we members are bottom feeders

[digp]

you want something for nothing?

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by digp

you want something for nothing?

That depends. What are you offering?

[Mystakill]

To be perfectly honest, I don't see the issue. I liken it to buying a piece of software. The vast majority of software does not provide for free upgrades. You have to pay for them. You got what you paid for at the time, and that's what you'll keep unless you're willing to pay for upgrades or a different plan. For example, if I buy Valve's Complete Pack, I only get what's included at the time I purchased it. If they later add more games, I'm *not* automatically entitled to them; I knew that going in and I would be wrong to expect more than that.

I've paid annually since I started with FM ~7 years ago, because a Member account wasn't sufficient for my needs. My family's email is vital to both our personal and business interests, so we feel that it's a worthwhile investment for our family members. We could get free mail service elsewhere, but not with the same features we get at FM. Also, the fact that I can email the developer directly and have a feature added, fixed, or addressed, makes it that much more worthwhile.

Bottom line, if a Member account is no longer sufficient for your needs, either upgrade to a higher tier account at FM or switch to an email provider which does meet them.

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by Mystakill

Bottom line, if a Member account is no longer sufficient for your needs, either upgrade to a higher tier account at FM or switch to an email provider which does meet them.

While I can't speak with certainty for others, I suspect that's exactly what many of us have done. In fact, I long ago abandoned my Fastmail account as my primary service, when the email market began changing radically to the point that many services offered far more of the functionality that I needed for free than I had with the Fastmail account I paid for. Which I had also upgraded to a full account for a few years until I realized how little I was getting for my money as compared with what the free services offered. Probably mostly in terms of Fastmail's historically somewhat notoriously restrictive bandwidth and storage space. (That, and I didn't care much for the way Fastmail operated as a business, feeling that those running it were far more "geeks" than businessmen.)

So, personally, I don't consider it that big of an issue, since it's a service which has had very little usefulness to me for the past several years anyway, one I rarely even think about on a "routine" basis, it's serving such limited usefulness to me for quite awhile now. But as I suggested above, I don't think it would have cost them that much to have offered the legacy Member accounts a "token" increase in storage space to at least the level of the current free accounts as a goodwill gesture to those who bought into the "plan" which "they" (the original owners) once seemed to be somewhat heavily promoting.

[William9]

I agree with xmailer. The email services business environment has changed. Google apps is a case in point. What many customers need, including me, is a very good email host for my own domain. Fastmail used to be one of the few good choices. It's still a good choice, but there are many others that will fill a need.

[Mystakill]

The only constant in technology is that it will always be changing. As someone who grew up with DOS (and several, better, pre-cursors), I'm used to it.

If a user only has basic email needs, then pretty much any email provider will suffice. There are any number of free and commercial service providers offering that type of service. For me, FM is still the only one with the features I need, at a price I'm willing to pay. I still have to supplement calendaring and contacts elsewhere, but my hope is that Opera will remedy those deficiencies in the not-too-distant future.

[KevinW]

I have a member account and I have no problem with the account not receiving the storage increases.

[digp]

Originally Posted by Mystakill

As someone who grew up with DOS (and several, better, pre-cursors), I'm used to it.

What were the better ones?

[anj]

Originally Posted by KevinW

I have a member account and I have no problem with the account not receiving the storage increases.

Hear hear. To me it seems generous of FM to be willing credit the $14.95 to an upgraded account considering how much value I have already received from it over the years. I have gotten and continue to get what I paid for -- subdomain addressing and SMTP.

[shampoo]

Originally Posted by xmailer

That depends. What are you offering?

Snarky^2.

I love it.

[robert@fm]

Originally Posted by Mystakill

The only constant in technology is that it will always be changing. As someone who grew up with DOS (and several, better, pre-cursors), I'm used to it.

One thing that's still severely wrong with Windows after all these years is that the file management system is still a CP/M clone, as anyone who's ever used a mainframe OS (or UNIX or one of its many clones) will know. (Long file names? -- ICL's George 3 allowed 12-character names (including spaces) and four-character types long before Windows was ever dreamed of. If hypertext had been invented back then, there would have been no HTM nonsense; all hypertext files would have been HTML.)

It has no generation numbering, leading to use of the clumsy BAK mechanism and other such kludges instead. (In Windows, you might have a directory with myprog.pas, myprog.txt and myprog.exe -- and myprog.bak, with nothing to indicate which file it's a backup of. In George 3 you'd typically have "MY PROGRAM(14/PASC)" (the current version), "MY PROGRAM(13/PASC)" (the "father" version), and "MY PROGRAM(12/PASC)" (the "grandfather" version), and likewise with the (/TEXT) and possibly the (/EXEC) files. No need for an ambiguous (/BACK) file or any such subterfuge.)

Even worse, there is only one access control flag -- hopelessly inadequate. In Windows, reading and execution are the same thing as far as the OS is concerned (and both always allowed), whilst appending to a file, overwriting the main body of the file, and deleting the file, are likewise the same thing -- and only have one control flag between them. In any mainframe OS worthy of the name, those are five different things, each with its own control flag. (It's quite common for files to be set to "append only", for executables to be set to "execute only" (usually done automatically by the compiler or linker), and for most files to have the "delete" permission turned off to guard against accident.)

[janusz]

and the relevance to FM is....