[MlMt] Switching to Fastmail: some questions

[Philip Paeps]

On 2021-07-23 01:13:58 (+0800), Ralph Alvy wrote:
> Well, Tuffmail is sadly ending operations on January 1, so I'm 
> seriously considering moving to Fastmail. That said, I have a couple 
> questions.

Fastmail provides excellent service and a very robust, 
standards-compliant, infrastructure.  After moving many friends, family 
and clients to them, I recently moved my gargantuan mailbox to them too. 
  Happy customer!

> 1. I see that Fastmail supports its own version of Labels. Is there 
> something in Mailmate that will recognize those Labels? Perhaps 
> Mailmate Tags?

I don't think labels add much value to an IMAP workflow.  Going by the 
documentation, Ethan's notes earlier in this thread and some 
experimentation, they only affect the Fastmail web interface and their 
mobile apps.  To IMAP clients, tags are folders.  Given that you can 
switch back and forth between folders and labels, I suspect the 
underlying storage is unaffected by your choice of labels or folders.

Note that Fastmail also supports IMAP keywords.  As far as I can tell, 
you can't make these show up in their web or mobile user interfaces the 
way you can in MailMate, but you can search on them.

> 2. I see that Fastmail has its own Contacts module, but that doesn't 
> support synchronization with Google Contacts. Will I need to import my 
> Google Contacts into Fastmail Contacts for Mailmate to see my Contacts 
> when composing a message? Or does Fastmail use my Mac Addressbook for 
> this?

Fastmail contacts use CardDAV.  They work well with every other CardDAV 
implementation, including macOS and iOS Contacts.app.

MailMate will use your Mac Contacts and doesn't care where the data 
ultimately come from.  If you sync your Mac Contacts with Google, 
MailMate will see them.  Fastmail's web interface and mobile apps won't 
be able to see your contacts stored by Google.

I would recommend importing your contacts from Google into Fastmail and 
syncing them to your devices from Fastmail.  I have a lot more 
confidence in the standards compliance of Fastmail's CardDAV 
implementation than Google's.  Fastmail can import contacts from Google 
in bulk but it can't keep them in sync.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freron.com/pipermail/mailmate/attachments/20210723/89ce7010/attachment.htm>