Anybody leaving for Gmail IMAP?

[pomj]

I was *very* close to bandon FM now when I should upgrade. However, in the end I upgraded for one more year.

For me if they implemented threaded discussions (no. one) and search across mailboxes I would *never* leave FM. But during the years I've had my FM account they have never done any usability improvements, for the web interface that is, so I reccon it will never happen... :(

[hankfoner]

Thrope, very thoughtful analysis. I agree with every word!

[Ken7]

Originally Posted by hankfoner

Thrope, very thoughtful analysis. I agree with every word!

I also agree with Thrope...The bandwidth and storage issues on my wife's Full account are the reasons we are considering a move to another service for her.

[Gitfinger]

I know I'm not the most knowledgeable user in the world, especially when it comes to Gmail's implementation of IMAP and the like, but I think there are a few points I'd like to make.

My main objection to Gmail is ultimately more ideological than anything else. Any provider that comes along and offers what is effectively an all you can eat buffet is pretty quickly going to become hegemonic. People, taking the path of least resistance like this idea of "free" for short term gain. The problem is eventually you have one hegemonic provider that is so big it is indeed about all you can eat as it's become the only game in town. For a provider of Google's size it doesn't take much to crush your competitors.

Fundamentally I don't trust Google so I'm certainly not going to trust them with my email.

[Merovingian]

Welcome to the EMD Forums, Gitfinger !
Come back anytime, especially if you bring words like "hegemonic" with you!

Yes, there is certainly something "Big-Brother-ish" about google,isn't there?

[thrope]

Originally Posted by Gitfinger

Fundamentally I don't trust Google so I'm certainly not going to trust them with my email.

I understand these concerns, although I don't share them (I guess I just don't have anything that private in my email). However I think gmail is referenced a lot in this thread mainly because of the recent IMAP announcement. I think the discussion should really about Fastmail's services, which I feel have really fallen behind the current marketplace standard.

As far as I'm concerned you can replace Gmail with any of the other large providers like AOL or Yahoo, all of which have lots of space and many now also support IMAP. Even Hotmail (I think it's called Live now) is much better these days. In 2003 it was easy to recommend even the Guest fastmail account over almost any of those (certainly Hotmail). Today that is much harder, if not impossible.

I'm worried less about existing users than how they hope to attract new ones (which of course is necessary for the continuation of the service).

To add something constructive to the discussion, my ideas for improving the competitiveness would be firstly to improve the full account, as I mentioned with 1-1.5GB of space, 500MB filespace and one domain, perhaps increasing the price to $25 or even $30 dollars. I don't think this would cause a lot of Enhanced users to drop down - I'm sure they will be using more alias/domains, the extra filespace etc.

Then replace the existing Guest and Member levels, both of which are more or less unusable currently (I can't believe anyone would sign up for them at the moment) with a new 'Basic' level account with, say, 500MB of space, 100MB of storage, but perhaps lacking extra useful features like the catch-all domain and advanced spam filtering (and the photogallery). This could be free with ads, or have the ads removed for a one-time fee (like existing Member) of maybe $20 or so (or even more depending on revenue). [Although they should sort out the ads - at the moment they look terrible, the green background and if you have the font larger they overlap the edge of the frame etc.]

I think this would make a much more rounded offering - you'd hook in casual users with the basic account, which while obviously not competing on space would have enough for most people, with advantages over the free services (no ads option, proper IMAP, filespace for casual use etc.).
Users like me (I guess casual+) would be more than satisfied with the full account, and happy to pay - and of course the enhanced account would continue to appeal to the same group (power users, many domains etc.)

Of course I don't know how financially viable this would be, or if the fastmail infrastructure could scale in this way, but I do know enterprise-grade storage is significantly cheaper than it was a few years ago, and none of those savings seem to have been passed on. I understand that as a fastmail customer you are paying for a lot more than storage, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there!

[thrope]

I should add - the other important thing is to change the pricing of additional storage to be more realistic (probably by scrapping the one time option - it seems silly anyway, it isn't like you get the space forever, you have to continue paying for the underlying account, so why not just bill the storage yearly/monthly like everything else).

Finally, I think these changes need to be made in the short term - I've already moved my mother to gmail and of course won't move her again even if fastmail does improve the offerings. I fear that many more will do this (from full and below) and once they've gone I think it would take something much more radical to get them back.

[hankfoner]

I do hope that FM are paying heed to Thrope's suggestions. They are reasoned arguments put forward in a positive spirit. Hank

[FMRocks]

Originally Posted by Gitfinger

The problem is eventually you have one hegemonic provider that is so big it is indeed about all you can eat as it's become the only game in town. For a provider of Google's size it doesn't take much to crush your competitors.

Well, as much well placed as your concerns are, I don't think Google will ever be the "only" game in town. In the big free-email provider market, other big providers like Microsoft and Yahoo are not just going to sit still. And considering economies of scale, only a few companies (such as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) can afford to provide that kind of huge storage free of monetary cost, given their vast advertising networks. There will also always be features and services that won't make sense on a major scale but in a niche market, which will keep specialized, if small, email companies like Fastmail.FM in business.

[Merovingian]

I agree with Hank. Thrope's post (#141) was very well described, and seems like a very good, logical proposal.

I think we at Fastmail are spoiled, and I almost expect Rob and the guys to start a thread that says "Hey, everyone, we are going to have a different breakdown to our account levels....whaddya think???" Because if I've ever seen a company that was in tune with what it's customers wanted, or recommended, it's Fastmail.
I have been blown away with the responsiveness of it's proprieters. Just the recent flap about the delay in login here is evidence of this. FM made a change. Complaints were voiced. Another change was made to address the issue. End of story. I don't know about anyone else, but I've never had my cable provider, credit cards, water company, etc. change their service as a direct result of my complaint, let alone as quickly as it happened!

This forum is a wonderful.......um......forum for offering feedback and giving suggestions to future use. And as long as they are done in a positive, well-meaning manner as thrope has done, I don't believe the folks at Fastmail will mind.

Rock On!

[JMac]

One final (hopefully!) post from me on this topic:

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I do use Gmail and take advantage of the storage space it offers. I don't use it for any serious email, and by that I mean I don't generally use it for any business or other purpose I consider to be somewhat important in nature. I also use the space offered for file storage - again, not for anything that would be a problem if it were somehow compromised or lost. I try to keep that all on email that I can control a little better - or encrypt. It's a nice service, but not good for everything for me, anyway. I do realize that some use it exclusively. (BTW, I also use a lot of Google's other services. I recently switched back to G-cal for my online calendar because they started offering a few of the features I felt it lacked).

And yes, any email service has the potential to be compromised. But since Google is the largest - or one of the largest, I'm not certain about that - it naturally draws the most attention from those looking to find a way to profit from it. I spent a lot of time in the Gmail Google Groups and there are a lot of folks who have had their Gmail accounts hijacked. Not because Gmail is inherently insecure, but because more of the hackers go after Gmail because the sheer vastness of the database makes it a little easier. Plus, a relatively large breach looks smaller against such a large database. Not many hackers go after smaller services like FM because it doesn't have the number of users that make it more bountiful, and also because a relatively small breach would look gigantic to FM's developers - it would still be a fairly large percentage of total users.

Fastmail will never be able to provide all of the storage that Gmail and Yahoo can. I accept that. However I can contact someone and actually get a response if something goes wrong with my account, or even if I need help with a certain feature. (Although a recent support request I submitted did go unanswered, all others have been responded to very quickly). I have seen Gmail users who were locked out of their accounts - usually for an unintended infraction - having more than one account got you locked out until about a year ago; it initially was against Gmail's terms. And when they lock an account they don't only lock the ability to send and receive, but they stop access to all messages in the account. Not a big problem if you have all downloaded to an email client on your PC, but for those who had relied on Google's online mail storage this was disastrous. The lockouts were usually limited to 24 or 48 hours then - but if it was for having multiple accounts you had to select the one you wanted unlocked - and lose everything in the other or others. Not a pleasant outcome for most! If you encountered an issue that caused your Gmail to not work - for any reason - trying to get a support response was next to impossible. Actually as an early pre-release beta tester I did have access to the development team - and still do for those still there from back then. But for most, they just had to post it in Google Groups and wait and hope something was being done about it. A lot of early users lost all messages during the early outages.

Still Gmail is useful for a lot of reasons. But I choose to use it only for what I consider to be trivial purposes. Others use it as their primary and only email service. It's a matter of trust and value of your data. If you are diligent in backing up all data locally, you're in a lot better shape. Do without backups and you are risking all. Of course that is true with any service - but you stand a much better chance of recovery from a smaller service's backup servers.

thrope - I'm not certain I understand your concern about people referencing Gmail so much in this thread. The thread is about Gmail's IMAP service and how that may put pressure on Fastmail to continue improving at a fast pace. Of course posters are referencing Gmail a lot in this thread - that's the purpose and intent of the original thread starter!

In response to that thread I am not trying to sing Gmail's praises nor its pitfalls, but to say that I am using Gmail, I love that they have implemented IMAP, but that I prefer to keep using Fastmail as my primary service. And that I am certainly looking - and hoping - for a lot of improvement in Fastmail. Read my posts from this past summer: Before and after I signed up for my FM account I was asking and commenting on what I felt - and still feel in a lot of instances - about Fastmail's service and policies. I'm not a long-time, veteran Fastmail junkie who wants Fastmail to stay just as it is because it's always been that way and I am comfortable with it. (But I think I heard from a lot of them back in the summer!!)

I just replied to the OP's comments with my thoughts on Gmail's IMAP and Fastmail improvements. Although a lot of folks have expanded the thread a bit. But this is a user-to-user discussion board, and that's how it is supposed to work!

Thanks,

Jim

[marcosscriven]

I tried out Gmail for a day, and quickly decided it wasn't for me - yet.
I use Tuffmail at the moment, and have been very happy with it, but a free service was worth a look.

I already posted my thought about it on another thread, but to summarise the things I didn't like

1) Replying or forwarding emails in the gmail web interface does NOT update the messages as such on the server - ie Thunderbird or any other client will NOT see the replied-to or forwarded mark. That's an essential part of IMAP for me, and quite a terrible thing to roll out even for a 'beta' version.

2) I don't really like labels as folders. I like labels, but I also want folders. I don't see why you shouldn't be able to have both, and if I had to choose only one, it would be folders. I see labels as sort of virtual folders, a bit like a 'view' in a database, whereas the folders are the actual physical copies. I have, for instance, in my work email a separate folder for each client. While I could have a 'label' in the gmail world, and while it might 'look' like a folder in other clients, it causes confusion when items appear both in that folder, and the 'All Mail' folder (and also in the 'Inbox', unless you tell the gmail filter to 'archive' it immediately - again a fudge), which you can't unsubcribe from. What's also bad is that in the gmail client the 'labels' really are just labels (rather than folders as they appear to be in other clients), and don't have any kind of status (ie you can't see if there are any unread items in a particular label). Adding even more to this, the labels are displayed as a flattened out view (rather than a proper tree structure)

3) Searching and filtering is really not all that good in gmail. There's a ton of better, and useful, options in something like Tuffmail, or I suspect any 'proper' IMAP implementation.

If gmail fix those things, then I'd be happy to have a few ads, and some anonymous computer process reading my emails, in exchange for a robust and free service.

[28pfds]

Originally Posted by marcosscriven

{snip}

I use Tuffmail at the moment, and have been very happy with it, but a free service was worth a look.

{snip}

Tuffmail is $34 for a 1 gig mailbox and 2 gig of transfer or $74 for 4 gigs of storage with an 8 gig transfer limit?. That's steep!

[marcosscriven]

Originally Posted by 28pfds

Tuffmail is $34 for a 1 gig mailbox and 2 gig of transfer or $74 for 4 gigs of storage with an 8 gig transfer limit?. That's steep!

Well the thread was about Gmail, but now you mention it, what do you pay?

I've still got 6 months left on my current billing period anyway, but always looking for cheaper options, just as long as I keep all the features I need!

[pin]

Originally Posted by 28pfds

Tuffmail is $34 for a 1 gig mailbox and 2 gig of transfer or $74 for 4 gigs of storage with an 8 gig transfer limit?. That's steep!

Tuffmail's prices have increased. The basic package has gone up 10% in the last two years - the 4 mailbox package i'm on has increased 35%. However, I wouldn't say it was steep - it is similar in cost to Fastmail. I suppose it depends what you compare it with.