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Opera Acquires Fastmail.fm
mattcsn writes "Opera Software just bought email service provider Fastmail.fm. Here's hoping that Opera uses a light touch and keeps the email service as unchanged as possible. From the article: 'FastMail has included a FAQ, in which it says that users who wish to not transfer their accounts over to Opera have to go into settings and indicate just that. Not acting upon the email the company sent out to its users or actively accepting the transfer will result in Opera assuming control over the mailbox and the account registration details. As to the reason for selling, FastMail says the market was getting increasingly competitive and that Opera's expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market would help the company grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.'"
For once I actually think the service will stay as it is. Opera's business isn't offering mail services, but their web browser contain mail functionality, and Opera has a good track record of a good company. What it seems to be is that they're looking to have a specific email provider in the browser, and buying Fastmail.fm is great for that.
Seriously, why is Opera doing this?
{{.sig}}
Tuffmail remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.
"Here's hoping that (COMPANY_X) uses a light touch and keeps (COMPANY_Y) as unchanged as possible. "
You must be new to the tech industry?
Out of interest, what are the great tech buyouts that have worked int he last 15 years?
What are the top 5 synergy-tastic deals and where are they now?
Nick
What if I don’t want Opera to take over my account?
Go to http://www.fastmail.fm/ login to your account, then go to the Options -> Cancel Account screen and enter your password to confirm you want to cancel your account.
Fastmail has served me very well over the years, but a couple of years ago they stopped making improvements and adding new features.
I wondered whether they decided that they wouldn't ever be able to compete with stuff like gmail and so they decided to stop investing and just milk it for whatever revenue they could get. This wasn't a terrible thing, mind you - the service kept working very well, but it did fall further and further behind. Gmail, in particular, is now offering a better service for free, so I doubt that fastmail was getting many new subscribers.
I was just thinking about paying them for the excellent service I've had for free for the last 10 years. I've had a free account with them for that long, and have always been extremely happy. Never paid for an upgrade because I never needed it. I think I'll hold off now and see how Opera handles the takeover.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Amazingly clean, browser friendly interface along with superb IMAP support. That was why I originally subscribed to fastmail.fm and it went even better, not worse.
There is a huge level of expertise in fastmail.fm and I believe they use best of the technology but it has never been some "nerd" service, they used the ideas to make it more friendly to newbie user. Of course, there isn't a chance you can compete with free and brands like "Google", so it could never get into place where it deserved.
Hopefully, with Opera, it will be more known and used.
I knew nothing about Opera acquiring them and there was nothing particularly wrong with fastmail.fm, but there was nothing particularly good about them either. I was hoping to get spam filtering good enough that I could have my phone alert me about new mail but even after months of training their spam filter it still let through far too much spam.
I have resorted to just leaving Thunderbird running on a desktop computer to delete spam and manually checking my phone when I feel like it instead of having it chirp every time a new email comes in. Thunderbird is a lousy mail client, but it catches at least as much spam as fastmail.fm's spam filter did.
I think fastmail.fm has a very small niche. For most people there's not really a compelling case to made for them.
You specifically grant them (unless you pay) the rights to analyze your mail. It is up to them to use it whatever sense they want. Just because you don't see ads, it doesn't mean they are harvesting the personal mails.
There are some people who really feel disturbed about that kind of policy and please don't bring up "what about your ISP root user?", I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
This isn't their first attempt at webmail. Operamail has been maintained and was their first attempt. They have no reason to shutter a webmail service. Their mail client is decent as well, and very similar to Gmail.
That was quick.......
Be yourself and aim high!
Fastmail was pretty much the only people that asked you for almost nothing to set up an account.
account name, password, name and junk confirm address.
They believed in your privacy by simply not asking for extra non operational [to you, not them] info.
Tuff mail askes for all sorts of stuff.
Gmail is a crock, because now they want your cell phone number and date of birth too.
Do not trust anyone who says they want your stuff for good or private reasons.
There really do need to be free and pay email only providers, not linked to search companies, web corps, social sites.
The acquisition FAQ says that they are excited to work on new webmail interfaces.
However, I just don't get that spirit of insight and innovation from the Opera team or the Fastmail team. I don't think they really have the chops to look past gmail and think about what the next best e-mail experience is. I feel that they will forever be constrained by the old-school thinking of the underlying protocols.
"I'm one of the main developers and was one of the (now previous) owners of Fastmail.
Fastmail has always been a small company, there are just 3-4 main developers (myself, Bron, Richard and recently in the last year, Kurian), and a couple of support staff scattered around world. For that small size, I think we've managed to build a pretty great product with lots of niche and power features, loyal users, and apart from a small disaster in 2006 (2-3 day outage for a big chunk of users), we've also been incredibly reliable, especially in recent years.
http://www.pingdom.com/reports/lzdx4pr0pdhk/ http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html
Fastmail was nicely profitable, but not spectacularly so. We're basically all geeks, and we don't have a marketing or sales department that can grow our customer base significantly (we tried, but it didn't work out, and we probably should have put more effort in, but didn't... because we probably preferred to spend time just building neat stuff, or fixing that edge case bug, or doing that fun thing... like I said, geeks).
I think we had to face facts a bit, we were a small fish with limited resources in a market that has become severely more competitive in recent years. We needed to invest a bunch of time and money in updating our interface, and adding new features (especially better mobile syncing).
And coincidentally, it's around that time that Opera came along and started talking to us. Despite being half a world apart, there's a lot of fit between the companies. They use a lot of perl, we do to. They're a company run by technology people, creating a product that's loved by geeks, is highly customisable, has a loyal fan base, and despite it's small size, punches above it's weight. I think that describes us pretty much as well.
So the timing was right, and Opera have an interest in picking up email as a core competency, and a bunch of ideas on what they want to improve, what they want to build. The other Fastmail guys were also interested in new opportunities, and we're all becoming Opera staff and are committed to working there for a few years at least. There's already plans for some staff to move to Norway to work, a change of life after 5 years of just 3 of us in a single office (apparently the Norwegian lessons are paying off... Jeg vil gjerne et øl til)
So it'll be an interesting change, and something new I'm looking forward to. I've been working for Fastmail for 10 years now. It's been a great time. I've loved building the product and the company. Like anything, there's been ups (it's fun developing a site that customers really love and tell you about) and downs (some people are addicted to being able to access their email, and running a 24/7 email service means that if people can't get to their email for even just 1 minute, you'll start hearing about it). After 10 years, it'll be strange having a boss again. I've met a bunch of the Opera people, and it'll be really great working with them. I know the other staff are looking forward to it as well.
It'll also be great to have Neil on board as well. He worked for us over a couple of summers, and basically designed the entire "new" web interface, all the HTML, CSS and JS. We've already got 80% of a whole new AJAX interface done (remember in programming though, the first 80% takes 80% of the time, the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the time), and I'm looking forward to completely finishing that off, and working on a bunch of new stuff.
Hmmm, this story went on longer than I expected. Hope it's interesting to someone...
Rob Mueller
"
Yeah. So they can scan my email. The Gmail account is mostly throwaway stuff, so they can conclude from harvesting my email... that I get a trivial amount of throwaway stuff. Seriously. I think the Gmail account has handled less than 10 total emails. Ever.
I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
Of course you are. You're using their routers, their CO equipment... that's no less (and no more) sacrosanct than the ISP's SMTP servers. 15 seconds with IOS and one Wireshark session and your emails would belong to the ISP's network techs.
There are some people who really feel disturbed about that kind of policy
Sure. If (A) my e-mail actually mattered, and (B) more specifically my email traffic passing through gmail actually mattered, then I'd be upset. Or not, since I did knowingly sign up for the service.
For me, it's a difference which makes no difference. If it matters, encrypt. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I'm hoping Jeremy is reading this thread. I've been a fastmail user for 9+ years. One selling point that Jeremy touched on in the previous article is that Fastmail has been bound by Australian privacy laws, which he describes as the most protective on the planet. Will Fastmail now be a Norwegian company bound by their laws instead? That would be my assumption. What change does this mean for privacy at Fastmail? This is not adressed in today's announcement or the FAQ.
I moved to VPN long time ago, in fact with Fastmail like services TLS/SSL support, they could never "wireshark" me.
Of course, I keep Yahoo mail since 1998, I just didn't like Gmail's (and Google in general), "You get it free, now sell your soul to us" attitude. If there were more people like me, they would seek for another solution. Of course, people jumping up and down saying "spyware" when poor shareware tries to check for updates using Gmail, it doesn't matter to them.
Nope. This is the same clueless management team who couldn't compete on the desktop with Microsoft (while, of course, Firefox does, and commands ~30% market share), and whined to the EU to give them an undeserved placement on the desktop. Given their poor performance, I predict they'll screw up fastmail.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
The FastMail team have an extraordinarily high level of clue. No wonder Opera got out their chequebook ...
I've deliberately subscribed (also "unsubscribed") some FastMail aliases to some botnet spammers lists. I never got a single piece of spam on these addresses. Subscribing to same lists with other providers produces a steady flow of spam. This has nothing to do with Sieve because most spam never reaches this stage at FastMail. With my Gmail address I don't need to subscribe: the spam finds its way to that address, and there's lots of botnet spam getting into Gmail. True, it's getting into the junkmail "folder", but so are many legitimate messages (false positives) so the spam has to be manually sifted there.
WIth fastMail I know that whatever message is rejected and not delivered into a mailbox (junk box or any other box) is producing an "undelivered" report to the sender. With Gmail there has been reports of disappearing mail: mail that was accepted by their servers yet not delivered to either the recipient's inbox or spam box. I have also seen reports by users of Gmail that get so much spam in their spam box that they gave up fishing for false positives despite knowing that they lose some business this way.