[jhollington]

Originally Posted by n5bb

Am I the only person who reads the Terms Of Service? All TOS documents state that the current TOS always supersedes any previous terms, and that the service provider can terminate or modify accounts at any time for any reason. There were never any lifetime guarantee in the TOS or any other written communication from FastMail. Please read the TOS for FastMail or any other service and you will discover that services are provided at the discretion of the provider.

Yup, pretty much the way I've always assumed that any TOS reads anyway. I honestly think that people are being deliberately naive if they truly expected that a one-time payment of $15 would guarantee them an email account for life. Sure, it would have been nice, but as the old saying goes, "you pays yer money...."

Honestly, I've always felt more fortunate that some companies are good enough to do things like this. As I mentioned earlier, I signed up for DynDNS back around 2000 when they actually were promising one-time payments for lifetime DNS hosting. I personally consider the fact that I still have seven domains with them and haven't given them a cent in over 15 years to be a privilege, not a right.

I think the key point is that all Member accounts received far more value than anyone anticipated 10-15 years ago when they made the purchase. You have been able to use many enhancements to a Member account (such as two factor authentication and many other features) which were not available originally

That's also a really good point.... Even IF FastMail had promised an account for life, they never made any promises about delivering new functionality to those accounts. Maybe FastMail should have left all of the "Member" accounts back in the relative bronze age of e-mail technology

I can't understand why anyone thinks they are getting a raw deal here, when many of them received email service for less than US $1.50 per year.

Sadly, in a world of Gmail and Hotmail et al, too many people think anything more than free is too much to pay, but I've always felt that to be ridiculous. Even in today's world where there's an article out every other week about the demise of e-mail, for most people e-mail is still a critically important tool for communications. I don't think most people would honestly expect to have telephone service or postal mail for free, yet they're not willing to shell out even a few bucks a month for e-mail (let's face it, even FastMail's new paid accounts start at $2.50/month).