Google Inbox vs FastMail

Inbox follows Google's Material Design guidelines, making for an intuitive and smart looking interface. Bold colors with clear text and intuitive actions allow for one of the better looking in house Google apps on Android.

Inbox tries automatically bundling similar messages together. For example, Inbox will create bundles for travel information, receipts, promotions as well as group messages temporally. It enables also managing these bundles of messages together - they can all be swiped away together.

It's possible to "hide" a message until a specific date and time or location, which gets the message out of your way until you're ready to deal with it. Swipe left and you can have the email disappear for a day, a week, a month, etc.

Inbox has intuitive swipe gestures that allow quickly dealing with emails or groups of emails. It's possible to mark them done, archive them or snooze them for later by swiping. It allows you to keep inbox at zero messages easily.

If an email contains pictures, flight information, reservation at a restaurant, attachments, links, dates, phone numbers and other information that the application recognizes, it will surface that information in its main view. These items can be viewed and interacted with without having to open the message itself. It allows finding and taking action on the important email information quickly.

You are able to add notes or reminders to pinned items - very useful for long email chains when you can't remember what the main point was!

For users of Google Now, Inbox integrates with the service allowing for reminders to be seen while using Google Now as well as set through the service.

Through a feature called Assists, Inbox offers context sensitive updates to messages. These include information such as flight status updates before a scheduled flight.

If a message includes a date, Inbox is capable of automatically creating a task from that information.

Can reply to emails using an AI generated response

Centralized "folder" for trip info such as airline, hotel, and rental car reservations. Similar to Google Trips.

In addition to the several automatic categories, you can also create your own bundles. Thus reduces clutter and enables you to archive a whole bunch of mails with one swipe.

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).

As you are their customer, Fastmail provides human support.

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.

Supports two-factor authentication, one-time passwords and fully encrypted connections.

The Fastmail interface is fully responsive across all browser sizes.

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.

You can write your own Sieve scripts for filtering/rerouting email.

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.

Get your old email out of Gmail easily with their migration tool.

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.

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).

Fastmail allows saving attachments and other files into their own file storage system for easy retrieval later.

FastMail has full support for folders, unlike Gmail where you only have labels.

Fastmail automatically filters your email into:

• All
• Unread
• Personal
• Notifications
• Mailing Lists

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.