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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.'"

12 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Opera Software by sopssa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. in other news by FuckingNickName · · Score: 2, Informative

    Tuffmail remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.

    1. Re:in other news by Fnkmaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails and stick with companies that make their money at offering email as a service. Tuffmail won't compromise your privacy because they'll go out of business if they do. Whereas Google owes you nothing.

      I was a Fastmail.fm customer for years until their huge outage a couple years back. I switched to Tuffmail, and haven't looked back. Great service, rock solid reliability, never a lost email, no more than a few hours of downtime over the last several years.

      I know of no other service that offers that kind of reliability for the very reasonable price Tuffmail charges.

    2. Re:in other news by Hurricane78 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In other news, real geeks have their own root server with their own setup (including greylisting and amavisd with spamd and clamav).

      Please hand in your geek card, appliance user! ;)

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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 :)

  5. Reliable, fast and standards compliant by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Opera is a good company.. done webmail before by osssmkatz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Which country is home base now? by tempwaldo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:What for? by sznupi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would guess Opera Mini will get soon a nicely integrated creation process and access to email account; so Opera Software will jump on the badwagon of hundreds of millions of people getting their first email adress (people in so called "3rd world countries", having access to the internet only via fairly simple phones; phones on which Opera Mini is very popular, it certainly helps it being #1 mobile web browser). Opera can also offer it in nice package to mobile carriers, I guess.
    Who knows, perhaps next step will be some integration with My Opera and also basic mobile client for that online community.

    --
    One that hath name thou can not otter