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Comment by nmjenkins

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Comment by nmjenkins

Chief Product Officer of Fastmail here. I see a lot of comments here from people that don't appear to have actually tried using the app, which is a little disappointing; don't knock it 'til you've tried it! Happy to answer any questions, but to answer the main ones that are popping up:

# Why Electron?

Because it lets us build an app that works well across all major platforms with the resources we have available. Building an email/contacts/calendar app is a huge undertaking. Doing it from scratch on each platform is just not feasible for us.

With Electron, we can maintain a single code base across all platforms so we can move faster, and keep feature parity everywhere. More than that though, we believe it lets us build a really great experience on each of these platforms, while offering a consistent UI for our customers across all their devices. Honestly, we can never out-native Apple because by definition whatever they do is "native", even if it sucks (Liquid Glass on the Mac is … not great UX). If that's your primary consideration, you will always be better with Apple's own Mail app, so it's pointless us trying to build something in that space. (And instead we work to also make Fastmail the best service to use Mail.app with — which we believe it is!)

# Why would you use this instead of the webmail?

If you prefer to keep Fastmail in your browser, great! You can do so. But we hear from many customers that they would rather not have their email mixed in with their tabs. With a separate app you can see it in the dock, Cmd-tab to it, make it your default email app system wide etc. It also lets us integrate with the system, like the Mac menu bar and native context menus.

# Why would you use this instead of an IMAP client?

If you've ever used the Fastmail web interface you probably already know the answer, but for everyone else…

1. It's a lot faster. Compared to Apple's Mail.app for example (which is a good IMAP client!):

   - It resyncs way faster when you open the app, and uses a lot less data (JMAP is so much more efficient).
   - Moving between messages is quicker. With Mail.app there's often a slight lag between clicking a message and it rendering. In Fastmail, it's usually instant.
2. It's more powerful. We provide the best standards support out there, and are also working to make the standards better. But there's always going to be more that we can do when we control both the server and the client. With the Fastmail UI you can:

  - Add private memos to emails
  - Mute conversations to ignore replies
  - Pin important messages to the top of your inbox
  - Schedule messages to send in the future (and not need your laptop to be online then for it to work)
  - See related emails when you open your contacts.
  - Add events straight into your calendar
  - And much more (https://www.fastmail.com/features/).
3. It's got much better search. (Yeah, this is kind-of just "more powerful", but I'm calling it out because search sucks in most email clients0.

# And finally…

This is just a choice. We hope this is something that some of our customers will love, but we're not backing away from our commitment to open standards and encourage everyone to find what works best for them.

I'll try to answer any other questions as I can.

Replies nmjenkins · 2025-10-13
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