how does fastmail.fm identify me as a user ?

[tha_martian]

hi there

fastmail.fm was the best provider i came up with after lil research

all my email accounts has been stolen after raising them for more than 5 years

my email provider doesn't care, and no response for my emails and so on. Maybe because it's a free service ?! who knows

i'm thinking about a provider that takes a government issued ID as an ID for my email.

i mean what if my "future" FM account gets hacked, is the support gonna do anything different than free service support team ?

thnx

[janusz]

There is no support for free Fastmail accounts. And having more than one free account is against FM's T&C.

[tha_martian]

first, i'm thinking about the "ENHANCED" membership

and only one account

[Terry]

You would get good support with that....

[BritTim]

Fastmail support is sometimes slow. Otherwise, for paid accounts, it is first class. If your priority is ensuring that you can never lose your email in the future, FM is a fine choice.

Even better is a combination of the following:

• Register your own Internet domain (e.g. smithmail.com). You can then have people send email to addresses like john@smithmail.com.
• Use FM as the mail provider for your domain (needs an enhanced account). Note that you can change your mail provider in the future (if necessary) without changing your email address(es).
• Arrange for all incoming and outgoing email to be forwarded additionally to a backup Gmail account. FM has features that can make this automatic.
• Periodically, back up your email to your own computer using a program such as IMAPsize.

The above should protect you against pretty much anything short of thermonuclear war.

[LazyGun]

I've had the same Enhanced account since 2002, and have never had any issues.
I'm a private rather than a business user for what that's worth, but the control and finetuning I get on my Enhanced account is something business users on other systems can only dream about. The file hosting/webspace is a nice addition what with public/private folders, automatic photo galleries, password protection if you want and more

I've used two different domains on top of my fastmail account (as described above by BritTim) and when I closed one and opened the other, absolutely nothing happened or went wrong. FastMail just kept working away happy with the changeover.

There's a plethora of well written and clear support documentation and how-to's, plenty of community support and on the odd occasion you might need it, the support on Enhanced accounts is second to none. Your emails are read by REAL PEOPLE!!!

The legend is that Jeremy and Rob got fed up with half-assed services from providers they used and decided to set up a proper email company. In ten years, I've not once seen anything to suggest they got it wrong.

If you follow BritTim's advice, you certainly won't regret it.

Oh and if you happen to use the Opera browser, FM integrates beautifully into Operas built in mail facility.

[SusieStar]

Wanted to say I appreciated LazyGun's post. I, too, have an enhanced FM account (have not had this for long), but will renew. I AM a longtime user of the Opera browser, and I'm impressed with the way they seem to be a good fit. I really do think, if you like one, you may just like the other, as well. Of course, nothing is absolutely right for each one of us!

I may be one of not as many who made the definite decision to go with FM when I heard Opera was buying. I had been considering FM (my free providers NEVER offered a real human written email, and were always opting me into nonsense features I didn't want, that risked my privacy and security). I was moved to sign up when I learned of the new partnering with Opera. These issues matter to me; after all, when things go wrong, what could I have expected from a "free" provider? Oh..and I have had a couple of "known" paid email providers, too; but they usually answered my questions, leaving more questions, nothing resolved. And it was always "the other server" on "the other end" that would be blamed. No one before FM, that I've used, actually owned up to its own issues when they occurred. Just my 2 cents (and I'm a newer FM user).

[paleolith]

Free providers are serious about selling advertising. As an email user, you are not their client. The advertisers are their clients.

FM is serious about selling email services. As a paying customer, you are their client. Users are their only clients.

It makes a LOT of difference. I've seen friends' AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, even gmail accounts hacked. Never heard of a FM account being hacked. Probably has happened but the hackers like to shoot at easier targets.

Edward

[LazyGun]

Have those accounts actually been hacked? Like real no-messing hacked?
I've heard of that too, but in most cases it turns out to be due to phishing and the odd time it's virus related. But hacking? No more than when some FaceBook user claims they were hacked, when what they mean is they installed a rogue app and gave it full access to their account.

[LazyGun]

Your house wasn't broken into if you handed over the keys.

[paleolith]

hack, verb: to cut or sever with repeated irregular or unskillful blows, to cut in a rough and violent way, etc.

It's a word with many meanings, including to cough frequently and to drive a taxi. I chose to use it specifically because of its non-specificity.

Edward

[LazyGun]

(Drive a taxi? I never knew that one. Is that why certain types of taxies are called Hackneys or Hackney cabs or is that from the place in London?)

Ok, (I don't mean to be antagonistic, by the way; I'm just throwing up the other side of the coin). I'm sick to the back teeth of telling p'd off FB users why there *is* a customer service number and why they can't use it.

I do think a huge part of the lack of hacking (said term to include phishing and general dumbassedness) of Fastmail accounts is security through obscurity rather than anything major on Fastmails part. The other providers you mentioned have a massive user base, whereas (I suspect) Fastmail's got a much smaller and therefore less lucrative population.
It's the like viruses for Mac against viruses for Windows - well, the virus writer goes for the bigger return which is Windows.

Another reason (which I must word carefully) is that almost by definition the userbase of any specialist email provider is generally going to be more ...ah... savvy in terms of phishing and the like. The average Gmail *user* sees Gmail as the cats pyjamas, whereas the average paying Fastmail *customer* sees Gmail as a handy backup facility.

(Wording it less carefully; allowing for population difference, the average Fastmail customer is smarter and less likely to fall for phishing scams, which are in turn less likely to happen in the first place.)

[paleolith]

The taxi senses are probably derived from older similar meanings for horses, and going back to the place name. The cough meaning may come from hawk. More on meanings and derivations.

I mostly agree with your points. Part of that is what I was getting at in talking about easier targets: larger targets, targets whose users are easier to fool. But I don't think that's all of it.

On the other side of the coin, I get a steady stream of spam from AOL and Hotmail accounts that Spam Assassin can't filter. It's bad enough that I have Sieve code to stop messages that arrive directly from AOL/Hotmail/AIM server unless I've whitelisted the user. (And yes, this means I have to whitelist MSN users too.) I don't have this problem with gmail even though it's free and huge. Policy and technical methods have to be making a difference.

Also, we don't really know what typical FM users are like. We on the forums here are not the tip of the iceberg -- we are a far smaller slice, a minuscule subset. FM doesn't reveal stats about their users, but clearly they must have some hefty corporate accounts to pay their bills. Users under corporate umbrellas are probably a good bit more cautious than typical individual users, but not necessarily savvy in the senses you mention.

Edward