Fastmail Improvements Over the Years

[Chipper]

There has been a lot of talk about the recent increase in price for Enhanced accounts. I'd be curious to compile a list of improvements to compare "then and now." I am not a power user so I can't really do a list (due to not needing as much which causes me not to notice the additions). However, I would be interested if others can add to the list.

Some things that I recall:
* Massively improved addr book
* SMS
* Improved interface to add/maintain folders
* Added link to empty folder (along with report all unread as spam, etc)
* Domain split

[Abydos]

Also
- Stunning new photo gallery !
- Cool new webmail interface (hopefully rolling out any day now)

[pcs]

I might be off on some of this, but some of the others I can quickly think of:

*Backscatter filter improvements
*Mailbox flag improvements
*Everyone on replicated servers
*Per-user spam filtering (bayes)

[Merovingian]

Incremental increases in both email and file storage, and an increase in aliases given to each accounts......

[hadaso]

How about:

Increased number of virtual domains from 1 to 50,
of virtual aliases to 200,

or how about:

Increased email quota from 150KB to 6GB.

File storage with very flexible website mechanism plus user control on DNS and website forwarding.

HTML composition

Customizable spam filtering with full control of the user with no need for Sieve programing

Greylisting

There are also tons of "little" improvements that have accumulated to a lot of improvement over the years. Things like the action drop-down in the "view message" window, saved searches in the action drop-down in the mailbox screen, moving the "None" option in the "signature" and "file into" dropdowns in the compose screen to below the "Personality" option (for easier selection), the way custom "from" addresses are entered in composed email and lots more. All are things that make life just a bit easier to those users that use them, and they add up over the years.

[FMRocks]

I'm a big fan of per-user spam filtering.

Also, this might seem years ago now, but I remember back when they added IDLE support for IMAP. It was a big deal then.

[bvaliron]

Originally Posted by FMRocks

I'm a big fan of per-user spam filtering.

the per-user spam filter is a killing feature. This plus sieve scripting make it even more configurable than the few mailboxes I have at university.

[petergh]

Am I the only who can't find half of these killer features on the plan comparison chart? I realise that chart can easily become cluttered by features interesting only to techies, but I think it is in need of an overhaul given the (semi-)recent features that have been added.

[FMRocks]

Originally Posted by petergh

Am I the only who can't find half of these killer features on the plan comparison chart? I realise that chart can easily become cluttered by features interesting only to techies, but I think it is in need of an overhaul given the (semi-)recent features that have been added.

That's a good point. There should be a comprehensive feature list, or at least the highlights somewhere.

[JMac]

I also second petergh's idea. I have had my account now for about a month and a half and I learned about more features in this thread during the last couple of minutes than I have in the past month and a half setting up my account!

These features are there in the Option, but there's no one listing of all that is available - and it is a heck of a lot more than some of us had thought.

Now I'm off to take a fresh look at my options.

Jim

[Sherry]

You can always spend some time going through the FastMail.FM Weblog. A lot of things went to the beta server so those that wanted to test the new upcoming feature could. Many features as they came out were mentioned in the blog.

Sherry

[rom1]

This will give you some history since March 2003.

[FMRocks]

Originally Posted by bvaliron

the per-user spam filter is a killing feature. This plus sieve scripting make it even more configurable than the few mailboxes I have at university.

Re-reading this thread, I just remembered seeing the Gmail video last night from the Gmail team. One thing they seem to be really proud about is that their spam reporting button creates an umbrella improvement rather than a per-user bayes. In other words, if I mark something spam, it helps you because Gmail has now learned that the same message is spam and can block it when it gets to your mailbox.

But you can only take it so far. First, not everyone considers the same thing spam. Secondly, there is potential for abuse. What if a bunch of people got together over the net and decided that they don't like a certain organization that has a mailing list. They all subscribe to it and hit the spam button in their gmail boxes. Gmail learns it as spam and puts it in the spam folder for all gmail users, so people who actually want the email don't get it, either. It seems you can "google-bomb" a mailing list that way too...

[JMac]

Originally Posted by FMRocks

Re-reading this thread, I just remembered seeing the Gmail video last night from the Gmail team. One thing they seem to be really proud about is that their spam reporting button creates an umbrella improvement rather than a per-user bayes. In other words, if I mark something spam, it helps you because Gmail has now learned that the same message is spam and can block it when it gets to your mailbox.

But you can only take it so far. First, not everyone considers the same thing spam. Secondly, there is potential for abuse. What if a bunch of people got together over the net and decided that they don't like a certain organization that has a mailing list. They all subscribe to it and hit the spam button in their gmail boxes. Gmail learns it as spam and puts it in the spam folder for all gmail users, so people who actually want the email don't get it, either. It seems you can "google-bomb" a mailing list that way too...

This, or some variants of this, can and does happen all the time, believe it or not. Last year I found none of my email was getting past the SMTP server of my ISP, Comcast. First thing I did was to change to Authenticated and switched to Post 587. Then I contacted someone on the Comcast forum whom I happen to know pretty well and he confirmed that I had been hit with a Port 25 block. I figured it was just an across-the-board action as several ISP's have done this and there had been some rumblings that Comcast would do the same because of their not-so-good reputation of a lot of spam generated from their domain.

But my friend told me that was not the case and gave me a direct number for a tech on the Comcast abuse team. I called and a tech named Josh had already looked into the matter and laughed when he told me there was only one Spam report of my address from SpamCop and that he had investigated it - it wasn't an email message at all but a post on Google Groups. And it was an obvious error or an intentionally malicious report: I had posted in the MyLife Organized group (a GTD-oriented Task Outline software) and asked another user about a question he had. Not even close to spam. The "Report this Post" button was, at that time, right next to the "Reply" button in the then-beta version of G-Groups.

So I asked if he was lifting the ban and he told me they could not - said they either cannot or will not lift any Port 25 ban once it is placed. They had gotten too much bad press about spam and no access was permitted to any tech there to lift the ban for an individual user.

So I got smacked for spam - basically labeled as a spammer - for no real reason at all. Either someone accidentally hit the wrong post button --- or they just didn't like me and did it for a hoot.

If one person can cause a Port 25 ban that easily, think what an organized group can do. Kinda sux.

Jim

[pomj]

Originally Posted by Abydos

- Cool new webmail interface (hopefully rolling out any day now)

you're kidding right ?!?