I paid for email service for the first time. Fastmail is getting rid of their ‘Guest’ (ie free) accounts. I’ve had an account since β2002. I remained under the 26MB limit for that whole time. I don’t use it for much, but some of the contacts are important. I didn’t want to have to deal with changing them and risking missing some.
Their plans seem a bit expensive to a miser like myself who’s always had $0 per month email before this. Luckily, they gave me a 50% discount as incentive. With a three year plan, that made it less than $2 a month. Just low enough to seem not-too-bad. I have three years to decide if their regular price is worth it.
Pluses I see of going for it:
- don’t need to change address contacts / services have
- privacy / security focused, a good balance for regular users
- can hook my domains up to them and have them all go to the same account
- more advanced controls and higher limits than Dreamhost (my webhost)
- file storage that can be used for backup, static websites, etc
- can use them for DNS if I want
- spread risk of problems with one provider
Minuses:
- costs money
- no labels / tags like GMail (folders are for the birds) and no plans to implement them anytime soon
- takes a bit more setup than Dreamhost (my registrar)
- I’m considering using something like mailpile to store my email, lessening the importance of the mail service it goes through
- long term lock-in for good price