[paul29]

Communicant's post #149 ("FastMail has been commercially shortsighted and tone-deaf in this matter" etc.) and similar ones are entirely right.

Dropping Google Reader isn't comparable to dropping FM member accounts because there was no user identity connected to Google Reader. You could switch to something else easily enough. But if your mail is on a fastmail domain you can't take it with you. So this is more like shutting down Gmail and telling people they have to buy Google Apps accounts (or whatever they're called) to keep using their addresses.

Suggesting that a refund gets Fastmail out of the deal is silly. If Fastmail sold company shares to early investors for $1 a share that are worth $1000s now, can fastmail buy them back at $1? That misses the point of early investing. If a bus company sells you a ticket across Australia and you get on board, can they refund your ticket halfway across Australia and boot you off the bus into the outback because they changed their business model? Heck no--they have to get you all the way to wherever they said they would take you. First people said FM never claimed "lifetime" and then archived posts showed that they did, that should have ended the story.

Suggesting people buy their own domains when FM hosted personal domain emails start with their $50/year plan is also tone-deaf (though other places will do that cheaper or free, admitted), and they already have established FM addresses. I went through this with another provider in the 1990's, said "never again I want a permanent email this time", bought a medium-cool sounding domain name and have gotten my email (currently through FM) on it since then. I also have a few unimportant personal web pages on it but moving those would be no real hassle.

So as for the value of email address continuity? Earlier this year someone contacted me through the domain privacy forwarder and offered me $6000 (six thousand) USD for my domain, far more than I thought it was worth (I'd have guessed a few hundred), but I turned it down because they wanted it immediately and I couldn't deal with the email interruption. It's THAT much hassle. If they had offered a 3 year transition period I might have thought about it, but that's not how these things work. If they offered $60K instead of $6K, then a 3 month transition might have been ok, but immediate would still been a hard sell.

I'm relatively new (2.8 years) to FM, I have the $40/year Enhanced plan that will be up for renewal in a few months, I'll probably renew out of inertia but I'm going to start planning a migration after that.

Those member accounts are old enough that the abusers are long booted, the support load has to be pretty low, so operationally they're a few rows in a database and a few blocks of disk space, and a little bit of network traffic. Bumping them up to Basic sounds much better than what's happening. Or offering to forward the addresses to other providers would be a huge improvement even though it doesn't uphold the lifetime membership claim. This isn't rocket science, FM's overhead is mostly fixed, and every cpanel web hosting plan these days includes unlimited (ugly) email for free without ads, ISP's usually include email etc., so it's not such an expensive thing to offer at a basic level.

It does look to me that FM is planning an exit (i.e. sell the company) and my guess is it will come through quite soon, like this year and probably in the first half of it.

Since recently I'm a happy customer of mxroute.com which hosts email for your own domains, has good spam filtering and deliverability, answers support tickets fast and personally, and is ridiculous cheap if you use a promo code. Feel free to PM me if you want me to check on what works these days. I'll probably send you an affiliate url but you absolutely don't have to use it to sign up with them.

Migadu.com will also host your domains for free (unlimited storage and mailboxes, but outgoing traffic limit of 10 emails per day and they put a small blurb with their url in the signature of each message) if you just want a place to park a stable address for a while.