About a month ago, I posted about how I was switching my work e-mail from Google Apps to Fastmail, and how it was just super. Well, after a month it wasn’t, and a couple of nights ago I switched back.
Ultimately FastMail had a major issue I didn’t see any easy way to get around: the spam filtering. It just isn’t nearly as good as Gmail. There’s two ways spam filtering can fail: it can let spam into your inbox, or it can mark things spam that aren’t. Between the two, I can live with spam making it into my inbox occasionally, but I can’t live with it marking important things I want to see as spam. The other issue I had that it would greylist messages it thought might be suspicious and cause them to be delayed by up to an hour.
The biggest thing that I was hoping to get out of switching was to use something that worked better with Apple’s mail apps than Gmail, and it did in the way that there was no concept of labels to contend with, but I think the better solution is just to suck it up and use a native iOS client for Gmail and its web interface when I’m on a Mac. The side benefit is that I’ll never send work e-mail from my personal account and vice-versa this way. It also turns out that there’s some pretty great Mail apps for Gmail on iOS I had no idea existed. The biggest downside is that I don’t have direct access to my regular address book through Gmail, but maybe separating work and personal contacts isn’t the worst thing I could do anyway.
