Fastmail isn't a household name in the hosted email space, but it's got a solid offering. You don't get a big suite of productivity tools with this platform as you do with our Editors' Choice award winners Google Workspace Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium. But you do get email with 30GB of archive space per user and standard calendaring. Fastmail is also easy to manage and excels at handling email across multiple domains.
Fastmail Pricing and Plans
While it doesn't have as many bells and whistles as our top contenders, Fastmail delivers a good feature set if you're seeking just email and scheduling at an affordable price. The first tier, Basic, runs $3 per user per month and includes 2GB of email storage per user. It also provides access to the calendaring functions as well as the web and mobile apps, available on Apple iOS and Google Android. There's a daily limit of 4,000 emails sent and the same number received.
The next tier, dubbed Standard, is the one I tested. It runs $5 per user per month and offers 30GB of email space per user, doubling the daily traffic limits. Besides everything the Basic tier has, it adds custom domains, the ability to choose your own email and scheduling client (via IMAP and SMTP), and group scheduling (via CalDAV). Last is the Professional tier, priced at $9 per user per month, which bolsters Standard with 100GB of email storage per user and email archiving.
These prices put Fastmail among the most affordable contenders this time around, but you'll need to analyze its features before buying. For instance, the introductory tier of IceWarp Cloud is $2.50 per user per month with 5GB of email storage as well as 20GB of file storage. For $3.90 per user per month, IceWarp's next-level tier hikes the email storage capacity to 100GB and throws in collaboration, conferencing, and antivirus, and anti-spam scanning as well as calendaring at every tier.
Similar Products
Google Workspace Business Standard
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Amazon WorkMail
Zoho Mail
Intermedia Hosted Exchange Email
IceWarp Cloud
ProtonMail Professional
GoDaddy Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Rackspace Email Plus
Getting Started
Getting started with Fastmail is easy. You automatically get a user on the fastmail.com domain, but you'll want to add your own custom domains to start taking advantage of the platform's full value. By clicking on the domain's link, it's easy to add a domain using a simple wizard. There are detailed instructions for most of the common domain registrars and validating a domain is simple once you've added the appropriate records.
After this, you'll want to add some users and then establish any aliases for them. Most Fastmail customers will have only a handful of users, and most of the work will go into establishing aliases, which don't count against your license. Considering you can have up to 600 aliases, there's a lot of flexibility here.
Taking a spin around the rest of the settings, there are a few other items of interest. The first is the ability to set up the folder hierarchy for users and sharing for that folder with the rest of your team. I really like this feature for small teams, and while not scalable, it's good for lean operations where you need multiple folks to be able to address emails quickly. You can also set up automatic purging so old mail doesn't collect.
You can define multiple calendars and share them across team members. Each calendar has the option of showing or hiding full event details as well as free-or-busy information. This is best used for vacations, medical appointments, and other items where it's useful to the individual to know what the appointment is, but perhaps it shouldn't be completely transparent to other team members.
Another handy feature is the ability to quickly restore deleted drafts, messages, contacts, calendar events, and notes. While you can do this with most other services, Fastmail makes it exceptionally easy—you check a couple of boxes and click Do It. Magically, your previously lost items reappear. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the file-sharing component.
There's also a lot to like about the mail client. The overall layout is familiar and very similar to Gmail; it even has labels that let you easily organize and search your messages. For productivity proponents, this can be automated to some degree using rules. To enable these, you must switch over to Labels instead of Folders under your preferences. Doing this allows you to create new labels. By clicking the labels on the left-hand side, you'll be able to see all the emails tagged with a given label. Because emails can have multiple labels, it's easy to get creative with this.
There's a snooze feature that I liked and that Google Workspace also has. This takes an email out of your inbox and sticks it in a special snoozed folder for a specified period of time. When that time has elapsed, the email pops back into your inbox just like a new message. This is useful for emails that aren't immediately actionable but not formal enough to make into a calendar entry.
I felt right at home with everything else. Composing messages, creating calendar invites, and setting up contacts with Fastmail felt exactly like any other service. I do have a mild complaint about the calendar with regards to working hours: One of the more annoying aspects of scheduling meetings is knowing what someone's working hours are. Microsoft 365 lets you have segmented working hours so nobody tries to book during those times. Fastmail is missing this feature. It might not be an issue given the focus on small teams, but even for most small businesses, it's worth pointing out.
Fastmail Security and Third-Party Integration
Fastmail's claim to fame is that the company doesn't use your email data for ads and other research. However, this appeal is mostly driven by a misconception that Google does—the search giant's business accounts stopped using customer data for ad purposes years ago, despite a pervasive myth that this is still the case. That said, Fastmail does a decent job of keeping data secure and private.
Hosted out of New York Internet in Bridgewater, New Jersey, Fastmail has undergone both SOC1 and SOC2 auditing and is also SSAE 16 compliant. This implies a high degree of digital and physical security. The customer policy does give Fastmail limited access to your data for troubleshooting purposes, which is not dissimilar to how Microsoft operates. If you want a completely hands-off approach, you might consider checking out ProtonMail.
As for third-party integration, Fastmail comes up a bit short—it does a good job of talking to third-party IMAP and SMTP email clients like Microsoft Outlook, but that's about all. If you're just looking for email, that's enough, but if you're seeking tighter integration with, say, team collaboration or unified communication platforms, you'll wind up rolling your own.
No-Frills Email With an OK Price
Fastmail ticks a lot of the boxes small business owners need. It should appeal to cost-conscious entrepreneurs who have a lot of domains and addresses but a relatively small number of actual users. But its low price is a little deceiving; even when compared to the more full-featured Zoho Mail, FastMail gives you less bang for the buck. Still, it's important to consider the target audience:
Fastmail is easy to administer and caters to folks that need swift, actual-human-person support. It's a good choice for a niche group, but if you need more advanced features and a full collaboration suite, you'd likely be better off opting for Zoho Mail or spending the extra bucks for one of our favorites, Google Workspace Business Standard or Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
Fastmail will appeal to serial entrepreneurs that don't have many mailboxes but need a lot of addresses across multiple domains. You can also get a real person if you contact support.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
