This post takes a look at a few Fastmail features that can clear out the clutter, target your tasks and master your messages.
The challenge to keep our inboxes clear of unwanted mail is ongoing. Fastmail is always developing new tools behind the scenes to evolve protection against spammers, scammers and phishers.
You can choose how firm the defences are in your spam protection preferences.
The risk of increasing your defences is that you may end up with real mail mistakenly ending up in your spam folder if you lower the score at which mail is tagged as spam. Being able to set the spam score in the subject and monitoring your inbox for a few weeks to see how accurate the spam detection is in your particular situation can help keep your inbox clean.
See our help for more information on stopping spam.
Just because you signed up to Fastmail with [email protected]
doesn’t mean that’s the only address you can ever get email at. (In case you were wondering, warpmail.net is indeed one of our many domains you can use.)
By adding aliases, you can have hundreds of extra email addresses at any of our (or your) domains, all delivered to your inbox without having to pay for an extra user. Whether you need an address for your professional mail (Clark Kent needs [email protected]
as an alias), or you just want to use different email addresses for different communications, aliases have you covered.
For extra ease of use, create a folder for each different alias and configure a rule to file the mail into those folders. This will keep the mail to each alias separate. You can even set a preference ensuring that any mail you reply to is using the correct mail alias the mail was received at.
Superheroes use aliases. You can too.
See our help for more information about aliases.
If you need a short-term alias, or you don’t want to set up an alias, you can create ad-hoc subdomain addresses. These are great for subscribing to communications from a new website or for online shopping.
In the form of <some word>@<your username>.<domain>.<tld>
, mail gets delivered automatically to your account, without requiring any extra configuration at Fastmail.
This lets our user [email protected]
who does a lot of online shopping, have a multitude of different addresses: [email protected]
, [email protected]
, [email protected]
.
These are also helpful to protect you: if a site is compromised and you start receiving unsolicited mail at that address, you can set up a rule to block all mail coming to that subdomain alias.
See our help for more information about subdomain addressing.
To guarantee mail from someone never ends up blocked as spam, add them to your address book. This is known as ‘whitelisting’ an address: mail from in your address book automatically bypasses spam checks.
If you’d like to whitelist an entire domain, so that mail from anyone at that domain is also whitelisted, you can add the whole domain as a contact, specifying *@<domain>.<tld>
as their address. All mail coming from any address at that domain will now be whitelisted.
To keep your address book tidy, rather than have an entry for every single email address you want to whitelist, you can have one entry with multiple email addresses: one email address for each address you want to whitelist.
See our help for more information on whitelisting and on general address book usage.
Want to check how close to your storage quota you are? Find a summary under your list of folders in the web interface.
If you want a breakdown by folder so you can clear out old unwanted mail, go to the Folder Edit screen (either through Settings, or using the link under the list of folders in the mail view). Then use the Quota Usage link at the bottom of the screen.
Your file storage also is part of your total quota allowance and a summary is also shown on the Quota Usage page.
See our help for more information on account limits and how to increase your storage quota.
If you use folders a lot, you may be interested in some of the ways we can help you keep them organised.
Set the order folders appear in your folder list so that the most important ones are at the top. You can do this either by using drag and drop directly in the folder edit list, or by specifying the sort order in the folder preferences screen where “1” puts a folder at the top and larger numbers towards the bottom.
If you have folders you don’t usually look at unless a new message is filtered into them via rules, you can set them to be hidden unless there’s unread mail.
If you have folders you hardly ever look at: they’re only for archive reference, you can even set a folder to be always hidden.
The sorting and hidden settings only apply when viewing folders through our web interface or via our Fastmail apps: they remain in their usual sort order and are always visible in other clients.
A useful tip: if you filter mail to an alias or a subdomain address into a particular folder and you want to ensure mail you send from that folder always matches the right alias, you can configure the sending alias to use in the folder preferences.
See our help for more information on folders and aliases.
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Macon Gambill has jumped into his new role at Fastmail.