Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
i've been working in the industry for 13 years and have never seen a single SLA honored, even in instances where they are clearly at fault and the impact is huge ( week long outage in the middle of the tax season for an accounting firm).
they are nothing more then arse covering exercises for CTO's
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!
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).
As for your point that serious FM users know all the names and positions of the key folks at FM, that is because of the open communication on the EmailDiscussions forums. It is a compact, transparent organization with good people.