9 Aug 2026
Been using ForwardEmail for about a year now for all my domains. Worked reliably enough, but performance was 'meh'. Last week I could not send outbound mail on my primary mail domain. This was seriously bad.
I contacted support and turned out that domain got blacklisted due to some complaint from GMail. Out of the blue and first offense (not even my fault). Support removed me from blacklist and still no outbound email. I switched to their webmail platform and could survive, but even the webmail did not work fully well on iPad, which is my main device. No further follow up from Support, despite my follow up on it. Maybe he missed it.
Signed up for FastMail and set things up, but I clicked one wrong option and had to contact Support to clarify next step. Took them more than 24 hours to get back to me. Not so "fast" service on the weekend, but they solved my problem.
Proceeded to set up my primary mail domain at FastMail and got things working eventually. DNS stuffs took a few hours to finaly propagated and mail flow started to resemble normalcy. Performance is fast. I like it. The iOS and iPadOS apps work well too.
I still have other domains at ForwardEmail, which I will not migrate yet. The focus, for now, is the primary email domain. But sooner or later, I will want to move some to self-hosting, although the primary email domain will remain at FastMail. Probably.
Stalwart mail is starting to officially support FreeBSD, although the port
is not yet updated with the latest release. Once the port is up-to-date,
I hope to self-host some domains using it with the help of SMTP2Go for
outbound. That is the plan anyway; still not sure if I will have the time
to do it.
Alternatively, I can also move all domains to FastMail. So far, this seems like a keeper.
Update 11 Aug 2026:
Fastmail support is shit slow even on workdays. 😖 And the support person did not seem very enthusiastic to understand the real issue at hand and dismissed my problem without actually offering any solution. Speechless.
Update 12 Aug 2026:
Fastmail treatment for new account is utter shit and they failed to put critical information in their migration documentation. Had I known this, I would not have migrated my primary mail domain that must send outbound mail without fail. Sigh.
Here is their Support's response which they used to close my ticket. I am speechless.
"I'm afraid all new Fastmail accounts are subject to the spam checking process irrespective of their billing status. We understand your concern is regarding delayed delivery of emails to recipients. While it is never our intent to delay legitimate mail, some messages from new accounts could be delayed.
I would like to clarify that you will not necessarily see all of your emails being held as a result of these spam checks. I would also like to take this opportunity to share a little more information about how this process works.
Due to the large number of spammers and scammers that sign up for email services with the intent of abusing them, email providers need to put safeguards in place to catch this activity before it reaches recipients. If there were no checks in place, it would impact the IP reputation of the mail server, which would cause deliverability issues for all customers.
Our anti-abuse filters use a range of automated checks to assess messages. Not all emails are flagged/delayed. Many factors can cause an email to be flagged, which include (but are not limited to) the volume of emails, a pattern of similar messages, issues with the headers or structure of the email, or the content within a message.
If a message has a spam score over a certain threshold, it will be held for additional spam checks. The delay timeframe depends on the volume of potential outbound spam that needs to be processed.
If a message has a spam score below the threshold, that message will be sent immediately and without any delays.
Please rest assured that these additional checks only apply for a limited period after a new account is created. We don't share the exact duration publicly, as doing so could make it easier for bad actors to work around our safeguards."
Their technology seems genuinely good. Their support is not.
Update 22 Aug 2026:
Outbound emails from Fastmail finally became normal a few days ago. Thank God.
I could not import the old emails in ForwardEmail mailbox because account verification could not complete anymore, since all DNS settings had changed to Fastmail. (ForwardEmail used DNS TXT record for verification, which is good, but left me in a tough spot.) Fastmail's instruction was to migrate everything first before importing the old mailbox, thus I had no way to import the old mail into Fastmail. SIGH.
I had most of the old mails on the device, but some attachments would not load. But at this point, I liked Fastmail enough and did not want to switch back to ForwardEmail just because of this. I liked their technology.
Earlier today, I cleaned up my other mail domains at ForwardEmail and found out it was possible to download the mailbox backup. I had low hope due to the account situation, but ForwardEmail delivered. I could download a backup of my mailbox. Yay!
Default MacOS Mail app does not seem to import them to my liking, but at least I have a copy. So I have something to work with.
Hopefully, it will be smooth sailing from now on.
Update 14 Sep 2026:
More than a month later, outbound emails from Fastmail still take 2-3 hours to be delivered. I had to use my personal non-Fastmail provider to send time-sensitive work emails. This is really bad. 😩 I am very disappointed.
Update 16 Sep 2026:
Fastmail support detected some issue and, without my prodding, proactively sent me an email regarding the list of my delayed emails.
"A recent infrastructure change caused our system to incorrectly flag some outgoing messages and route them to a queue where they were held instead of delivered. We've corrected the issue, and we're also rolling out a broader update that will prevent this from recurring.
We recognize that timely email delivery can be critical, and we sincerely apologize that this happened.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this message, and our support team will be happy to assist."
So of course I told them that even after they "corrected the issue", my emails were still delayed by more than one hour.
Update 19 Sep 2026:
To which Fastmail support responded.
"I am very sorry to hear that you've seen additional delays with your outbound mail.
As my colleagues noted in your previous ticket (PTN #___), some of your mail has been put on hold for additional spam checks.
As your account ages, you should not see further delivery delays for your mail."
This is more than two months after I signed up as a paying customer with 1-year upfront payment. And my outbound emails are less than 10 on daily basis. I am speechless.