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Opera Acquires Fastmail.fm

Posted by Soulskill on from the hopefully-for-more-than-a-song dept.

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.'"

4 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Do not transfer = Cancel by Lambticc · · Score: 5, Informative
    I suppose the poster didn't actually RTFA as you can either accept by clicking, accept by doing nothing or not accept by cancelling the account.

    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.

  2. Fastmail had stopped investing. by Qwavel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Fastmail had stopped investing. by Bronster · · Score: 3, Informative

      I guess you haven't seen what's going on behind the scenes. We haven't been quite so public, but personally I've been doing a LOT of work improving the Cyrus imap server that we run on. It's stability and the reliability of the replication system has improved enormously over the past few years, and most of that has been due to FastMail investing time (mostly mine :) ) in not only working on Cyrus itself, but in the monitoring and introspection tools we use to make sure that the replicas are truly up-to-date.

      We've almost fully rolled out UTF-8 support internally throughout our interface, which you'll notice if you have to deal with emails with more than one character set at any point. In the past we did everything in a user's default characterset, which was OK for most people but a pain for some.

      And heaps of minor fixes that most people don't ever see :)

  3. Re:in other news by Bronster · · Score: 3, Informative

    We put a lot our eggs in one basket for a bit - we had a 2Tb (yeah, I know - not so big by today's standards) RAID6 set die when 3 disks failed. This is before we had replication. It took about 2 weeks to get everyone back online as we streamed from backups as fast as we could!

    Our infrastructure is a lot more fault-tolerant now. We actually lost a RAIDset about 3 weeks ago when two drives failed within about an hour of each other (a RAID1 of 150Gb drives - it was about 80% rebuilt)

    Users didn't notice anything at all, but there were a couple of days when a subset of our users didn't have a realtime-replicated copy of their mail store as replication re-synced all their data to the new drives.