For business and personal life: how Jon uses Fastmail
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Fastmail values your time and privacy without sacrificing productivity. Check out how Jon Henshaw, a Senior Director of Technical SEO, makes the most of his email thanks to filters and rules, Masked Email, superior spam blocking, and more.
What are your favorite Fastmail features, and what purpose do you use them for?
My favorite Fastmail feature is Masked Email. I use it whenever I sign up for a newsletter or create a new account. It allows me to use a unique email address and create different passwords for every account. And it’s easy to use because it’s fully integrated into my password app, 1Password.
My other favorite features are the Calendar and Contacts. They function perfectly on Apple devices, which enabled me to switch my email, calendar, and contacts to Fastmail. On top of that, if you want to use Fastmail with Apple’s native apps, you can easily create a unique profile for each device that magically sets up all your accounts with just a few clicks. That’s something some of my family members do.
How do you set it/maintain your workflow? (workflow is how you use Fastmail)
I use the same account for personal use and business since Fastmail allows me to add as many domains and aliases as I want. I’ve created filters that route messages to my business email addresses to specific folders. Since Fastmail is intelligent, it knows to always reply with the same email address and signature as the message it was initially sent to. Fastmail also made it easy to change my reply address to a different one if necessary.
Another step in my routine is with reporting spam. Fastmail has an advanced folder setting that will report all messages moved to it as spam. I created a “Learn Spam” folder and turned on this advanced setting. Once a week, I review messages in my Spam folder and move confirmed spam into the Learn Spam folder.
How have you changed the way you use email since you started using Fastmail?
While Fastmail works well with Apple’s native apps, I prefer to use the Fastmail app, especially on my iPhone. The feature I use the most is custom swiping. The Fastmail app allows me to set custom actions for short and long swipes to the left and the right. For swiping right, I set it to “Mark unread” for the short swipe and “Archive” for the long swipe. And for swiping left, I set it to “Learn Spam” for the short swipe and “Delete” for the long swipe.
Overall, I enjoy the user experience of the Fastmail app the best. Since the app consolidates the Contacts and Calendar features with Mail, everything works together seamlessly.
Is there anything else about your workflow or your Fastmail experience that you would like to tell people about?
As a blog and news publisher, I get a lot of link requests. Many senders can be relentless and keep sending new messages hoping I’ll reply to one of them. Instead, I take advantage of Fastmail’s “Blocked senders” feature. It enables me to add the email address or the entire domain to a block list, and once I do that, I never hear from them again. Gmail has a similar feature, but it doesn’t work. Even after I block someone on Gmail, messages still get through, but not with Fastmail. Their blocking works 100% of the time, and I love it.
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