Fastmail vs GMail - upgrade or move on?

[JTB]

I did. No reply.

[ChinaLamb]

Originally Posted by JTB

I did. No reply.

I am not one for posting someone else's email address, so...

Rob posted his email in this thread:

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=53028

[JTB]

Just got an email. All is sorted. Off I go to transfering my nearly 10 years of email!

[injinuity]

prog,

If storage space is the only issue, then why not just pay for extra storage. Pay for an additional 500mb/1Gb one off fee and you still have your lifetime member account.

Rgds,

J.J

[Prognathous]

Originally Posted by injinuity

prog,

If storage space is the only issue, then why not just pay for extra storage. Pay for an additional 500mb/1Gb one off fee and you still have your lifetime member account.

Where did I say anything about storage space? This is one thing I have plenty of (in Fastmail).

Prog.

[sadams]

Hello All,
This is Steve again - originator of this thread.

Thanks for all the useful and informative responses - especially with regard to others who have tried gmail and recounted your experiences and contrasted them with fastmail.

You have confirmed my opinions and convinced me to stick with Fastmail - I just upgraded to a Full Account.

Note: I did manage to wait till my BW got blown (another 4MB attachment from a family member - when DID that become "normal behavior") BEFORE upgrading... resulting in my account being locked.

Since upgrading I can send emails again (via web & SMTP) - but incoming messages are still get bounced with "locked or deactivated" responses.
Can anyone explain this lag?
Should I be chasing tech support?

Cheers,
Steve.

[robmueller]

It may take up to an hour for the lock table to rebuild. If it's been more than an hour since the upgrade, email me at robm@fastmail.fm with your account name and I'll check it out.

Rob

[sadams]

Originally Posted by robmueller

It may take up to an hour for the lock table to rebuild. If it's been more than an hour since the upgrade, email me at robm@fastmail.fm with your account name and I'll check it out.

Rob

Rob - thanks for the prompt response (here) and reassurance :-)
I can confirm it has come back to life now and all services have resumed - no problems with incoming emails.
**Note: I did log a support incident (via support form) so that is now redundant - perhaps you can intercept it.

A question on the support form/incident management..:
I submitted the form but was not issued with any kind of Ticket or Incident ID/number.
I also did not receive (to my alternative email id) an email acknowledgment/summary of the issue. I realise that it may take a while to receive a response from a techy/human - but why no auto-generated summary response to show me my form got logged and is "in the system"?

Questions:
- How do I reference my logged incident/issue with no ticket number?
- How do check on it's status?

Example: In this instance (my upgrade/BW/blocked account issue) I would want to update it to say that the problem has been resolved. But I can't (seem to) do that.

Care to answer my questions and comment?

Cheers and thanks for the great service.

Steve.

[robmueller]

It assigns an internal ticket number that we see, and you'll see when we reply.

The problem at the moment is that it doesn't send you an email to confirm receipt of your ticket, or give you a web link to see the history + most recent status update. That's bad.

It will be replace, and I promise soonish! I've got most of the work done, just have to finish, polish, roll out...

Rob

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by sadams

...(another 4MB attachment from a family member - when DID that become "normal behavior") ...

I think in April 2004 when Google started giving away 1GB mailboxes with no announced bandwidth restrictions. Their reasoning was that their mailboxes were practically unlimited because of the average size of an email message but the average size soon followed the allowances.
Two days ago I received an email without any attachment whose size is 738KB. I guess the blame is in

<META NAME=3D"Generator" CONTENT=3D"MS Exchange Server version =
6.5.7652.24">
...
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<!-- Converted from text/rtf format -->

Using the Firefox web developer extension I can see that the page created by FastMail to display this message in html view (document only, without css_js+images) is 13 KB (312 KB uncompressed). Most of what's in there (copied from the html part in "raw view" goes like

</SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial (Hebrew)">&rlm;=EE=F8=F2=E9=E5=EF</FONT></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial"></FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"> =
<FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial =
(Hebrew)">=EC=EE=EE=F9=E5=FA</FONT></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial">:</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"> =
<FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial =
(Hebrew)">=E2</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial">'</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 FACE=3D"Arial =
(Hebrew)">=F4=F8=F1=E5=EF</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"he"><FONT COLOR=3D"#000000" SIZE=3D2 =
FACE=3D"Arial"></FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN =
LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"en-us"></SPAN><SPAN LANG=3D"he"> =

so you can see it's mostly styling definitions for empty strings or for single words. Almost any javascript-based html generator is capable of collecting definitions for adjacent strings and removing excess formatting instrustions. I also noticed in several "email conversations" in the past few days where several Outlok users participated was that email size varied between a few tens KB and more than 200KB, again with no attachments - just short text and short text replies.

You would have thought Microsoft®™ is also capable of doing it in Exchange®™, but then perhaps it's not in their best interests.

Perhaps MIME should be extended to have "gzipped" transfer encoding?

[ChinaLamb]

Originally Posted by hadaso

Perhaps MIME should be extended to have "gzipped" transfer encoding?

Bandwidth and storage are getting ever cheaper... It is a nice thought, but it is probably too late to see stuff like compression implimented within the MIME standard now.

Its a shame that the emails themselves are becoming bloated.

[Aimlink]

Originally Posted by ChinaLamb

Bandwidth and storage are getting ever cheaper... It is a nice thought, but it is probably too late to see stuff like compression implimented within the MIME standard now.

Its a shame that the emails themselves are becoming bloated.

For me, it's a terrible shame that we waste bandwidth because it's there to use. Streaming video and such are nice benefits of increased bandwidth. Same for GMail apps and such new technologies that are possible only with decent bandwidth.

However, bloated e-mail messages that are MUCH larger than before, though transmitting the same useful information to the recipient, is ridiculous and just a waste as so many things tend to be today. And our glib response is, 'not a problem; we have the bandwidth to handle it'. It's like saying.... let the spam continue... afterall, we have the bandwidth for it.

I know I'm hitting my head against a wall, but sometimes it feels good.

[marcus0263]

Originally Posted by curtis

If only Opera would be compatible enough with the websites out there, including GMail, then we'd take on the user features that can be achieved with FireFox which has better website compatibility.

One word "Extensions"

Extensions I cannot live without

1) Adblock
2) Firebug
3) Web Developers Toolbar
4) Edit Cookies
5) User Agent Switcher

Plus a number of other really sweet extensions

[marcus0263]

Originally Posted by curtis

For me, it's a terrible shame that we waste bandwidth because it's there to use. Streaming video and such are nice benefits of increased bandwidth. Same for GMail apps and such new technologies that are possible only with decent bandwidth.

However, bloated e-mail messages that are MUCH larger than before, though transmitting the same useful information to the recipient, is ridiculous and just a waste as so many things tend to be today. And our glib response is, 'not a problem; we have the bandwidth to handle it'. It's like saying.... let the spam continue... afterall, we have the bandwidth for it.

I know I'm hitting my head against a wall, but sometimes it feels good.

Amen! Couldn't agree with you more, text email (I'll even concede to rich text) is all that is needed. Especially when you're checking email with your mobile device like a PDA or smart phone. Bloated html email I loath it, nothing but a waste of bandwidth IMO.

Yes and I myself find myself beating my head against a wall ......

[neg8]

I'm going to chime in here. Fastmail has been great, but I've been quietly getting frustrated with a lack of innovation here recently.

The REAL comparison with gmail and fastmail isn't the conveniently banal statistics in the comparison placed on the wiki, but the fact that with gmail, we are reaching a point where I can have a total gamut of PIM data syncronised between webmail, desktop apps and my Symbian 60 OS phone with custom APIs to boot.

Otoh, I'm still strugging to sync data between phone, home pc and webmail, and what's the best Fastmail can do? LDAP - lol (and how long has that taken?). I'd like to know if fastmail even looked at commercial options - I'd pay a little extra for SyncML services???

Paying Fastmail for a service that was truely functionally superior 5 years ago was ok. Paying now for a service that is now just "nicer" isn't the same. Personally I'm finding now the issue is not email but total personal information management - fastmail isn't really in that space I guess.