail in different ways. Some of us like the simplicity of knowing mail can be in only one folder. Some of us want to apply more than one label to categorize messages in a few ways. Fastmail lets you choose what works for you.

Here’s a way you can use labels to process your emails. Use a “To-Do” label on emails that create tasks for you. Emails with the “To-Do” label may require another label to give you more information. Labels like “Urgent” or “Someday” help you to prioritize tasks.

For general inbox organization, “To-Do” labelled mail can get even more identifiers such as “Family,” “Travel,” or “Receipts.”

Make messages stand out with color

To take this even further, you can add color to establish priority. For an email you are keeping to reference, the label may be a cool color like blue. For emails that create tasks or need responses, a bright color like red is more eye-catching.

Colorful labels gives you sense of what’s in your email at-a-glance. If your personal mail has a green label, and work email is orange, a mostly green inbox could indicate you need to find time to take care of some personal stuff.

Labels give you smarter searches

To bring all your associated mail up at once, use the advanced search bar to pull up everything assigned to a label. Now, you can apply a group action all these email, which can be very convenient. It’s also just helpful sometimes to pull up everything together.

An advanced search can help you to quickly find all messages with more than one label.

Fastmail rules apply labels for you

You can start using labels today by creating rules that will apply labels to mail automatically. To set this up, create a rule in Fastmail to add a label to new and old mail from any sender. Now you have an easy way to reference all this related mail at once.

Create more rules to apply labels to mail that you want to stand out or collect. If you are searching for a new job, you might want to attach a “Job search” label to all related messages, but an “Active” label on messages from companies where you have an interview.

To use labels, upgrade your rules in Settings → Rules. Once this is done, go to Settings → Preferences. Under Mail, choose to organize messages with Labels.

Fastmail labels are designed to be truly useful, customizable, and a delight to use. Labels give you a heads up to what’s in your email at first glance, and this is a helpful way to start your day.

Only you can unlock the Fastmail app with a glance, touch, or PIN on your phone or tablet.

Email is the gateway to our lives. It holds personal details, the accounts we use, and our whereabouts. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t want others to see your email if you ever pass them your device.

Now you have the option to enable screen lock, which uses your phone’s security settings to hide your email behind biometrics like fingerprint or face recognition, or a PIN code.

You have an extra layer of protection to share your screen, and an easier way to get back in yourself.

Share your device while protecting your email

From time to time, others might use your devices. Your kids may use your tablet for games and learning, or you may hand off your phone to a coworker or friend to flip through pictures or take a look at something.

In case your device is set aside or further passed around while unlocked, screen lock can help.

An enhancement, not a replacement

Screen lock is handy, but it’s not a replacement for your account’s master password.

As always, we recommend that you use a strong password protection for the overall security of your account and turn on two-step verification.

Works with your device settings

If you already use your face or fingerprint to unlock your phone or tablet, you can enable screen lock, and Fastmail will use your existing lock to keep your email safe.

You’ll save time using touch, face identification, or a PIN to identify yourself because these authentication mechanisms let you access your account with minimal effort.

If you have at least one unlock method on your device, you can turn on Fastmail’s screen lock in Fastmail apps under Settings → Device Settings. Otherwise, it will be off by default.


Every day we strive to save you time, eliminate extra hassle, and keep your data private. Enjoy the convenience of screen lock on all your devices!

Now more than ever, it’s time for email.

For years, productivity discussions have talked about focus, distractions, getting into the flow, etc., etc. With the coronavirus pandemic, uninterrupted time is even more precious. Many of us are forced to balance our work with home, health, school, and hobbies in one shared space. Our productivity and focus is suffering.

All along, there’s been something that we use every day, which can help. It's email!

Email encourages high-quality communication

Through all the interruptions and turmoil in your life, email is a constant. Everyone has email, and every email system can email every other. It lets us stay connected, but doesn’t demand an immediate response. You can read it in your own time, and have the space to craft a thoughtful reply.

As we scramble to adjust to this new way of working, we're discovering that video conferences are exhausting. Without in-person communication, the incessant instant messaging chatter encourages shallow work, which leaves us feeling unproductive.

Everything has to be RIGHT NOW!

In the office, you can see if someone looks busy with something else and not bother them—or interrupt if it’s urgent. Without that awareness, everything feels equally urgent.

Slow down, you move too fast

Things move slowly in the email world, as anyone following the progress of JMAP from initial announcement (2014) to eventual standardization (2019) knows! This is a good thing.

People enjoy the continuity of email continuing to work exactly the same way, day after day. Email is stable and dependable, and you can just get your job done. In this rapidly shifting world, stability is even more valuable.

Gotta make the morning last

The advantage of email is precisely that it’s not immediate. It’s ok to deal with your emails on your own time, and you don’t have to process them in order of delivery. Every email has its own unread status, so it’s easy to pick out immediate messages to deal with, and come back to the others later.

The world has over 50 years of experience with email. Email workflow can adapt to your needs, with powerful concepts like filtering, folders, and flagging or pinning.

Fastmail knows email

Fastmail is one the longest-running, and continually growing, email companies in the world. We’ve been working with email since 1995, and we understand the importance of permanence and of email being your electronic memory. Our fast and powerful search helps you quickly recall those important memories.

We also understand the importance of working without interruption and keeping organized, with snooze and VIP contacts giving you control over when you’re interrupted by new email.

We're continuing to make it easier for you to be in control of your email, with more powerful filters launched recently, and labels in beta now!

Respect your own time

If you’re not using any of our filtering or productivity tools yet, don’t stress about it, but do set aside time to experiment. Set up a workflow that makes your email work for you.  

Your time is valuable. We’re here building the system lets you get in, deal with your email on your own schedule, and get on with the rest of your life. Many sites want you to spend more time on them. We want you to deal with email quickly and have more time for other priorities.

Stop your attention being stolen one notification at a time. Take advantage of email to remain well informed without being overwhelmed.

Rules and filters get you through your inbox quickly, so you have more time for what matters.

Reading email is something you do every day, which is why it should be an enjoyable (and a fast) experience! A constant stream of new messages, however, can create a big mess.

Fastmail lets you create rules that do something with your mail automatically so that your inbox is manageable. You can tackle your day with an organized inbox, and still have time to do what you love.

Rules manage mail to de-clutter your inbox

Newer emails at the top of your inbox tend to get the most attention, which is why this space is prime real estate. Spare this area from mail that doesn’t matter, and you’ll reach an empty inbox, aka “Inbox Zero,” by the end of the day!

Create rules to send anything that you don't need to look at daily into folders, and use filters to get rid of junk mail. Keep your life organized by using folders to collect mail that is alike. Our customers use rules creatively to bring order to their inbox.

"I have a number of domains running through Fastmail. I use the rules to allocate email from each domain to their own folders." —Stan M., Fastmail user

Create rules that highlight mail that matters

Rules that you create can bring attention to your most important mail. Mail that matters can be pinned, forwarded, set to send alerts, filed into a specific folder, or a combination of some of these.

Get alerts for the messages you're always looking out for, such as messages from VIP contacts like your spouse, partner, teacher, or colleagues.

You can do more than one thing with important mail. For example, incoming mail from VIPs can also be pinned to the top of your inbox as soon as it arrives.

Filter out anything that slows you down

Filters work to get rid of mail that steals your time like spam or mail from blocked senders.

You can also create rules that put away mail that you do not need daily. It can be marked as read, archived, filed away in a folder, or deleted.

Rules catch all mail based on sender, subject line, or any other information you use to find mail. (Pro tip: You can now take the results of any search and turn it into a rule).

"My inbox is for unexpected emails, everything else is filtered and sorted in their own folders." —@etixxx, Fastmail user

Customized for every area of your life

It’s difficult to function with an inbox that’s cluttered, but rules put mail in its place.

Create folders for the areas of your life or the things you like to read. For example, you can make folders called “Volunteering” and “Gardening newsletters." Rules collect these messages together so you can read them at the right time.


Customize Fastmail to fit your unique needs. You’re the expert. We provide the tools to make it work best for you.

COVID-19 is changing the world as we know it. In this time of uncertainty, you can count on email to keep you connected.

You don't need to worry about your Fastmail service. We’re taking care of you and our team by working remotely from four continents. You can still depend on reliable service, quality products, and round-the-clock customer support.

Virtual tools are crucial now that we’re social distancing. Email allows you to do business and talk to loved ones. Calendars can structure a new daily routine. Contacts, notes, and files keep essential information close at hand.

We’re keeping you up and running

We’re doing our part to contain the spread of COVID-19 by asking our employees to work from home, and we’ve moved all our meetings online. Our employees benefit from comprehensive healthcare coverage for them and their families, a healthy work-life balance, and plenty of paid sick leave. (Sound good to you? We're hiring).

These measures ensure we’re always working at our fullest human capacity, to bring you the best, most stable email service and top of the line products.

We’re leading with our values

You’re likely feeling extra stress about many things right now. We want to assure you that as our customer, you are at the center of everything we do. Email is one thing you can leave to us.

Reach out to our customer support, and you can expect timely, helpful assistance. Access your account on your desktop, phone, or tablet and enjoy fully functioning, connected tools.

We’re ready for future challenges

We’ve been working towards adapting to a changing world for some time. As we move forward together, we see email as an essential business. Now more than ever, you need connection and support.

Long ago, we decided to be the human alternative for email. It’s moments like this that we see we made the right choice. We promise to bring you thoughtful privacy-focused products, and service that provides connection, resilience, and support.

We’re committed to keeping you up and running and feeling good about your email. Stay safe and healthy out there!

Clean up your inbox with filters and rules that organize mail automatically.

Fastmail helps you manage new and existing messages quickly and easily for a tidy inbox. Our latest update to rules, and the addition of filters, takes what rules can do to the next level.

Filters and rules process mail by sending particular messages to folders, forwarding it to another account, pinning mail to the top of your inbox, or marking it as read.  

Setting up rules to do what you want with your mail is more clear and convenient than ever before. Read on for more details.

Create a rule from a search

You can create a rule from any search in Fastmail. We’ve improved how we match messages when they arrive, so that this is now possible.

As you search through your mail, the option to create a new rule based on your search results appears next to the search field. Select "Create Rule" to open the rule builder tool. You can create and edit rules using the rule builder from this handy spot.

Do more than one thing at a time

Fastmail’s new rule builder tool also allows you apply more than one action to mail.

For example, you can send a message from a VIP contact to a folder and pin it to the top of your inbox.

Apply rules to the past, present, or both

While traditional rules run when a new message arrives, Fastmail rules can be applied to your entire inbox. Regardless of if you used rules in the past, you can organize your full inbox today.

You have more choices for the mail you want to clean up, be it new mail, mail already in your inbox, or everything.

Preview the messages a rule will catch

To check if a new rule will work as expected, Fastmail shows a preview in your mailbox as you’re creating it.

Want to filter out sales from your favorite clothing brand, but not mail about new orders and returns? A preview will confirm your rule collects the messages you want.

While you won't be able to preview old rules, those rules will be converted to new rules and can be edited. For example, you can do something new, like add more than one action, to a rule you’ve already set up.

Forward, quiet, or delete mail instantly

Set up rules to forward mail to another account, such as newsletter subscriptions that are also relevant to your work email address. Or, have mail you don’t care to look at day-to-day to be "mark as read” as it arrives so it won’t catch your eye.

If there is something you never want to see, automate it to "delete to trash," so it doesn't add clutter to your inbox.

Block senders to never get unwanted mail

You create rules to do something with the mail you want, while filters work to keep out the mail you don't want to recieve. In your filters and rules settings, you can easily add or edit your blocked senders list to filter out mail from blocked senders. (You can also block senders using the "More" drop-down menu on the contact's card).

Your filters and rules settings screens is where you can create and edit rules too.

New Fastmail filters and rules tame messy inboxes. Upgrade your rules in settings for an inbox that's working smartly for you.

An updated interface brings better usability and readability to Fastmail’s mobile apps.

Getting things done on your mobile devices just got a whole lot easier. Our apps are updated to match how you use email on the go—whether you’re trying to find something or get through your inbox quickly.

It’s the same Fastmail you know and love, with a modern new look, spacious layout for tapping, single-handed navigation, and a readable typeface. Now, there’s more to love about Fastmail on your device.

Key touch-points come to you

Thumbs are the most crucial finger for mobile navigation and are used to hit most icons and buttons. You probably do this without noticing.

To bring important touch-points to you, we’ve put them under your thumb. Add a new item in the lower right corner of your screen, be it a new email, calendar event, note, or file.

Slide to see all your tools

Find all of your tools with one gesture. Use the bottom navigation slider to go to any area of Fastmail you want. Jump from email to calendar, or notes to settings, without lifting a finger.

A thumb-friendly experience means you can navigate single-handedly.

Better productivity using calendars too

See all of your calendars and calendar groups on a new left-side menu. It’s consistent with where you look for email folders in your inbox. Files users will see a new menu here too!

With our new design, you’ll know where to tap to change how you view your calendars by month, week, or day. You’ll see it right away!

Style updates, so you get the most out of your time

A de-cluttered workspace is necessary to breeze through your day. Our style changes are all about helping you achieve productivity and efficiency.

Modern-looking icons freshen up the left and bottom navigation. Enjoy luxurious space for browsing around a small touchscreen with a new finger-friendly design.

Fonts are larger, and we’re using an extremely readable typeface so that you process what you’re looking at right away.


Building products for people is what we do best at Fastmail. Get back to your day with mobile updates that are respectful of your time and thoughtful about all that you do.

Download the Fastmail app for your phone and tablet on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Everyone deserves privacy and security online. Here are steps you can take.

Privacy and security shouldn’t be a privilege only available to the technical elite.

You deserve to know how to protect your personal information. You should also be able to choose who you trust to handle it. Nobody wants their data given to third parties without their understanding or permission.

As a Fastmail customer, you’ve already prioritized email privacy. However, how can you take your privacy further? What can you do to protect your friends and family?

Start small and don’t let perfectionism hold you back

Once you start investigating what you can do to protect yourself, it can be bewildering. There’s a lot of terminologies, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the tools and options.

However, perfect is the enemy of good enough! You don’t have to do it all in one go. Pick one thing and start using it in a couple of places. Every step you take is a worthwhile improvement toward better privacy habits.

Use strong and unique passwords for every account

Pick a password manager and move, one account at a time, toward having a different password for every account. Password managers generate and save passwords in one place so that you can use complex passwords with ease.

Two-step verification adds another layer of protection

Install an authenticator app on your phone and set up two-step verification (also known as two-factor authentication or 2FA) for your most important online accounts, like your email and your bank.

When you’re ready, you can move to a hardware device, like a Yubikey that works great with Fastmail.

Check to see if your password has been compromised

Sign up for notifications from haveibeenpwned.com, which will tell you if your email address has shown up in a data leak.

You’ll also be alerted to the type of information published in the breach, like your password.

Share what you know to help others

Once you’re comfortable with your process, talk to those around you. Tell others what you do to protect yourself, or share this and other resources.

Help demystify the technology, make it the norm to understand why privacy and security matters, and be supportive about what steps people can take to protect themselves.

Each year, January 28 is Data Privacy Day. Let’s work together to increase privacy awareness on this day and all year long!

Fastmail brings dark mode to email, calendars, and contacts, delighting users who have been awaiting its release.

Dark mode, a hotly anticipated theme that reduces the light from your screen, expands to all corners of Fastmail.

It swaps traditional light and dark color use on devices so that surfaces are dim, and the text is bright. For some users, this a preferred way of working. Now it's easy to get on all Fastmail apps.

Dark mode follows the settings on your mobile device

You don’t have to do anything to get dark mode in Fastmail if your device is already set on dark. Just open your app, and you're all set!

If you don’t already use dark mode on your devices, you can switch to it in your iPhone settings under Display & Brightness. On Android, you’ll find it in your display settings.

Even more dark on desktop

You’ll get better blackout coverage on desktop when using the Fastmail dark theme. The theme was previously available, but it’s been rewritten to further reduce white backgrounds in your email content.

Turn it on in your Settings → Preferences. Once you’re all set up, you can experience the benefits.

Highlights the content of your emails

Fastmail is where you go to read emails, and dark mode puts the words you’re looking for front and center.

Dark theme brings forwards text, a possible time-saver for quick-moving readers who prefer this reversal of light and dark.

Saves energy, for you and your phone

If you spend a lot of time on email, some people find that a dark background creates a more enjoyable viewing experience.

If this theme reads more clearly to you, and the dark background creates a sense of calm, you'll likely get more done. Your mobile device may join you. On many devices, dark mode helps you to save power, so your charge lasts longer.

You read email how you want

Email features should always be about giving you options and control. Fastmail gives you the power to use themes that work best for you.

If you’ve been waiting eagerly for dark mode, thank you for your enthusiasm! Listening to our customers helps us bring the most desired email features to Fastmail. Follow us on Twitter to find out when new features are available for testing.

Try dark mode and see how you like it. Download the Fastmail app for your phone and tablet on Apple App Store and Google Play.

In our final blog post for the year, Fastmail’s CEO reflects on our achievements during this 20th year of the company, and looks forward to the future. In his (not so) secret shadow role as Fastmail’s CMO (chief meme officer) and experienced dad-joke wrangler, Bron brings his signature style.

A 20th year refresh

We spent a lot of effort this year looking deeply at who we are, who our customers are, and how we tell our story.

You can see this reflected in our new logo, colour scheme, and marketing - highlighting the personal touch. Our service has always focused on enabling connection between people, and respecting your time. FastMail became Fastmail to match how we saw others writing our name. We redesigned our settings screens with the same goal - to help new users get set up fast, and to allow experienced users to quickly change the settings they need, then get back on task.

Of course our new Fastmail logo is also designed to fit well alongside the logo of our other product: Topicbox, the electronic memory for your team. Where the Fastmail product is designed for individuals to communicate and hold their own electronic memory, Topicbox expands that concept out to teams who may not all use Fastmail for their email.

Having a central location lets teams keep their memory in one easily searchable place, with the same thoughtful interface and quick access to the information they need. As with many organisations, we use Slack for our real-time connection and use Topicbox as our long term memory. This year we wrote about how to get the best out of both immediate and permanent communication tools over on our Topicbox blog.

Powerful new features

We know that our customers are accessing their email more frequently, or even primarily, from pocket-sized devices. Some people (including many of our staff) have both work and personal accounts, so you can now have multiple users logged in to our app.

Mobile devices are famously a source of interruptions. Our apps are there to serve you, so we give you control over who gets immediate access to your time with VIP contacts and notification controls.

We also help you see email at the time you want, with the long awaited snooze feature.

And of course we all make mistakes, so this was also the year that we added support for undo send. Amusingly enough (looking back on it now), some things were missed when testing this feature and it caused annoying bugs at rollout, with emails being put into the wrong outbound queue so they weren’t authenticated properly. We wished we had an “undo announce feature” button while we scrambled to fix issues in those first few hours!

And we’re not just about email. Calendars help you organise your life, and this year we added calendar search and side-by-side view to assist with planning.

You can see more about what we ourselves have said on our blog, and what others have said about us on our press page.

Enabled by open standards

Many of the great features above were either directly enabled by, or made much easier by, our favourite open standard: JMAP. We’re really proud of our work - and our technical staff continue to be delighted with how easy it is to build on top of JMAP-based APIs.

Of course, the work isn’t done yet! The JMAP working group at IETF recently rechartered to cover both Calendars and Contacts as well, and we continue to work with the community on the open standards which power your Fastmail experience.

It’s not just open standards, we’re also significant contributors to open source software, particularly the Cyrus IMAPd server, where we build the reference implementation of all our JMAP work.

Supporting our community

All members of our executive team are strongly active in our communities.

I’m a chair on three separate working groups at the IETF as well as acting as a liaison between CalConnect (who we hosted in October) and the IETF. I also love to talk, appearing on the Techtonic podcast recently.

Helen, our COO, was nominated for the RAD awards as one of Philadelphia's best entrepreneurs of the year.

Our CTO, Rik, was recently recognised as one of the most influential technologists in Philadelphia. Rik is also deeply involved in the community for the Perl programming language - a language which we use and are proud to sponsor.

And Nicola, our Chief of Staff, loves talking almost as much as I do. She has spoken at multiple conferences and meetups this year about all things privacy, ethics and standards: most recently at YOW! CTO Summit. Nicola also takes on much of the organisation for CTO School Melbourne, which we sponsor as part of our contribution to our local tech scene.

Many other Fastmail staff have presented at conferences and meetups throughout the year, and will continue to in the future. We love engaging with the world and sharing our experience. If you're at the privacy-themed Linux Conference Australia in January 2020, some of our team will see you there. They'll be loaded with stickers!

2020 vision

What a coincidence, our 20th anniversary year ends as we go into a year with even more 20s in the name. I’m sure that was the most important consideration when Rob and Jeremy decided they wanted an email service for the busy professional back in 1999!

And now it's time to farewell one of the world's favourite numerical puns:

Goodbye old friend.

Ever since I was a small child I remember seeing organisations talking about their long term plans as their “2020 vision”. No longer! It is the end of having “2020 vision” about the future.

Seriously though, I can see a little way into the future. For sure the highly anticipated “Dark Mode” will be arriving soon to protect those tired eyes, and we’ll be continuing to deliver productivity enhancements to make your email experience smoother and more efficient, surfacing the information you need, when you need it.

Last year we stopped sending newsletters with GDPR concerns. This year we built a system to create per-user non-identifiable aliases for our users, and we recently used it to send a newsletter to customers who requested them through their settings. You can also read the newsletter online. One of the things we asked in this newsletter was for feedback on what our customers love about our service. We've already received tons of useful feedback, which will help us prioritise the things that our customers love, and inform our future development plans.

Thanks for reading, and thanks as always for using Fastmail!

Cheers,

Bron.

In celebration of 20 years of Fastmail, we’ve interviewed our co-founder, Rob Mueller, to discuss the past, present, and future.

How did you email in 1999? Twenty years ago, Fastmail thought people would pay for a premium email service that put their needs first. And what about now?

People have always wanted excellent email service, that’s a given. In an industry dominated by big tech companies, people are growing concerned about online privacy and long for one-to-one customer support. Our work is even more relevant today by focusing on the human needs surrounding email.

In celebration of 20 years of Fastmail, we’ve interviewed our co-founder, Rob Mueller, to discuss the past, present, and future. Rob is a systems architect and core developer working on Fastmail through today.

Fastmail is 20 years old! What thoughts and emotions come to mind when you think about that?

Thinking back, my first experience with the internet was when I started university. By 1999 when we started Fastmail, I had only been using the internet for seven years, so as clichéd as it seems, I certainly wouldn’t have expected to be still working on Fastmail 20 years later.

Working at Fastmail is a job I still enjoy going to every day. It's something I feel lucky and grateful to be a part of, with technically interesting and diverse work, and a great team of people creating a best in class product that customers love.

Where did you draw inspiration to start and build Fastmail?

Jeremy Howard [who co-founded Fastmail along with Rob Mueller] had the main inspiration for building Fastmail. As a management consultant working on customer sites, he had to use remote email systems regularly. The options available at the time (Hotmail and RocketMail) were not designed for professionals, and so he decided there was a market for a paid, professional email service. As a software developer, he brought me on board to help build that product, but it quickly became a partnership and an ongoing company we worked on together.

Twenty years later, Fastmail is still delivering on that original idea. These days delivering a professional service is more involved than ever. People expect a feature-rich service with more reliability and better performance than ever. With all the awareness around services collecting and selling user data, people really want a privacy-focused service that doesn’t package up and share their online profile or data with others. Fortunately, as a company that’s always had a straightforward paid subscription model and never relied on advertising or profiling, protecting people’s privacy is an inherent feature for us and something we continue to champion and enhance.

Would you say you have met or surpassed your original vision?

We’ve certainly exceeded the original vision in so many ways. Technically our product is much more sophisticated than what we originally built, but at the same time faster and easier for users to use. The company is bigger and more successful than I ever expected it to be. With our work on JMAP and other open standards, we’ve gone from just building an email service to being thought leaders in the email, contacts, and calendaring space and continuing to drive the entire ecosystem forward.

What accomplishments make you the most proud?

From a technical standpoint, taking our original work on the modern UI we released in 2011 and then building and refining that into what became JMAP, and guiding that through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to become an RFC standard was a lot of work and a great achievement for the company and everyone involved.

From a personal standpoint, I’m so happy that we were able to take the company from a small group of people working together in one room into a more traditional organizational structure, while at the same time preserving a great atmosphere for people to work in and driving technical excellence.

Where do you expect Fastmail to go over the next 20 years?

Some have claimed “email is dead” over the years, but that’s not what we see. New communication systems come along, but they tend to augment the existing ones in different ways. Email is still the largest open federated communication protocol on the internet. Any new protocol tends to be vendor-specific and tries to lock people into their system. In that way, email continues to have a unique place that I think will keep it around for a long time. I believe that means Fastmail still has a bright future going forward.

Getting email, contacts, and calendaring right in a business setting with all the sharing and different interaction scenarios is a difficult problem. This is why there's really only a couple of companies that truly have large business ready email, contact, and calendar systems. I feel Fastmail’s involvement in standards work has allowed us to learn all the complexities of these interactions, and it’s something we’ll be focusing more on over the next decade.

Fastmail, now 20 years old, keeps evolving to make your life easier.

Our cake has 20 candles, and we’re celebrating by releasing more helpful features for you. Email technology has changed over the last two decades, and we’re leading that charge by releasing JMAP, a new modern open standard for email, and user-focused features and benefits that put people first.

Growing through the years

In the late 1990s, internet use exploded, and over time having an email address became a societal expectation, just like having a phone number. Still today, email is one of the most widespread and heavily adopted communications tools.

When Fastmail started in 1999, internet service providers or webmail sites offered email; however, many of these options were slow and cluttered with ads. Fastmail founders felt there should be better experiences for people using email.

People want to work smarter and faster, and everyone wants to be treated with respect. Fastmail has differentiated itself by providing a quality product, with excellent email delivery, an ad-free and thoughtful interface, top features, and expert customer support to boot.

Service you can trust

Our relevance has increased in an era where free email services monetize user data, which costs people their privacy. Scan the headlines today, and you’ll find that you can’t trust many big tech companies. The tech sector’s dirty secret is that free services come with a price. Fastmail leaves advertisers out and uses a straighforward fee-for-service model that’s fair to customers and protects user data.

It’s not easy to build a trusted company, but we do so by being clear about who we are and working hard every day to deliver reliable service and one-to-one customer support. When email is on your side, you spend less time worrying about your data and your service.

Fast because we save you time

In recent years, the “fast” in Fastmail refers to spending less time on email. You get better productivity with time-saving features and technical excellence. When you open Fastmail, your mail loads instantly. It’s speed you have to see to believe!

To keep you working faster, in the past year, we’ve released snooze, undo send, notification settings, multi-user support in our mobile apps, VIP contacts, new calendar views and calendar search, and side-by-side calendars and calendar groups.

You’ll have fun discovering the many new Fastmail features that uplift your quality of life!

Better onboarding, new import tools, more ways to share

Our user base is growing, and that’s good news for you! New users help us bring more features to our platform. To welcome more new users, we’ve overhauled our onboarding process, which means that you can tell your friends, “It’s easy to move over to Fastmail.”

Beyond making life easier for new sign-ups, current customers can more seamlessly bring in new calendars, domains, or additional email accounts. Our improved import tool gives you a full, worry-free sync!

Anyone looking for a private email alternative, where you don’t have to give up the features you love to move away from big tech providers, are at home at Fastmail. Give peace-of-mind to the people you care about the most each time you share Fastmail.

Making a better future for email

Academics spend years and years working to publish new internet standards, so it’s pretty surprising when a company puts in the effort. But in doing so for the greater good, the work is open for future innovation instead of being locked-up for profit.

We’re pleased to introduce JMAP to the world, a new open internet standard that makes email better for everyone.

JMAP not only opens up a new wave of innovation around email management, but it means developers can make tools for everyone, not just one dominant provider like Gmail.

Your support of Fastmail is making JMAP possible and that’s one of the reasons why Fastmail is email you can feel good about.

You're the essential piece!

Email is something you use every day. It can bog you down or raise you up, which is why email on your side is something worth paying for. If you’ve been with us 20 years or you just signed up, thank you for allowing us to keep you connected.

We look forward to a future of making email everything you need it to be. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

App improvements, both available now and coming soon, help you get the most out of Fastmail’s power wherever you go.

Email power users know that thoughtful features make your life easier. Fastmail keeps getting better so that you get the most out of each day. You may have noticed our momentum around app enhancements, and we’re just getting out the gate.

The features below put you in control so that your email works how you want it. Grab your phone or tablet and follow along to see which of these new features has hit your Fastmail account.

Deal with emails when you want with snooze

With Fastmail apps, you’re in control — even over the moment an email arrives! Snooze an email to have it come back at a better time for you. Learn more

Undo send gives you a second chance at a better email

Have you sent an email too soon? Undo send gives you the chance to cancel an email up to 15 seconds after sending. Learn more

Multi-user support puts all your accounts in one app

You likely have an email address for home and for business. Maybe you’re using additional accounts to keep your prime email address private or filter out more spam. For however you use email, you can seamlessly manage and switch between all your accounts. Learn more

Give priority to people you care about most with VIP contacts

Quickly find mail from the people you interact with the most. A gold star helps these contacts and their messages stand out. Get notifications from only your VIPs to work with less distractions. Learn more

Notification controls to get alerts for important emails only

Set up alerts for VIP contacts, important folders, or only for mail from people you know. Notifications go from distracting to respectful with the many options you get. Learn more

Share files on your mobile device into your Fastmail app

When sharing any file from other mobile apps, such as a photo, you can make Fastmail an option in the share menu. Tap the Fastmail icon and your photo drops directly into a new email.

Take action from the lock screen

Save yourself a few screen taps and get back to emails faster. Notifications for iPhone users arrive with an action menu that let you reply, archive, or delete a message the moment you see it. Android users have enjoyed this helpful feature from the beginning.

Set your favorite browser for opening links

For whatever web browser you love, you can set it to open when you tap on links in Fastmail.

Enjoy these features on your desktop and moble Fastmail apps. Access our web app by logging in on your computer. To use on mobile, download the Fastmail app for your phone and tablet on Apple App Store and Google Play.

Fastmail hosts a meet up of top talent in open calendaring to advance scheduling tools.

Our calendars, just like our email service, are built on open standards. To help shape and improve online calendaring for users everywhere, we're proudly involved in CalConnect.

Open standards make it possible for you to bring any calendar to any service you choose and coordinate with people no matter what system they use. CalConnect, a calendaring standards organization, works to keep calendar developments open, so that you have more freedom and control of your data.

Tech experts from around the world gather at Fastmail

We’re proud to have brought together calendar experts from all over the world this year for CalConnect XLVI, hosted by Fastmail in Philadelphia. The event was held in October 2019.

Did you know that virtually every important calendar standard has been authored or edited by members of CalConnect since the late 2000s?! Members include our CEO, Bron Gondwana, and one of our company directors, Neil Jenkins. Fastmail's own Ken Murchison has been honored by CalConnect for his contributions to open calendaring. Ken is a principal developer of the widely used free and open source Cyrus Mail and Calendar server, and an author of many of the email and calendar standards in use throughout the world today.

CalConnect is for developers, product managers, and members of the open standards community who want to build, implement, and test new standards in calendaring. Members of CalConnect include some of the world’s largest software development organizations and research universities.

Shaping the next wave of calendar innovation

CalConnect maintains relationships with other standards bodies, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). IETF is a trusted publisher of high quality, fully open technical specifications. ISO standardizes time and date formats among many other things.

Bron’s role in CalConnect, and his leadership at IETF as a chair of the calendar extensions working group, keeps these groups connected. CalConnect members drive the work, the agenda, and collaborations at their meetings with the shared belief that everyone wins when competitors work together on the foundational building blocks of our digital world.

The most recent two CalConnect events have hosted interim virtual IETF calendaring meetings, allowing these two standards groups to work more closely together. Many documents produced by CalConnect are in the process of becoming IETF proposed standards.

Other CalConnect members sit on ISO standards committees, bringing their expertise and long experience of date and time issues to the development of the standards used by governments worldwide.

Bringing more to your calendars

CalConnect keeps us on the pulse of calendar development, where we can contribute to advancements and represent the voices of our customers. This means you get more of the stuff you’re asking for faster!

Fastmail's COO, Helen Horstmann-Allen, took advantage of having the collected knowledge of attendees to discuss our list of potential new features and user stories for calendars and ask how best to implement them with existing standards, or what new standards work might be required.

As you can see, when top technical experts convene, great work moves forward for you and your productivity. Without CalConnect, we wouldn’t have standards that innovate on calendaring and keep calendar specifications open so other developers can take them further.

You can follow CalConnect on Twitter and on the web at: calconnect.org. The next CalConnect will be held in April 2020 in Nottingham, UK.

See when people are free for your next event or meeting. Compare calendars with one person or between a group.

Spend less time scheduling with side-by-side calendar views that let you see when people are available.

Take calendar sharing to the next level with features that are great for scheduling with anyone you share calendars with, such as your team or your family.

Get organized by looking at any of the calendars you own side-by-side for more thoughtful planning.

See your calendars next to each other

When someone else's schedule matters when planning your own, compare your calendar to theirs to figure out when to do things. In Fastmail calendars, choose the view “by Calendar” to see the calendars you are viewing side-by-side.

There’s no limit to the number of calendars you can compare. Look at any number of calendars as it works best for you and your screen.

For example, view your calendar and your spouse’s side-by-side to find a good weekend to plan a trip out-of-town. Or look at all the calendars for users on your team at once. Find a good time for a weekly meeting that works for everyone.

Carve out more family time, keep your team aligned, or both. Ditch additional scheduling tools and do it all in Fastmail.

Create a calendar group to view calendars together

Is there a group of people that you meet with frequently? Or is there a set of calendars that work together for one area of your life? For example, you might group personal, family, and birthday calendars together and call this group, “My Life.”

Create a calendar group and to easily see all these calendars at once.

Once the group is created, using the “by Calendar” view, one click is all you need to show all the calendars in that group.

For business use, you may want to create a group called “Founders” for the calendars of both of your business partners. Or maybe you want to make a group for a team you employ such as, “Sales Team,” for your sales representatives.

Learn more about calendar groups, and which plan types they’re available on, by visiting our help page.

If you aren’t using your Fastmail calendar, bring in your calendars to Fastmail and start viewing them side-by-side.