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
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.
I'm also a fastmail subscriber. Can't fault reliability and features of it, although aesthetically speaking, there is room for improvement with the web interface. The only real issue I have with fastmail is the mailbox size (600MB for my service level) - when I signed up, I was only regularly using one machine to read my email on, so it wasn't an issue to get my mail via POP3, and use my local mail storage when I wanted to search old messages. Now I have four or five devices I regularly read my email on, so the Google Mail 8GB of storage is starting to look attractive, I can have all my mail searchable from any machine. My current fastmail quote isn't nearly large enough for that, and it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
Oh no... it's the future.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's stuff that we block before we even know who it's addressed to. At one point (I haven't checked recently) we had over 1 MILLLION IP addresses that were being blocked from even connecting to our MX servers (for a 24 hour rolling block none less) because of their behavior.
But you can certainly turn the spam scanning right down to the point where anything that's not pretty ugly will be allowed into your mailbox. I have my spam scanning turned a fair way up, and the only false positives I've had are newsletters from companies that I do have a relationship with. Adding them to my address book fixes that up just fine.
Training my personal bayes database has certainly helped reduce the spam through to my Inbox as well (my personal domain address has been around for a while and gets ~400 spam/day)
Bron ( FastMail sysadmin )
FastMail.FM has fewer global filters than any email provider I can think of. However, all large email providers need some - the first time a service gets hit by an SMTP-based DDOS they discover this!
Imagine you have a botnet of 100,000 computers all trying to open SMTP connections to your server and blast through email at the same time - that's not something you want to allow. So, we have a database of IPs which have attempted to DOS us in the last few hours, and block them at an IP level. That's why there's no ability to allow users to turn off this global filtering - since it happens at IP level, we don't even know which address they're attacking.
Because most IPs are dynamic, we expire them from the blocklist very quickly (unless they keep reappearing again and again), so that innocent bystanders don't get impacted.
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.