When comparing Porkbun vs FastMail, the Slant community recommends FastMail for most people. In the question“What are the best email service providers?” FastMail is ranked 9th while Porkbun is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose FastMail is:
Depending on your point of view, requiring to pay for Fastmail is actually a positive aspect of the service. This way you know the company is at least making some revenue (they have been around since 2010) and you know who the customer is. Pricing is as follows ([go here](https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html) for their on-site pricing info).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Transparent, everyday pricing for all domains and services
All the top-level domains available at Porkbun (319 of the 1,562 currently in existence) are offered for $1 above the wholesale price, plus the processing fee for your credit card. No gimmicks or bait-and-switch pricing, no surprises. That's the price for renewal and inbound transfers too, so you know exactly how much you'll be spending every year you own the domain.
Pro Free WHOIS Privacy (for top-level domains that allow it)
All domains receive free WHOIS privacy, which masks your personal information from the public registry and saves you from the deluge of e-mail spam and telemarketers which typically accompanies purchasing a domain name today. Some top-level domains, like .us, require that you publish your contact info publicly, and they'll tell you that before you place the order.
Pro FAST Payments - honest pricing - integrity
No more topping up a reseller account with credits that cost a commission to buy or getting caught at renewal with a higher price unless you find a coupon somewhere... It's integrity all the way and a VERY fast payment portal!
Pro Porkbun accounts can be secured with two-factor authentication
Don't let the next big hack allow some internet pirate to steal your domain, just turn on 2FA in the control panel and all logins will require a TOTP code in addition to your e-mail address and password.
Pro Best Service
No hidden renewal charges and free privacy on all domains.
Pro Live support during support hours
During support hours a real human can be reached via phone or email. Emails are generally responded quickly and always within 24 hours.
Pro Not spamming you with useless offers
They are sincere, they do not spam your inbox with "offers" and services you are never going to use and then, if you make the mistake to accept, pay inflated prices when you renew. They communicate with you only for serious and legitimate reasons. Excellent services!
Pro Just the best
Nothing wrong to say about them, this company should stay as they are.
Pro Free SSL Certificates
Every domain is issued SSL certificates for the root domain and any ten subdomains of your choice via the Let's Encrypt service. The certificates expire every 90 days but Porkbun automatically renews them for you prior to each expiration, for as long as you own the domain. These certificates don't offer any identity verification, but they do allow all the traffic to and from your domain to be encrypted at industry-standard levels at no cost. They can be acquired at will through the interface without any contact with support staff and the certificates are available for download as soon as they are created.
Pro Free DNS hosting
Registering the domain is only half the battle, the other half is announcing to the world the IP address of the server hosting your site. Porkbun includes this service with all domain registrations and makes it easy to manage by using the GoDaddy DomainConnect standard for service auto-discovery. This means you don't need to get your hands dirty, just pick the web host you want to connect the domain to from the drop-down menu and click OK. Or you can manage all the settings yourself from the control panel without restriction or interference. You can have as many A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS and TXT resource records as your heart desires (or ARIN allows).
Pro Free e-mail forwarding and reasonable e-mail hosting
All domains come with 10 free e-mail forwards which allow you to use your new domain to create aliases for existing e-mail accounts elsewhere. If you need hosted e-mail instead, that's only $24/year per mailbox, and it includes 10GB of storage, external POP3 and IMAP gateways and a modern webmail portal from which you can send and receive e-mails.
Pro DNSSEC support for all top-level domains
Worried about falling victim to one of the many security risks on the internet? Then take a moment to generate DS records for your domain and Porkbun will propagate them to the root zone for free. Doing this ensures that even if the nameserver for your site goes down, no hackers can impersonate it and steal your visitors' personal or financial information.
Pro Sincere, personal touch to all interactions
The support team is very pleasant to deal with and small enough that personal relationships can easily be formed. The promise of responses to support requests in under an hour is almost universally observed and even their site has some fun (who doesn't like pictures of playful piglets while their SSL certificates are generated?) instilled in it.
Pro Accepts Bitcoin
They accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for all services.
Pro Free website builder and hosting at Weebly
All domains at Porkbun can take advantage of Weebly's very popular website builder, complete with hosting for unlimited content pages and an e-commerce shop for five items. Of course many features are locked out until you pay for a hosting package, but you can very easily host a simple but professional looking portfolio or blog with minimal effort and greater than 99% uptime.
Pro Traditional revenue model increases likelihood of personal data privacy and safety
Depending on your point of view, requiring to pay for Fastmail is actually a positive aspect of the service. This way you know the company is at least making some revenue (they have been around since 2010) and you know who the customer is. Pricing is as follows (go here for their on-site pricing info).
Pro Human support team
As you are their customer, Fastmail provides human support.
Pro Offers more control over email
Gmail has a tendency to dumb down the interface (try to sort by sender). Fastmail gives full control over email, just like a "traditional" client would.
Pro Secure
Supports two-factor authentication, one-time passwords and fully encrypted connections.
Pro Fully responsive interface
The Fastmail interface is fully responsive across all browser sizes.
Pro Fast
As Fastmail does away with all the extra bells and whistles of Gmail it is super fast to interact with. It also has faster IMAP and SMTP performance than Gmail.
Pro Custom sieve scripts
You can write your own Sieve scripts for filtering/rerouting email.
Pro Simple email actioning
Like gmail, you can "Pin" emails to the top of your inbox to deal with later with either a checkbox or the keyboard shortcut. Like Gmail you can also both archive and delete emails.
Pro Offers IMAP migration tool
Get your old email out of Gmail easily with their migration tool.
Pro Adjustable spam filter
On writing this Fastmail has Basic, Normal, Aggressive or Customisable spam filtering which can be selected in the Advanced settings.
Each user has an individually trainable bayes database to improve spam filtering. You can train your personal bayes database by selecting some messages and using the Report spam and Report Non-Spam options from the Action menu on the Mailbox screen.
For IMAP users who don't use the web interface much, you can specify folders as spam/non-spam training folders on the Folders screen. Then just move messages into those folders as appropriate to train your bayes database.
For your personal bayes databases to be active, you have to train it with at least 200 spam messages and 200 non-spam messages. If you haven't trained enough messages, then we use a global continuously updated bayes database against your incoming messages, which helps detect spam/non-spam, but isn't as good as a personally trained one.
Pro Offers subdomain addressing
Instead of using plus addressing (e.g. foo+bar@email.com), FastMail offers the ability to receive mail through subdomain addresses (e.g. foo@bar.email.com).
Pro Integrated file storage
Fastmail allows saving attachments and other files into their own file storage system for easy retrieval later.
Pro Proper support for folders
FastMail has full support for folders, unlike Gmail where you only have labels.
Pro Intuitive default filters
Fastmail automatically filters your email into:
- All
- Unread
- Personal
- Notifications
- Mailing Lists
Pro Identities & aliases practically gives you a new email that you can manage from a single account
With identities and aliases, you can set up a completely new email address that can be managed from your account, without paying for more. As of time of this writing, FastMail offers up to 500 identities and 600 aliases per account, regardless of plan type.
Cons
Con No wildcard/catch all email forwarding
Con Australian law enforcement
The company and all email hosted by then is subject to Australian laws requiring sharing with law enforcement. These provisions are weaker than those provided by European GDPR.
Con Lacks folder notifications on official mobile app
Con Expensive
The most popular domain registrars will provide you with both multiple email accounts and a domain name at a lower price than FastMail charges for only 1 email account.