Short answer: To dictate in Fastmail, put your cursor in any compose field and use Voice Keyboard Pro. On Mac, hold your hotkey and speak, and text appears instantly. On iPhone, tap the keyboard's mic button. It works in Fastmail's web app and native apps, subject line and body alike.
Fastmail is one of the most respected independent email providers in the world, built by people who care about speed, privacy, and doing email well instead of stuffing it with ads. If you have chosen Fastmail, you probably value your time and your inbox. So here is a fair question: why are you still typing every email by hand?
The average adult types around 40 words per minute. Fast professional typists reach 80 to 100 WPM after years of practice. But almost everyone speaks at 130 to 150 words per minute without any training at all. That gap is the whole argument for dictation. When you talk your emails instead of typing them, you get through your inbox two to three times faster, and your hands stop aching by mid-afternoon.
This guide walks through exactly how to dictate in Fastmail on both Mac and iPhone using Voice Keyboard Pro, how to dictate the tricky parts (subject lines, email addresses, formatting), and how to keep your accuracy high even when your emails are full of names and jargon.
Why dictate your email at all?
Email is deceptively expensive. A single well-worded reply might take two or three minutes to type, and most people send dozens a day. Multiply that out and email quietly eats a large chunk of your working week. Dictation attacks that cost directly. You think at the speed of speech, and now you can write at the speed of speech too.
There are three specific wins when you dictate email rather than type it:
- Speed. Speaking is roughly three times faster than typing for most people. A reply that took three minutes to type takes about one minute to speak.
- Tone. Dictated email tends to sound warmer and more natural, because you are literally talking to the person. Stiff, over-formal email is usually a typing artifact.
- Comfort. If you deal with wrist strain or RSI, moving even half of your writing to voice takes real load off your hands over a full day.
The catch has always been that built-in dictation tools can be clunky, inconsistent between apps, and awkward to trigger. That is the problem Voice Keyboard Pro is built to solve: one consistent, accurate dictation layer that works everywhere Fastmail does.
How to dictate in Fastmail on Mac
Fastmail on the Mac is usually the web app open in Safari, Chrome, or a dedicated browser tab, and it works beautifully with system-wide dictation. Voice Keyboard Pro is a menu bar app that types into whatever field your cursor is sitting in, so it does not care whether Fastmail is a website, a pinned tab, or a wrapped desktop app. If you can click into it, you can talk into it.
Step 1: Install Voice Keyboard Pro
Download Voice Keyboard Pro for Mac and grant microphone and accessibility permissions during the short setup. It lives quietly in your menu bar and adds no clutter to your screen. There is a free tier with a daily limit, so you can try it against your real inbox before deciding anything.
Step 2: Open a compose window in Fastmail
Click Compose in Fastmail, or hit reply on a message. Click into the body field so your cursor is blinking where you want the text to appear. This is the same as typing, you are just about to use your voice instead of the keyboard.
Step 3: Hold your hotkey and speak
Press and hold your Voice Keyboard Pro hotkey, say your sentence, and release. Your words appear at the cursor in about a second. Because it works at the system level, the exact same motion works in the subject field, the body, a signature edit, or even Fastmail's search box. You learn one gesture and it works across the entire app.
This is the same approach that works across every Mac program. If you want the wider picture, our guide on how to dictate in any Mac app covers the general workflow, and the same steps apply to Fastmail.
How to dictate in Fastmail on iPhone
On iPhone, Fastmail runs as a native app and also in Safari. Either way, dictation happens through the keyboard. Voice Keyboard Pro installs as a custom keyboard with a dedicated mic button, so you can dictate directly inside Fastmail without switching apps or copying text back and forth.
Step 1: Add and enable the keyboard
Install Voice Keyboard Pro from the App Store, then go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard and choose Voice Keyboard Pro. Tap into it once more and enable Allow Full Access, which is what lets the keyboard send audio for transcription and return your text.
Step 2: Switch to the keyboard inside Fastmail
Open Fastmail, start a new message or a reply, and tap the compose field. When the keyboard appears, tap the globe icon until you land on Voice Keyboard Pro.
Step 3: Tap the mic and talk
Tap the microphone button, speak naturally, and watch your words land in the email. Tap again to stop. It is genuinely faster than thumb-typing a reply while walking, and far more accurate than trying to type on a moving train.
If you send a lot of email from your phone, it is worth reading our dedicated walkthrough on how to dictate emails on iPhone, which goes deeper on mobile-specific habits that keep your dictated mail clean.
Dictating the tricky parts of an email
The body of an email is the easy part. Real email also has subject lines, recipients, punctuation, and formatting, so here is how to handle each by voice.
Subject lines
Click or tap into the subject field first, then dictate. Keep subjects short and specific, because a subject line is a headline, not a sentence. Say something like "Invoice for June, follow up" and you are done.
Punctuation and new paragraphs
Voice Keyboard Pro understands spoken punctuation. Say "comma", "period", "question mark", or "exclamation point" and it inserts the right symbol. Say "new line" or "new paragraph" to break up your text. With a little practice this becomes automatic, and your dictated emails come out properly formatted rather than as one long run-on block.
Email addresses and recipients
Recipient fields are the one place to slow down. Email addresses are not natural speech, so for a brand-new address it is often quicker to let Fastmail's autocomplete do the work, or to type it. But for people you email constantly, there is a much better answer, and it lives in the next section.
Smart Vocabulary: teach Fastmail your names and jargon
Every inbox is full of words that generic transcription gets wrong: colleague names, company names, product codes, industry acronyms, and the occasional email handle you type ten times a day. Voice Keyboard Pro includes Smart Vocabulary, a personal dictionary with replacement rules, so you can fix these once and never think about them again.
You can add entries so that when you say a name, it is always spelled the way you want, or set a short spoken phrase to expand into something longer. For example, you might say "send my scheduling link" and have it expand to a full sentence with your booking URL. For a Fastmail user, common Smart Vocabulary entries include:
- Frequent contacts' names spelled exactly right, every time.
- Your own company and product names, so they are never mangled.
- A spoken shortcut that expands into your standard sign-off.
- Industry acronyms that would otherwise be transcribed as ordinary words.
This is the feature that turns dictation from "good enough" into "better than typing" for daily email, because your accuracy climbs the more you use it. If you also live in other mail clients, the same dictionary carries over, which is handy if you dictate in Proton Mail or Spark too.
Fix mistakes by voice with Voice Edit
Even great transcription occasionally picks the wrong word, and re-selecting text on a phone to fix one word is tedious. On iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro includes Voice Edit: instead of tapping around, you simply speak the change you want. You can say what to replace and what to replace it with, and the correction happens in place. For email, that means you can fix a name or a stray word without ever putting the phone down to poke at the screen.
Writing email in another language
Fastmail is used all over the world, and plenty of people write to contacts who do not share their first language. On iPhone, Voice Keyboard Pro offers two-way translation while you dictate, across 24 languages. You can speak in your own language and have the email land in the recipient's language, which removes a lot of friction from international correspondence. It is one of those features you do not think you need until the day you have to email a supplier in another country and realize you can just talk.
Privacy: a good fit for Fastmail users
People choose Fastmail partly because they are tired of their email being mined. That instinct is worth carrying into whatever tools you bolt onto it. Voice Keyboard Pro is built with the same respect for your data: as of the 2026 privacy update, the server stores only operational pings needed to keep the service running. It does not store your audio, and it does not store the content of what you transcribe. Your emails are your emails.
That alignment matters. There is little point using a privacy-first mail host and then routing every sentence you write through something that keeps a copy. With Voice Keyboard Pro, the words you speak into Fastmail stay yours.
Tips for dictating professional email
Dictation is a skill, and a few habits make dictated email read as well as typed email, sometimes better:
- Think in one sentence at a time. You do not have to speak the whole email in one breath. Dictate a sentence, pause, dictate the next. It reads more naturally and it is easier to correct.
- Say your punctuation on purpose. A quick "comma" or "period" in the right place is what separates a polished email from a wall of text.
- Read it before you send. Ten seconds of proofreading catches the one word that came out wrong. This is true of typed email too, and dictation is no different.
- Build your Smart Vocabulary early. Add your five most common problem words in the first week and your accuracy will feel dramatically better.
- Dictate replies on your phone. The biggest time savings come from handling quick replies by voice on iPhone instead of letting them pile up for later.
Troubleshooting Fastmail dictation
The text is not appearing when I speak on Mac
Make sure your cursor is actually clicked into the Fastmail compose field before you hold the hotkey. Also confirm Voice Keyboard Pro has accessibility and microphone permissions in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Those two permissions are what allow it to hear you and to place text at your cursor.
The mic button is missing on iPhone
This is almost always the Full Access setting. Go back to Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards, tap Voice Keyboard Pro, and make sure Allow Full Access is on. Without it, iOS blocks the keyboard from doing transcription.
Names keep coming out wrong
Add them to Smart Vocabulary. Any word you find yourself correcting more than once is a candidate. Once it is in your personal dictionary, that word gets spelled your way from then on.
It stops before I finish a long email
Dictate in shorter bursts. A sentence or two per pass is more reliable than trying to speak six sentences in one go, and it makes proofreading easier. This habit also keeps you comfortably inside the free tier if you have not upgraded yet.
Free tier and Pro
Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with a daily limit, which is plenty to try dictating your Fastmail inbox for a few days and feel the difference. Pro removes the limits and unlocks the full feature set for $4.99 per month or $34.99 per year. For most people the yearly plan pays for itself in the first week of not typing email by hand.
The bottom line
Fastmail already made your email faster and cleaner. Dictation is the natural next step: instead of typing at 40 words a minute, you write at the 130 to 150 words a minute you already speak. On Mac you hold a hotkey and talk; on iPhone you tap a mic button. Subject lines, replies, and full messages all work, your names and jargon stay accurate through Smart Vocabulary, and your words never leave your control.
Try Voice Keyboard Pro free and dictate your next Fastmail reply. Once you have talked your way through a morning's inbox, going back to typing every email feels like a strange thing to do.