There is already a fastmail desktop app. It's called thunderbird. And there are many more, for all possible tastes!

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It's much faster than Thunderbird so far for me, and more convenient than a browser tab for me, and I'm especially liking the interconnections among mail, contacts, and calendar. The best feature for me is being able to click an email link anywhere on any web page, and have it lead to the Fastmail app.

I do have two questions. The app on my macOS system is using 700MB RAM; is that for Electron? The majority of RAM is showing as GPU rendering; is that for font smoothing?

Nothing wrong with offering an option for people who prefer a desktop app, you don’t have to feel like you are the target audience for everything.

I sometimes think we forget that Electron would have allowed them to ship this to customers super quickly, across all desktop platforms, and get a nice-looking application in to the hands of their customers (who probably have been requesting this for years).

Just a webpage with a bundled web bowser (electron).

This is like the worst of everything. A terrible noncustomizable browser and a poor email client glued together.

You could also reimplement some QoL features like E2E search by building a local index of seen cleartext messages, or perform spam filtering via local NLP models—though in my experience, I never saw any encrypted spam. Threading UI might use a cleartext copy, or instead of Thunderbird's "Subject: ...", it could use a random UUID while preserving cleartext "RE: " patterns.

PGP is a very simple standard and could have become the default if not for some unfortunate client UX. If a major mail client automatically imported or generated a key on first install, required the user to write down a BIP-style mnemonic for private key recovery (PGP private key containers are quite large, so this might rely on symmetrically encrypting a provider-side backup), and attached the public key to every outgoing email—enabling end-to-end encryption automatically, with trust established on first use—I’d expect that a quarter of all human email traffic could have instantly become secure, eliminating decades of complexity built to sustain the illusion of trusted parties. A provider offerring this UX within an interoperable standard could be the only push it needs.

You might object to TOFU as suboptimal, but it has been the standard in many encrypted messaging systems: Signal, for instance, uses key servers to distribute keys and relies on users to verify shared secrets out-of-channel, as does WhatsApp. If this simple manual verification UX could be integrated with Web of Trust, it could automatically vouch for the user, showing a reference path for each of your contacts. Even without that, it is better to accept a one-time risk of key exchange compromise than to face the continuous possibility of eavesdropping.

[1] https://fmail3.appmac.fr/

There are so many good clients out there, and I'd rather have 1. The team focus on their core offering, and 2. the existing email client is for the same reason (limited developer time, and matureness) a much better choice for security

# 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.

  - 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/).

# 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.

Does it use JMAP?

Is it open source?

I’d really like to see a modern E-Mail client. Just in general. Most I’ve seen just aren’t appealing at all.

[1] https://github.com/joelekstrom/fastmate

Thunderbird has had a good number of QoL improvements, and the calendar plugins etc are quite niec. Just if one day search could... uhh... work, that would be nice

My main problem is that I have to put a lot of effort to not use gmail for my business because most of third-parties (like CRMs) work only/better with gmail.

Fastmail team, how about a Gmail compatible API ?

I haven’t had a chance to download this yet, but hoping that it has native keybindings. (Cmd+N) on mac for composing a new email or something similar.

I know fastmail’s built in keybindings are robust, but I can’t keep track of them all.

I'm sure there was some deal that didn't get completed because of this.

The only thing I miss is the official API for the scheduled sending feature.

That's the only thing I would open the webpage app to do.

Have a solid, well-performing web app, that's all I care about.

I’m not a customer of Fastmail, because the laws in Australia are very anti-privacy and Fastmail is at their mercy. But my mail provider has exactly the same problem: a lame web app.

This is not a “technical person” complaint. These so-called apps look and behave worse on macOS.