Why Fastmail over ProtonMail

I’ve now been using Fastmail for a year now. I was using ProtonMail previously but decided to migrate to Fastmail. I’m going to go into the details of why I switched. This is personal preference and my reasoning behind the switch.

For full disclosure,I had tried Zoho mail for a short time before Proton mail but quickly moved to ProtonMail for some of the reasons I moved from ProtonMail to Fastmail.

I’m not affiliated with either of these and I still use ProtonVPN.

Here’s my reasoning for the switch.

Masked emails

First up for me was the 1Password integration to mask my email address. This means any new website I register with I’m prompted by 1Password if I’d like to create a masked email address to use on signup.

I was fed up with signing up to websites then getting spammed with marketing emails. The masked emails this means I can quickly identify where an email has come from and if it’s not from the intended sender I can delete the masked email and any further emails from that address go straight to the email bin.

In my old age I’m getting more and more fed up with these types of emails, ironic, for someone that’s just setup with a new email marketing provider 😂

Custom domains

Setting up a custom domain was straightforward enough with Fastmail. I did document Setting up Fastmail with Vercel if you’re interested in the process.

With ProtonMail it was pretty much the same process which I documented Setting up ProtonMail with Vercel.

I will come onto why this was a factor in the next section.

Clear pricing

Fastmail has clear, understandable pricing. There’s three tiers, Basic, Standard and Professional. Each one listing what you get for your money.

I found with ProtonMail I was wading through pricing structures and addons which made no sense and I was quickly lost on what I was actually paying for.

The ProtonVPN made this really confusing. I now use ProtonVPN with a clear pricing model, with ProtonMail they say it’s included but as I’ve said already it was really confusing on knowing exactly what you were getting.

Ease of use

Fastmail gets out of your way, set up folders simply, you’re not prompted with additional modals or pop-ups which I found frustrating with ProtonMail.

You can set up filters and rules after you make the folder in Fastmail which is easy to understand and doesn’t force you to go through a setup flow.

User interface

As with the ease of use of Fastmail, the user interface is simple and easy to understand with intuitive context menus.

I rarely have to visit the Fastmail documentation on how to do something.

Migrating from Proton mail

ProtonMail prides itself on being completely secure, this is an issue when you want to migrate data from one provider to another though.

They provide a Proton bridge tool for you to download and configure to export the data.

I remember it was a pain in the arse messing around with the Proton bridge. It’s a secure connection to your ProtonMail from your computer. So secure that I couldn’t actually get any useable data! 😂

When you actually get the data exported, it’s in a format that is not useable in Fastmail.

I literally had to send myself the emails I wanted to keep.