Fastmail vs Hey

Get great search, leading open standards support, and so much more when you move your email to Fastmail.

If you’re paying for email, naturally you expect a secure, private, ad-free service with personal support if you need it. But with Fastmail, you get so much more, at an even better price.

  • Great search, and your full email history. Our migration tool let’s you pull in all your email history so you have access to it in one place, wherever you are. Powerful search turns it into a gold mine of information, so you can make email your electronic memory.
  • Leading open standards support. With Fastmail you can get full JMAP, IMAP, CardDAV, and CalDAV support, which means you are free to choose your favourite apps — or even use more than one — and they all stay in sync. It means you can integrate your address book and calendar with everything else on your phone. And it means you can easily migrate your data somewhere else should you ever need to. With HEY, your email is in a walled garden, only accessible to the HEY app.
  • Super speed. At Fastmail, we live up to our name. We built Fastmail to be lightning quick from the bottom up, because your time is too important to be spent waiting on email to load. Almost every action is instant — no more lag on every click.
  • And so much more. Use your own domain, or multiple, at no extra cost, with powerful and flexible handling of extra email addresses (aliases). Get a better calendar, with full support for sharing and invitations. Don’t worry about making mistakes, with undo support for just about everything. The list goes on…

Moving made easy(ish)

As HEY doesn’t support open standards for email access, we can’t directly import it server-to-server like we can with other services. But we’ve made it as easy as we can. Here’s what to do:

  1. Log in to HEY and go to Accounts & Settings, then select your account.
  2. Select Export your data, then click each of the options to export your email, contacts, and calendars.
  3. In your Fastmail account, go to Settings → Migration, and choose Proton and HEY, MBOX files.
  4. Click Upload files and select the MBOX files you wish to import. From here, you’ll see the names and sizes of the MBOX files that will be imported. On the right side, there is a drop down menu titled Destination where you can select a destination folder for the emails to be imported into. (The destination is set to the Inbox by default.)
  5. Click Start import.

You will need to keep the browser tab open while the import is in progress. If you have to stop the import, you can resume it at a later time by reimporting the same MBOX file. Messages that have already been successfully imported will not be imported again, so you do not have to worry about duplicates.

To transfer your contacts or calendar events, go to Settings → Migration and choose Upload contacts and calendars, then follow the instructions to select the files you exported from HEY.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Do you block spy pixels?

    Fastmail loads all images via our own servers, keeping your IP, location and cookies private, so you can’t be tracked by your email. For added protection, you can choose to block remote images, which is the only sure-fire way to prevent a sender knowing you’ve opened it.

  • How do I just get notifications for emails I care about?

    Stay focused by turning on VIP-only notifications — we’ll only notify you about messages from contacts you mark as a VIP.

  • How do I bubble up?

    Hit Snooze and choose a time. The message will will stop cluttering up your inbox, but pop back in at the top, right when you need it.

  • How do I unfollow a thread?

    Just Mute it, and all future replies will skip your inbox so you don’t have to worry about it again.

  • How do I recreate the screener?

    Honestly, we don’t think the screener is a good idea for most people: it’s just going to give you another inbox to review (or forget about, and find an important email stuck there months later). When you have a great spam filter, like with Fastmail, you don’t have to manually choose who to let into your inbox. And if you start receiving a newsletter or promotions you don’t want, you can easily unsubscribe or block them.

    Having said that, if having a screener works for you, here’s how you do it with Fastmail:

    1. Create a folder called “Screener”.
    2. Search for NOT fromin:contacts — this will match any message sent by someone not in your contacts.
    3. Click the Create rule button next to the search, and set the action to Move to Screener. Click Save.

    Now, any mail you receive from someone new will go into your Screener folder instead of your inbox. When you review the mail, you can add them to your contacts to let them through to your inbox next time, or block the address if you don’t want to hear from them again.