New to Fastmail...

houmi · 27 Oct 2001, 04:14 AM

Hi,

I am a recent user of fastmail.fm, I have been an avid fan of pine/elm for its simplicity, and recently joined onebox.com , but the lack of space and trying to find something "for life" has pushed me into looking for paid email services. That's how I got to find out fastmail.fm

First, I wanted to say that your interface is slick and providing imap/pop are always nice. Not having a banner is always a plus as well. Now couple of questions.

Questions:

1) It seems that these days free can not happen, the more people join this service, the more hd space you're giving away, so I see you going to a fee based system. Do you have an idea of how much a month it could be ? It also seems to me that 100 MB could limit your hd space quickly...

2) How secure fastmail.fm is ? will you have a TOS ?

3) What kind of system are you running this from ? And what kind of Raid , etc ? How big can you get in terms of storage ? also IDE vs Scsi ?

4) Finally what is the background of people at Fastmail.fm , is this set as a hobby ? or a business venture. I just want to know if it is possible for the people responsible for fastmail.fm to give up for whatever reasons in 1 year and close down the service. Basically what/who is behind fastmail.fm

Suggestions:

1) I strongly urge you to listen to what Obeckley said, the "from address" is great, but once people start to send anonymous emails, this site could be added to spam list. Either by stating an organization name, or reply address changable, this could be done. But I love the idea of 'from address" , since I could use it nicely with pobox.com

2) Are you planning for any email notification service (in future) ? like how IM's do these days ?

3) I saw that you might be going to Exchange, will you be using this same "look" or will be using the outlook web ?

Thanks,

Houman

Jeremy Howard · 27 Oct 2001, 07:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by houmi
I am a recent user of fastmail.fm, I have been an avid fan of pine/elm for its simplicity, and recently joined onebox.com , but the lack of space and trying to find something "for life" has pushed me into looking for paid email services. That's how I got to find out fastmail.fm

I hope you've tried Pine with FastMail.FM IMAP--it's a really good combination.

Quote:

1) It seems that these days free can not happen, the more people join this service, the more hd space you're giving away, so I see you going to a fee based system. Do you have an idea of how much a month it could be ? It also seems to me that 100 MB could limit your hd space quickly...

Here's the link that defines our free/pricing policy: http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/about.html

It's also discussed on our forum in more detail here,
and in the 2nd half of this thread here.

Quote:

2) How secure fastmail.fm is ? will you have a TOS ?

A discussion of reliability and security is here. Please let me know if you have any followup questions since I've only provided an overview there.

Quote:

3) What kind of system are you running this from ? And what kind of Raid , etc ? How big can you get in terms of storage ? also IDE vs Scsi ?

We use IDE because of its price/performance. We use multiple drives, but we don't need RAID striping--just putting different users on different drives has the same effect with lower overhead. We don't use RAID mirroring because we can't justify the extra cost. We back up the user data nightly, but if you need to be 100% sure of not losing email, you should IMAP sync each night and include your mail store in your backup strategy. Possibly storing email on RAID 0 mirrored HDDs will be a paid option in the future.

Quote:

4) Finally what is the background of people at Fastmail.fm , is this set as a hobby ? or a business venture. I just want to know if it is possible for the people responsible for fastmail.fm to give up for whatever reasons in 1 year and close down the service. Basically what/who is behind fastmail.fm

It's a hobby business venture.

Rob and I do it because we enjoy it--we don't particularly need to make money out of it since we've saved money from previous jobs and have other sources of income, but we'd like to get to the point where it's at least self-funding. I'd say that you're safer with us being around in a year's time than most other ventures. There's no VC to pull the plug. There's no parent company funding this as a promotional venture who might decide its not paying its way. We're not particularly profit-focussed so if we don't get rich out of this we'll still do it. I guess it's possible for us to lose interest at some point--but we've been doing this for 3 years now and are enjoying it more and more all the time. Besides which, we aren't happy with any of the other email services out there (we're very fussy) so we have to keep FastMail.FM running to get the level of service that we demand.

Quote:

2) Are you planning for any email notification service (in future) ? like how IM's do these days ?

Yes. This and other planned enhancements are discussed in our Coming Enhancements screen. This mentions 'SMS and pager' notification, but we plan on including IM notification too. I've got a bugzilla entry filed with our IMAP server provider which I need completed before we can turn on our notification system, but we've got 80% of the system written. We actually hook into it already to send ourselves pager messages when our monitoring software identifies problems.

Quote:

3) I saw that you might be going to Exchange, will you be using this same "look" or will be using the outlook web ?

Huh? No bloody way am I going to Exchange!

In a past life I was a suit in a couple of big multi-nationals so I've used both Exchange and Notes a lot. There's no way I'd touch them again!

Thanks for the insightful questions Houman. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know, or any of my answers above that you'd like clarified.

**Shelded** · 27 Oct 2001, 09:32 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jeremy Howard
There's no VC to pull the plug.

Not to be morbid, but what if God pulls the plug? Can either of you be replaced by another technical person, or are there geographic or knowledge/skill barriers?

Lvsheng · 27 Oct 2001, 09:48 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by shelded
Not to be morbid, but what if God pulls the plug? Can either of you be replaced by another technical person, or are there geographic or knowledge/skill barriers?

What about his son?

Jeremy Howard · 27 Oct 2001, 01:16 PM

Either one of us can look after this on our own. Since I almost never actually see Rob in person, someone would have to take out the whole of Melbourne to get both of us!

Anyway, the whole thing is written in Perl using pretty standard modules, and we're slowly releasing a lot of the building blocks as Open Source software. And over the next 6-12 months we're hoping to bring at least one developer on board part-time, so we'll slowly share the knowledge. Anyway, if we both meet an unpleasant end you lot should all be too busy morning our loss to be sending email.

PS: lvsheng--who's son?

Lvsheng · 27 Oct 2001, 09:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jeremy Howard

PS: lvsheng--who's son?

Your son.

Jeremy Howard · 28 Oct 2001, 05:46 AM

My son? Ah, well there are certain existential problems with that.

Although, I did have a funny experience last night... I had dinner with my mother and she asked me "so how did the server move go this week. And who are these 'Runbox' people?". I almost fell off my chair--it's not the kind of conversation one expects to have with their mother... It turns out that she's been looking at FastMail.FM, and clicked the link to the forum, and has been reading these threads!

So gang--better watch your language!

(Hi Mum!)

sheprd · 2 Nov 2001, 02:47 AM

Sirs I have some suggestions for improving Fast Mail. (1) Eliminate the mandatory sending of user full name. (2) Remove the 7 digit requirement for user names (3) Let subscribers use and pay by the month. It was 1 and 2 that probably kept me from trying Fastmail. Thanks .

Jeremy Howard · 2 Nov 2001, 05:26 AM

There's no mandatory sending of full name. You have to enter something when you sign up, but this doesn't have to appear on your outgoing emails (you just change your Send From address and your Signature when you first log in).

You can use names shorter that 7 characters by requesting it from webmasterATfastmailDOTfm. Create an account with a 7-char name first, and then let us know what shorter alias you want. Note that very short or popular addresses may attract a charge in the future.

You will be able to pay by the month. I don't know where you read that this was not the case.

Feel free to follow up here or by email if you have any further questions.

27 Oct 2001, 04:14 AM	#1
houmi Junior Member Join Date: Oct 2001 Posts: 15	New to Fastmail... Hi, I am a recent user of fastmail.fm, I have been an avid fan of pine/elm for its simplicity, and recently joined onebox.com , but the lack of space and trying to find something "for life" has pushed me into looking for paid email services. That's how I got to find out fastmail.fm First, I wanted to say that your interface is slick and providing imap/pop are always nice. Not having a banner is always a plus as well. Now couple of questions. Questions: 1) It seems that these days free can not happen, the more people join this service, the more hd space you're giving away, so I see you going to a fee based system. Do you have an idea of how much a month it could be ? It also seems to me that 100 MB could limit your hd space quickly... 2) How secure fastmail.fm is ? will you have a TOS ? 3) What kind of system are you running this from ? And what kind of Raid , etc ? How big can you get in terms of storage ? also IDE vs Scsi ? 4) Finally what is the background of people at Fastmail.fm , is this set as a hobby ? or a business venture. I just want to know if it is possible for the people responsible for fastmail.fm to give up for whatever reasons in 1 year and close down the service. Basically what/who is behind fastmail.fm Suggestions: 1) I strongly urge you to listen to what Obeckley said, the "from address" is great, but once people start to send anonymous emails, this site could be added to spam list. Either by stating an organization name, or reply address changable, this could be done. But I love the idea of 'from address" , since I could use it nicely with pobox.com 2) Are you planning for any email notification service (in future) ? like how IM's do these days ? 3) I saw that you might be going to Exchange, will you be using this same "look" or will be using the outlook web ? Thanks, Houman Last edited by houmi : 27 Oct 2001 at 04:17 AM.

27 Oct 2001, 01:16 PM	#5
Jeremy Howard Ultimate Contributor Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Australia Posts: 11,501	Either one of us can look after this on our own. Since I almost never actually see Rob in person, someone would have to take out the whole of Melbourne to get both of us! Anyway, the whole thing is written in Perl using pretty standard modules, and we're slowly releasing a lot of the building blocks as Open Source software. And over the next 6-12 months we're hoping to bring at least one developer on board part-time, so we'll slowly share the knowledge. Anyway, if we both meet an unpleasant end you lot should all be too busy morning our loss to be sending email. PS: lvsheng--who's son?

28 Oct 2001, 05:46 AM	#7
Jeremy Howard Ultimate Contributor Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Australia Posts: 11,501	My son? Ah, well there are certain existential problems with that. Although, I did have a funny experience last night... I had dinner with my mother and she asked me "so how did the server move go this week. And who are these 'Runbox' people?". I almost fell off my chair--it's not the kind of conversation one expects to have with their mother... It turns out that she's been looking at FastMail.FM, and clicked the link to the forum, and has been reading these threads! So gang--better watch your language! (Hi Mum!)

2 Nov 2001, 02:47 AM	#8
sheprd The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: VA, USA Posts: 2,789	Sirs I have some suggestions for improving Fast Mail. (1) Eliminate the mandatory sending of user full name. (2) Remove the 7 digit requirement for user names (3) Let subscribers use and pay by the month. It was 1 and 2 that probably kept me from trying Fastmail. Thanks .

2 Nov 2001, 05:26 AM	#9
Jeremy Howard Ultimate Contributor Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Australia Posts: 11,501	There's no mandatory sending of full name. You have to enter something when you sign up, but this doesn't have to appear on your outgoing emails (you just change your Send From address and your Signature when you first log in). You can use names shorter that 7 characters by requesting it from webmasterATfastmailDOTfm. Create an account with a 7-char name first, and then let us know what shorter alias you want. Note that very short or popular addresses may attract a charge in the future. You will be able to pay by the month. I don't know where you read that this was not the case. Feel free to follow up here or by email if you have any further questions.