Guest and Member subscriptions being discontinued

[joe_devore]

AS I understand it from what Brong(FastMail Rep/dev) mentioned here on the forums.
FastMail "used"
primarily used "Perl" and a bit of "JavaScript"
but now its reversed with the New UI..

[jhollington]

Originally Posted by joe_devore

AS I understand it from what Brong(FastMail Rep/dev) mentioned here on the forums.
FastMail "used"
primarily used "Perl" and a bit of "JavaScript"
but now its reversed with the New UI..

Yeah, that was referring to the classic interface on the front end, which of course is a whole other story as to why that piece is going away and why it's not as simple as copying code from one system to the other.

The thing is that any large-scale e-mail system is made up of multiple components, which almost always run on different servers (physical or virtual). Generally, the front-end services that handle webmail are completely separate and isolated from the actual mailbox stores. Similarly, so are the message transfer agents that route mail in and out of the system, and most likely so are the IMAP processes that are used for accessing your mail from a third-party email client.

Basically, there are a whole bunch of servers talking to each other behind the scenes... You log into the webmail server, and it probably connects to a directory server to figure out where your mailbox is, and then in turn gets redirected to the specific server where your e-mail is stored and retrieves it from there.

So in terms of the Member accounts, I'm thinking more along the lines of the back-end where the messages are actually stored, which would almost certainly still be some version of Cyrus, but may be an older version, on an older operating system and hardware platform.

Again, however, I'm completely guessing here, as FastMail has been entirely silent on the issue. It's pure speculation on my part, nothing else, and it's just as possible that what BritTim says about everything being on the same level of infrastructure is entirely correct as well, as there's certainly evidence that this is the case ... in the very least the documents that FastMail has published over the years to explain its storage architecture would have to be excluding the Guest and Member accounts, although I'd argue that due to their significantly lower storage quotas, it also wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that FastMail had "left them behind" somewhere along the way, as there'd be little need to migrate/upgrade them onto newer/faster/larger hardware.

[walpurg]

@jhollington
It's just a bit difficult to imagine that Member accounts, which have been around concurrently with other paid account types for a very long time, were somehow singled out and put in an entirely different environment, not portable into the current main system the same way the other accounts have been. With their tendencies towards grand unification, it's highly doubtful they'd have ever set themselves up for pointless extra complexity in this manner. It's not as though they carried the Member level over from an acquired provider or other paid accounts were added much later on, so where'd this divergence be coming from, realistically? I think you're sort of inadvertently insulting their intelligence by suggesting this particular excuse.

[n5bb]

Fastmail was clear about why they are discontinuing Member accounts. You can choose to not believe their given reasons, but obviously they believe this is the best choice for their company. They don't have the advertising revenue from most other email providers, and I'm sure they want for every account to be self-supporting. Most of the comments in this thread seem to be speculative and not based on any factual knowledge of Fastmail's costs of keeping those accounts open. Remember that the reasons for closing the Classic interface and Member/Guest accounts are completely different:

• Classic was discontinued for technological reasons.
  

  Originally Posted by brong

  ...Most new features are on hold right now because we're in the middle of the technology transition that removing classic is part of, so there are multiple incompatible copies of everything that need to be kept in sync for every changed. It's really quite painful and slow and error prone for everyone until we get that cleaned up...

• Member/Guest accounts are being closed for financial reasons.

  Originally Posted by Fastmail Help

  Why are Member level plans going away?
  FastMail has always been a premium email service, paid for entirely by the subscription fees of our users.
  
  As a security and privacy focused service with no ads, we don’t have any split loyalties. This means we can continue to invest in developing and maintaining FastMail for all of our customers. While the cost of data and storage for Member accounts may seem low, there are significant costs associated with providing them, specifically to do with the huge resources required for ever-increasing security issues. Every year we see a significant percentage of FastMail accounts compromised to send spam, phish our other customers and more. This results in very high support and abuse costs.Today we require a team of full time staff just to manage security, in addition to multiple data centres and a 24-hour Operations Team.
  
  We also have an ongoing commitment to continuing development, which is why these steps are necessary to maintain the high quality of service users have come to expect from us over the years.

Bill

[placebo]

It's too bad FastMail doesn't migrate these legacy member accounts to pobox.com, which the company owns, so that mail to these addresses could be forwarded to another email address. I think the reason most people are upset is that they're losing their longtime email address. It's a big pain in the butt having to update addresses all over the internet.

[walpurg]

Originally Posted by n5bb

Fastmail was clear about why they are discontinuing Member accounts.

The instructions you give around here to graciously help people out are a good example of 'clear'. The reasons provided by FM unfortunately are not, or this would not be happening:

Originally Posted by n5bb

Most of the comments in this thread seem to be speculative and not based on any factual knowledge of Fastmail's costs of keeping those accounts open.

If your helpful posts were written in a manner similar to how FM has explained this, they would be a waste of space. There's barely any 'factual knowledge' in their PR statement to even form a belief. As for them believing that what they're doing is right (for them), that much is obvious.

[Pfolson]

Originally Posted by walpurg

The instructions you give around here to graciously help people out are a good example of 'clear'. The reasons provided by FM unfortunately are not, or this would not be happening.

What, exactly, is not "clear" about FastMail's explanations? They stated their reasons for both decisions in simple, straightforward language. You may not like the decisions they made, and as Bill said, you may choose not the believe the reasons behind them. But there is nothing that hasn't been perfectly clear.

People here seem to be upset for a variety of reasons. Some are upset because FastMail has chosen to keep the private details of their private business to themselves, not divulging specific information, such as the exact numbers of various account types or the number of staff people involved in maintaining those accounts or the precise dollars and cents it costs them to keep those accounts running. Others are angry because FastMail staff has chosen not to come on these forums on a daily basis and argue with their customers, responding to every single question and criticism -- even though, in most cases, the same questions and criticisms are simply being repeated again and again and again by the same handful of users. Then there are those who are angry because FastMail hasn't yet implemented their own particular pet feature in the new UI -- even if those pet features are the very definition of terms like "niche" and "edge case," and would benefit a vanishingly small number of customers. But most of all, people are upset because FastMail made a decision they disagree with, and for whatever reason they are unwilling or unable to take the logical next step and move their e-mail to another provider. They would rather stay here and be angry and continue to complain about their lost cause -- and I don't even want to guess the reasons for that.

People are entitled to be angry about whatever they want, and to display that anger in any way they want. They can believe that FastMail made a mistake or mishandled the public relations. They can choose to feel slighted, cheated, misled, lied to, abused, whatever. But to say FastMail has not been "clear" about their decisions is unfair. One decision was technical, the other was financial. You can't get much clearer than that.

[walpurg]

I didn't think I had much interest left in rehashing all this again, but I'm beginning to be rather entertained by this line of 'unfairness' defense. Well, @Pfolson, if you think it's logically sound to claim that most of the comments based on 'clear' explanations are 'speculative and not based on any factual knowledge', then you apparently believe that the people speculating are intellectually deficient in some way, because ordinarily 'clear' explanations should not give rise to baseless speculation by obviously intelligent people, including those with industry knowledge.

As for what is not 'clear', I thought I just wrote a pretty long post about that on the previous page, fully quoting the exact same explanation @n5bb felt the need to requote a few posts later to remind us to remember it. Why don't we assume that people with common sense can figure out without much difficulty that companies make decisions for financial reasons. It's just that some happen to think not eroding the trust of your customers by going back on your promises is the more financially sound decision in the long term. Unless there is an existential level reason for doing it, and if it is 'clear' for you from their explanations that such a reason exists, by all means do lay it out.

I suppose in the end, if you sincerely believe that the definition of 'unfair' is calling a company out on breaking their promise and not the breaking itself, there's nothing I can do about that. I do appreciate your permission for people to be upset, even if you gave it after first suggesting they GTHO. (I, personally, can't say I'm upset. More like bemused by this discussion and somewhat disillusioned in FM.)

Oh, and while this is pretty off topic here:

Then there are those who are angry because FastMail hasn't yet implemented their own particular pet feature in the new UI -- even if those pet features are the very definition of terms like "niche" and "edge case," and would benefit a vanishingly small number of customers.

Yeah, it was really stupid of FM to implement those pointless features in the first place. Thinking that no one would complain when they got removed made sense, though, because this is the first time in the history of the world for people to dislike feature removal.

EDIT: I almost forgot that when this change was first announced, the reason given was

Given the limited number of remaining 'Member' users we have decided to no longer support this account type to help simplify our internal architecture.

I'm not sure if that wording still exists somewhere on FM's site or in the internet archive, but it's been quoted in this thread, such as here and even by myself. This does not look like a 'clearly' financial reason to me, and it wholly lacks the 'security' focus of the currently available explanation.

[jhollington]

Originally Posted by walpurg

@jhollington
It's just a bit difficult to imagine that Member accounts, which have been around concurrently with other paid account types for a very long time, were somehow singled out and put in an entirely different environment, not portable into the current main system the same way the other accounts have been.

To be fair, not put so much as left.

That said, you're probably right that it makes more sense that they'd be unified considering how FastMail typically rolls, but having been on the back end of a lot of mail systems, it's not a stretch for "low priority" accounts to be left behind on older platforms just because there's no need to migrate them, and there's always a sense that "they're fine there for now" and "we'll get to those later." With the storage quotas and low traffic that Guest and Member accounts generated, there wouldn't have been a push to migrate them onto newer hardware.

[walpurg]

@jhollington
Sure, but if those accounts started out the same as the others, there should already be procedures/tools in place for migrating them, they same way the others were migrated. It's hard for me to imagine any kind of a huge overhead in this scenario, considering how FastMail typically rolls, as you say.

And more importantly, those Members who end up taking one of the deals offered to them will have to be migrated no matter what ancient platform they're currently on, so I see no sensible reason why the same process with some very minor modifications couldn't be used to migrate everyone, if there was a will to do it.

[jhollington]

Originally Posted by walpurg

I'm not sure if that wording still exists somewhere on FM's site or in the internet archive, but it's been quoted in this thread, such as here and even by myself. This does not look like a 'clearly' financial reason to me, and it wholly lacks the 'security' focus of the currently available explanation.

Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, the goal to "simplify [the] internal architecture" is in line with reducing the "huge resources required for ever-increasing security issues." They're both vague terms, but definitely point to the same general objective.

The part about compromised accounts of course comes into play as well, and perhaps in FastMail's deeper analysis, Member accounts have a higher chance of being compromised as they may be far less frequently used — considering the nature of the Member account, there are probably quite a few of them that may only be laying around for legacy reasons, getting checked often enough that they're not "inactive" but not so often that the users themselves would be likely to notice a problem.

One way or another, I'm willing to bet money that in some manner these Member accounts have become a technical burden for FastMail, which of course translates into a financial one by requiring paid staff to focus their efforts on non-revenue-generating accounts.

[walpurg]

Originally Posted by jhollington

Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment ...

I don't know, terms like '(the opposite of) vast majority'/'limited number' on the one hand vs 'huge resources' and other hyperbolical language on the other don't mesh very well for me, at least not in this case. To at the same time downplay the issue and claim it's hugely important makes the whole thing look more dubious than it probably is. I'm not on their case because I hate them, I just hate to see them explaining things in a manner that adds to the problem of people already questioning their integrity because of the 'lifetime' promise. And if they're mainly having a problem with dormant Member accounts, I think there'd be very little drama around here if they only terminated those, not everyone.

(Hopefully you saw my other reply, the one I posted a few seconds before you.)

[jhollington]

Originally Posted by walpurg

...if there was a will to do it.

There in lies the key point. I'm still not making excuses for FastMail here, per se.... Just saying that I could understand the decision to "cut bait" on the Member accounts if it were a matter of putting any time and resources into migrating hundreds (or even thousands) of accounts that aren't actually generating any revenue for them.

Which of course still makes it a business decision at the end of the day

[jhollington]

(Hopefully you saw my other reply, the one I posted a few seconds before you.)

Yeah, those ones clearly crossed in transit.... Thanks for the heads-up

Originally Posted by walpurg

I don't know, terms like '(the opposite of) vast majority'/'limited number' on the one hand vs 'huge resources' and other hyperbolical language on the other don't mesh very well for me, at least not in this case.

Yeah, I can totally understand your point. I'm mostly just saying that none of what they've said later on necessarily contradicts anything they originally said about discontinuing the accounts.

No matter what the technical reasons are, or how many accounts are involved, the bottom line is that FastMail has decided that the "Member" accounts are a burden on their resources in some form.

To at the same time downplay the issue and claim it's hugely important makes the whole thing look more dubious than it probably is. I'm not on their case because I hate them, I just hate to see them explaining things in a manner that adds to the problem of people already questioning their integrity because of the 'lifetime' promise.

Yeah, and to be clear, I've been of the same mind as others in this thread all along in believing that FastMail really should have "done the right thing" here, but at the end of the day, it's their call, and they obviously feel that the goodwill they've eroded through this decision is less consequential than whatever the burden is of maintaining the legacy Member accounts.

And if they're mainly having a problem with dormant Member accounts, I think there'd be very little drama around here if they only terminated those, not everyone.

Sure, and I honestly don't think that was ever solely the issue. Completely dormant accounts can very justifiably be terminated, but I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of the "Member" level accounts were also used on a very casual basis — just enough to prevent them from being terminated, but not so much that the users behind those accounts are really maintaining them properly.

Plus, at the end of the day, if you're only looking at usage stats, there's really no easy way to tell the difference between a hijacked account and one that's being legitimately used by its original owner — at least not until the hijacked accounts start exhibiting anti-social behaviour, at which point it's already too late to do anything about it in terms of the risk to FastMai's online reputation. For all FastMail knows, 90% of the remaining Member accounts could be hijacked 'sleeper' accounts, just waiting to unleash hordes of spam on the world.

Accounts that are being paid for on an annual basis are less likely to fall into that sort of nebulous category.

After all, despite this thread having run to about 29 pages, my quick count is that there are maybe a dozen folks in this discussion that were actually impacted by this. Now, obviously not every FastMail user comes to EMD, and some of those dozen or so folks probably also know others (as was implied in a couple of posts where folks said they signed up their friends and relatives back in the day). Of course, I'm sure there are also legitimate Members who just saw the email a few months ago, shrugged, and walked away from their FastMail account. Still, however, despite all of the sound and fury exhibited here, we really have no idea what kind of numbers we're actually dealing with.

[walpurg]

Originally Posted by jhollington

For all FastMail knows, 90% of the remaining Member accounts could be hijacked 'sleeper' accounts, just waiting to unleash hordes of spam on the world.

That's a good one

Anyway, thanks for the talk, I rather enjoyed this rare opportunity (in this thread) to get by without my good friend /sarcasm