Memos: stick private notes on your email

Without commenting on whether it's a good feature or not, this morning I had the pop-up ad for this new feature displayed in my Fastmail web page. However, it was positioned on the screen so that the "Got It" link at the bottom was obscured, and the pop-up captured all clicks. I could move the mouse all over the place, things highlighted and unhighlighted, but the only thing actually clickable (Got It) was off the screen. And the ad said something about paying my utility bill online, which I don't have setup, so I thought I had some kind of virus locking up my email account.

I really didn't appreciate this at all, and that's being diplomatic about it.

For years, I used Fastmail alongside four other email accounts with local mail clients like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and eM Client. The experience was always just okay, but recently, tasks like opening messages, switching to folders with lots of items, or searching became frustratingly slow. Additionally, these mail clients consume more resources than I’m comfortable with, and their background processes ballooning to around 2GB on older devices with just 8GB of RAM was simply too much.

The most responsive and lightweight email experience I’ve found is, surprisingly, the Fastmail web app. However, I hesitated for a long time because using a webmail interface felt like a step backward, and I dislike more vendor lock-in. (For context, I already use my own domain through Fastmail.)

But eventually, I couldn’t stand the slowdowns anymore and made the switch. I used Fastmail's IMAP importer to fetch all messages from my other accounts, added their SMTP credentials to Fastmail for composing new emails, and enabled Fastmail's Labels feature in the settings.

Everything is better now. Processing new messages and achieving inbox zero is much faster, labels are more flexible, search is nearly instant, and the resource usage of this additional Firefox tab is significantly lower than running a native email client.

New features like Memos seem useful, but I’m still somewhat wary of the increased vendor lock-in. For example, I hesitate to use their 1Password integration with Masked Emails because I’m not sure how much of a hassle it would be if Fastmail ever turns evil, and I need to jump ship and point my domain to another email host.

Is Fastmail hitting the point where they feel compelled to add new features on top of a perfectly good email client, bogging it down and slowly turning a snappy, clean experience into a morass because they couldn't just let it be good and functional?

I hope not. I hope they are keeping it simple and clean.

Nice, they reasonably kludged it into an IMAP folder:

> If you also use another email app to access your Fastmail account, such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird, you’ll still have access to your memos. You’ll find them in the Memos folder, as a reply to the message your memo is attached to.

I am a Fastmail user. I wish they would break out their Calendar from their Email app so that I could easily switch between them when composing emails and needing to reference my calendar (when mobile, using the app). I assume this is a pretty common use case - has anyone found a workflow for this?

Great feature! Would love to see this in Outlook (only option at work), gmail and others. Is this proprietary or some kind of extension of the email spec? Cheers

i love fastmail web ux but i hate that the fastmail app is useless without internet. no browsing of cached mails.

Those of us that check email in Emacs have long had this feature. Org mode has capture functions that can take an email and make a note out of it, or a todo item, schedule it, or do whatever. It's amazingly powerful, and doesn't rely on some web-based software.

Fastmail user. I wish they would do a faster way to filter and move messages to folders/tags. I wish their unsubscribe would work in more cases and actually work the same as “block” feature.

Offline mobile app would be very nice!

Notes with attachments and inlining of images would be super helpful. I think their Notes product have a huge potential.

Hey did this and I thought it was a good idea. Glad this is getting picked up on by other email services.

This was one of my favorite features of Google Inbox (RIP). Does anyone know of a good browser extension that can reproduce this feature for GMail? Preferably one that just works with localstorage rather than forcing you to put your notes in some third-party service...

I love Fastmail (and am a paid user) … but don’t understand what problem this feature is solving.

I appreciate that the data is still available via IMAP. But, it feels fastmail is slowly drifting towards the inevitable enshittification. Maybe that is a bit harsh but still. Some things that have been bothering me in recent months:

- It is not possible to prepay anymore. I used to have at least a year's worth of credit to make sure the account doesn't lapse if I get incapacitated on renewal time

- If a paid account stops, the email address eventually becomes up for grabs for someone else

- The monthly calendar view does not scroll smoothly anymore. Instead it now jumps to full days or months and it makes scrolling through it a badly jagged experience. It used to be so smooth and the best calendar view of any service, ever. Now, it's just as annoying as everything else.

- The calendar view now greys out the month that isn't current. Again making scrolling through the year a worse experience.

I'm sure there are justifications for all changes. But for me things like this make me go from "Fastmail is awesome!" to "Meh, it's email and it's alright". Saying that as someone who has been a paying user for many years.

Heads up protonmail! This would give an edge. Also please allow seeing the note with each message of a thread.

Hey does this as well, it's a cool feature

https://www.hey.com/features/inbox-notes/

"private", but the Australian government can access freely.

I use email drafts for this.