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Interview With Jeremy Howard of FastMail.fm
Siker writes "In a world of giants such as Gmail and Rackspace, email service provider FastMail.fm is somehow doing great, with signups above the million mark and reliability above four 9s. Email Service Guide interviews Jeremy Howard, founder of FastMail.fm, to find out how. Also covered are the company's contributions to Open Source software such as Cyrus-IMAP and Thunderbird. Jeremy discusses the future of IMAP, how open protocols help FastMail.fm, and why he thinks SLAs from email providers are a con."
You can tell it's a slashvertisement when the URL is casually dropped four times in the title and summary
rlong@
Synchronicity happens.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
From the article:
Jeremy: SLAs are generally a bit of a con. If a customer canâ(TM)t access their email when they need it, that could cost them enormously, either commercially or personally. But all SLAs Iâ(TM)ve seen only offer a small refund for a large outage â" itâ(TM)s really no help at all to the customer. So instead of offering such a miserable token, what we do instead is support independent 3rd party resources like pingdom uptime monitoring and the Email Discussions forum so that prospective customers can get a truly independent and complete view of what we offer.
I'm inclined to agree with this approach. E-mail is how everyone works today. A client e-mails me a task or a request, his way of measuring my worth to him is how fast I finish that task. If I can't reach my e-mail, the potential for injury to my reputation and the relationship with that client because of just that one 2 hours-a-year outage could be a loss of such extent that the e-mail provider couldn't possibly offer me enough compensation.
In other words, information on how well the provider does in practice is much more relevant to me than some clause for token compensation.
FastMail.fm is a great service, and if you've ever tried FastMail.fm you'd know this. In fact, FastMail.fm is so great that I was very excited to see a FastMail.fm story here on Slashdot. And the man behind FastMail.fm? That's FastMail.fm-tastic.
If you don't like it, you can go FastMail.fm yourself, you FastMail.fm-er.
Neverheardofthem. Move along...
Okay, so could someone who is familiar with who these guys are explain what they have to offer? From a quick look, my impression is that as a consumer who doesn't necessarily need 5 9's of reliability, there isn't much reason for me to use them over Gmail.
Lavabit has a great service concept.
Only minus point: When using the free 1GB plan, the ads invalidate PGP signatures. They have ad-free 128 MB though.
Features: http://lavabit.com/features.html
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I've been using fastmail for years, and have been very happy with it. As a free email provider they are one of the best. Arguably gmail gives you more, but I use my fastmail and gmail accounts about equally, and I really like them both about the same. And fastmail doesn't have the looming spectre of gmail's targeted ads based on the content of your messages, suggesting that they care a bit more about your privacy. Google has a little bit nicer interface, and way more storage for free, buuuuut... fastmail of late has had better availability/uptime.
Go fastmail:)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Great service but they have had problems in the past with hardware failure, although my account was never affected.
I do like their support. When I have a problem I get a response from Rob (the software dev guy) and he knows his stuff.
Their web interface is not in the same class as gmail, but I use IMAP so this is not an issue.
One feature I love is that advanced users can write sieve scripts for filtering.
Email is a one way tranference of information. Communication is two way, needing a confirmatory "message heard and understood". We have become casual in assuming that text messaging, social application posting and email are part of global communication. It is not. It is like shouting from your front porch; you have to hope someone is listening and understands the message. Email has a role to play, just don't think it's communication. This is why chat, IRC and Skpye all offer the immdediacy of knowing you're message is on target, even it is just a subtle joke. How often do those blow up in your face using email? Cheers
How long will they have their four 9s reliability now that they've been slashvertised?
Free Account: 10MB email, IMAP
So, I've already lost interest. FastMail.fm does not have the capacity to handle 4 of the past 10 e-mails I've received today, unless I give them my credit card.
With regards to uptime, I concede that GMail had some issues a few weeks ago. But, look - Google is good at one thing, and that's redundancy. It's build into everything they do. With greater volume comes greater visibility and responsibility, and I'm honestly not sure I'm willing to trust "FastMail.fm" with my precious data. (What is this "fm" extension anyway? It's not that I care, it's that millions of other people do - and that's the problem).
kdawson consistently publishes pointless or stupid OPs. Whenever I see the name kdawson I know that there will be a problem. Whether kdawson lets through a spelling error, or kdawson puts forward slashvertising, or even whether kdawson makes an egregious logical error in editorializing, I always know what to expect when I see the name kdawson.
i pay the $15 per year for 600mb. it's fast, it works well on imap, i can use aliases, and my email won't trigger behavior profiling, won't target ads, or freeze me out of my email because someone sent me a spreadsheet.
i know everyone is used to paying for email, but i really like email without ads, someone that will support mail from a domain i own, from a server i don't have to manage but can access anywhere with anything. i think they provide a great service for what i pay for.
whenever I notice his crap I tag it firekdawson... kdawsonispants might work to.
After my university account expired, I went with Fastmail after deciding I did not want my non-throwaway email account to be sold to spammers, open for 'harvesting', or at the whims of some company's profit motives. I went with Fastmail's $20/year account and have been a happy customer now going on 4 years. Features I like best:
They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit. SFTP access to files would also be cool! Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the .fm. This is non-standard, and I wonder how often it looks a little shady to some people who expect all emails to be of the com, edu, or org variety. Might be nice if they'd register another domain under .com that could be aliased to my main accounts.
Another feature that'd be worth the $20/year itself would be the ability to create aliases under the .edu domain in order to get cheap versions of software! I'm sure this is more difficult than it sounds, though.
iSKUNK!
I've been on fastmail for several years, and $40/year is nothing for the peace of mind I get knowing that our private emails are not being used or sold for advertising to us or anyone else, as well as the ability to serve as the mail host for my domains and used by me and my family.
They were ahead of Google in offering IMAP, including SSL for IMAP and SMTP, although I see Google has now caught up.
Something else I appreciate is the effectiveness of the server-side spam filtering. I've never had to spend any of my time fiddling with training my spam filtering. The default server-side rules take care of everything.
1. Empty bottle of tears.
2. Put kdawson into bottle.
3. Advertise to nerds about Bottle of suck that can be opened on your analring or pre-pubescent pen1s.
Their free account is rather weak, but I'm quite happy with what I'm paying $20/year for...
1. Actual security. It's the only webmail I know of I can log in through a secure connection, and it includes a no-cache mode so I don't have to worry about messages I read being in the cache on a public (and possibly infected) machine. You can also make a single-use password for when you have to use a machine that has a good chance of having key logging spyware.
2. On the flip side, there's a "log me in for freaking ever" option for when I'm on my own machine, which not only keeps me logged in, but sets the session to 8 hours so I can just leave it open when needed.
3. Long term file storage - especially when I'm developing something, there's a good chance the same file is going to get attached to a bunch of different messages. Needing to upload it only once (and having it already sitting on their servers for when I'm not on the machine I made said file with) is a huge time saver.
4. Full control of the spam filters, including custom entries. I have the tolerance set high (so I don't ever lose stuff to false positives) but deletion turned on for very high scores (so unquestionable spam is purged without me ever having to touch it.) Google gives you ummm... and "on" and an "off". :P
5. Full filter control, including the ability to autofile stuff into folders (the college I went to sends WAY too much crap, so I put that all in a folder, as I occasionally want to read some of it, but would rather not have it clog up my inbox.) Similarly, the ability to shove stuff you get from a mailing list in its old folder is good for the same reason.
6. File space can be used as webspace. Sometimes I need a temporary, quick, static webpage, and really don't want to be bothered downloading an FTP client (and risk leaving the password to my server sitting on a public machine).
7. Aliases - useful both for cutting spammers off, and for being able to select different sigs, whether to save sent mail, etc.
8. The "bounce" button - deletes a message and sends the sender the standard "this address doesn't exist" autoreply.
9. Real status updates - if something gets screwed up, they tell you exactly what went wrong, what they're doing to fix it, and when it'll be fixed assuming nothing else is borked.
10. Minimal downtime... I think I've seen them die 3 times in ~5 years. I DO have a Gmail account as well, and they're down far more often.
11. I CAN SEND .EXE AND .ZIP FILES. Seriously, as a freelance programmer, Gmail is often useless to me because they don't accept either.
12. Far more customizable, in general. I find Gmail's lack of options annoying.
One criterion that I have for an e-mail provider is that they let me be the arbiter of whether an e-mail is useful or not. Unfortunately, from reading their website, Fastmail.fm apply a series of SMTP and content-level filters that cannot be disabled.
For example, regarding levels of spam filtering they write:
Go to the Options -> Spam / Virus protection screen and switch from "Basic" to "Normal", "Aggressive" or "Custom" level filtering.
How about a ``None at all'' option? I don't receive spam and I baulk at a company blocking any e-mails addressed to me, particularly if I paying $40 per annum!
Disclaimer: I am an extremely satisfied enhanced-account fastmail.fm customer for many years.
One thing that people often don't pay attention to is that fastmail.fm does a lot of Open Source work. One of the fastmail.fm crew, Bron Gondwana, has made extremely important contributions to the world's best, most scalable libre-software mail spool, Cyrus IMAP. He has commit rights upstream, and he has been a very active contributor and member of the community for a few years, now. fastmail.fm is a Cyrus IMAP shop, but they help other Cyrus IMAP users all the time in Cyrus the mailing lists, they have given us details about how to set up highly scalable and redundant multi-million-user setups many times now... And it is not rare to see Bron on the LKML (Linux Kernel ML) engaging the kernel developers to fix a kernel bug or two.
This is no publicity stunt, these guys are it: the email shop anyone who likes to tout around about the importance of FLOSS should vote for with their wallets. About the only thing that could make fastmail.fm even better, would be servers in a non-openly-hostile-to-privacy, non-corporate state: the servers are in the USA.
Many thanks for these kind words - and thanks too for pointing out Bron's great work.
We're at a point now where every single piece of software we use, bar one, is open source. (The one exception is the RAID-monitoring tool that IBM requires for monitoring their RAID hardware.) Everything else, from programming languages, to operating systems, to system monitoring, email servers, web servers, anti-virus, anti-spam, and so on and so on, is all open source.
The reason we use open source for everything is that we can (and do) hack at the source to add features and fix bugs, we get direct access to the actual developers when we need help, we never have to rely on a third party to fix problems, and we get all the security benefits too.
For those who are interested, we have some more details on FastMail.FM's software (and hardware) infrastructure on our site.
Jeremy Howard
FastMail.FM
free email at lavabit.com ftw
Well, I have mod points, but rather than using them, I'll tell my story.
My wife was losing mail and we couldn't track down the problem. I had server logs showing that some mail was accepted by fm, but then disappeared. After much hair pulling, I put in a support request.
I quickly received four pages of logs showing exactly what happened to the mail in question - from the time it was accepted until it was deleted by an email client.
It turns out that there was a Mac Email client which was set to delete mail coming from sources not in my wife's address book. I thought she was only using the webmail. But every once in awhile she'd start the Mac client and it would reach up and expunge mail from the one or two people who were in the fm address book, but not in the Mac Mail address book. Gone without a trace!
Believe me, this kind of service is worth far more than $20 per year.
As you can see from the thread, these guys build on free software, and give back. I run a number of mail servers myself, but I (and my family) use fm because it would take me man years to add on what these guys offer, to say nothing of admining it all.
I'm always amazed that people are willing to waste dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours just to save $20 per year. I keep trying to get my daughter to use fm, but she'd rather struggle with the spam on the free service I provide her on one of my servers than fork out the $20. Wastes my time, too.
Well then, time to plug in something else :)
I've used FastMail for a few years, and would never give it up. I have never seen a better deal, in fact, I looked at a provider referred to in the comments that charges $19.95 monthly. Crazy, and I doubt they could compete as far as features and quality of service. I use a number of e-mail services, but FM is one that I won't be dropping. I actually do not see any real competition because of the features and price. Cotse and Swissmail.org are very good, but they come with a higher price and still don't have many of the features of FastMail.
Never heard of this, so I clicked on the link, this is what I get:
MessagingEngine.com Server Outage IMPORTANT: Some proxies seem to incorrectly cache this page. To ensure you have the latest information, please hold down the Ctrl key and click the Refresh or Reload button in your browser to force a refresh of this page. I'm sorry, the server your email is on is currently down. We apologise for the inconvenience; any email sent to you during this time is being queued by another server and will be delivered as soon as the server is working again. Status updates about why this server is down and when it will be working again will be posted to our status blog. Please check back in a few minutes to access your email. Reported by frontend1.messagingengine.com
Very Nice.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!