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'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!
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!
FastMail.FM operates under Australian law, not US law (although the servers are in the US, they are owned by an Australian company). Australian privacy law offers more protection than almost anywhere else in the world. For instance, an Australian company that receives a request for information about an account under the Telecommuncations Act is legally required to not provide any actual email contents to the requesting law enforcement agency.
To have an account closed, law enforcement would have to jump through plenty of hoops first, and we'd check really carefully to be sure that the request was legally enforceable before we complied.
Jeremy Howard
FastMail.FM
FastMail.FM operates under Australian law, not US law (although the servers are in the US, they are owned by an Australian company).
The servers are here in the US? I feel safe in speculating that if *you* will not pony up the emails to a US judge, the people who maintain the server farm *here in the US* will. US judges generally couldn't care less about how they do it in whatever country, and, as you said, the servers are here in the US...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
For your own information
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.
The web interface was written from scratch and has been continually developed over the last 10 years. It's not drag-n-drop because in our experience that's not the most powerful and efficient way to manage email. It's designed to be lean, yet powerful - but folks who want something simple and full of eye candy would be best off looking elsewhere, frankly.
It does use asynchronous requests (I hope you don't mind if I don't say "AJAX" - for many reasons, I can't stand that acronym) when it provides a real advantage. For instance, many parts of the interface appear/disappear without doing full page refreshes (for speed), to addressing fields in the Compose screen have a really powerful autocomplete system, and message composition is extended in a number of ways (such as inline spell-check and automated auto-formatting of plain-text emails).
They can't - they have no access to the emails, because they can't login to the machines and they can't access the encryption keys for the data. All maintenance of the OS/software is done from Australia.
We've had a number of US-based law enforcement bodies over the year try to get hold of our data without going via the appropriate Australian bodies, and it doesn't work out for them. In the end, they have always ended up submitting a request for cooperation via the Australian Federal Police, as they are required to do, and we respond to that request in line with Australian law.