Migrating to the European cloud: a perspective on moving from fastmail to proton mail

Title ideas:
_Migrating to the European cloud: a perspective on moving from fastmail to proton mail_
_The cost of moving to the European cloud: a perspective on moving from fastmail to proton_
_The UX cost of moving to the European cloud: a perspective on moving from fastmail to proton_
_Migration to the European cloud: it's been a rough ride_
_Fastmail to protonmail: leaving the golden standard_
_Protonmail has momentum, but it's not there yet_
_Protonmail review from a longtime fastmail user_

- on The drive and pressure to introduce lots of apps to be the EU's office or g workspace provider
- on why giving it a shot
- on my experience, just post migration and after some use

What I like

- EU (greater EU anyways) hosting (this is the reason to consider moving at all)
- Serious effort in safety (but not an expert, and having to trust NASA/physics PhD's on crypo isn't a strong argument for me)
- offline access of mails (but just after purchasing Fastmail introduced that, and a desktop app as well. I may not have moved if that was announced earlier; the argument would have become tougher for sure).
- Continuous improvement, not just using community solutions but also taking part into building (i.e. an effort to lead)
- They do have responsive human support (fastmail did too though)

What I dearly miss or don't like

- Fastmail's Catch all magic:
- no need to assign a top-level account (that can not ever be removed unless there is no mail in the mailbox to that address; I removed one of my domains, but cannot remove the alias at all.) for a catch-all domain
- sending from catch-all domains
- Fastmail's ease of use and nameservers which do the harder parts for you
- Wildcard magic
- Fastmail's UI is similar and yet much clearer
- The limitation on 100 aliases max sucks if you don't have wildcard sending ('reverse catch all'): no I don't want to use an external service like Simple Login
- Fastmail's filtering system is golden
- Protonmail seems to expect that you have a top level domain; anything subdomains and you're on your own (it is possible: but, see above, you need a useless primary address).
- Proton's odd concept where it really wants to categorize some things for you. In mail this is labels and folders. You can have both, but they're both in the UI, with no option to customize. The importer imported my fastmail labels as folders; that kind of sucks but I guess that's just a protocol limitation? Not sure. In proton drive it's this "My files" top level folder (so they can also give you a "Shared with me" and I think also device specific folders). But I hate it. I want to order stuff by my rules and my way, and it's just not possible.
- The complete lack of snoozing emails. According to the support article it should exist on web (and iOS but can't test that), but at least for me it doesn't. Odd anyways that desktop and mobile are excluded then since they seem to just add wrappers around browsers on all platforms, the Standard Notes way (https://standardnotes.com/blog/react-native-is-not-the-future) (that was before they teamed up with proton).
- The ~~terrible~~ purple color scheme (1) and branding, it burns in my eyes. I tried all variations and like none. The branding everywhere seems to be a trap to lure new sales, with a lack of depth in any material. See for example a representative sales article like this: https://proton.me/business/europe-tech-watch#netherlands - I think it's barely readable, and lacks much of the greater details like how they support these numbers. The docs are just like this. And the easy topics are there but for details like subdomains, catch-all senders etc. you need to look elsewhere. I also miss useful stuff like tables when listing supported features. In stuff like "how to snooze", one of the last items at the bottom is (hidden in text), oh by the way, only web and iOS. (1) don't want to offend anyone. I just don't like it.
- It's sometimes a bit slow. It's mobile app sometimes doesn't work ("Failed loading conversation"). I see that stuff enough in JIRA. We need to do better. This is the absolute basics.
- They're not quite transparent what they're working on next. Release notes also commonly just have "bug fixes". For a company which asks that you trust it with your data (as the good guys), I expect more.

My pricing comparison. Proton is not cheap at all, even compared to competitors.

Quality over quantity.

Next posts:

- Proton drive (experience vs next cloud and own cloud, hetzner and transip)
- proton vpn (experience vs mullvad)
- proton pass (experience vs bitwarden and authenticator)
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