Really dislike the new UI and...

[NumberSix]

I sympathize with many of the complaints about lost features, however I'll reiterate something I said elsewhere recently: many of those missing features still exist, they are just accessed in a different way. For example, several per-message options, like where to save the sent copy, are now in Accounts (aka Personalities), advanced settings. This makes sense to me.... sometimes you want a particular Personality to save its sent messages in a different place than normal, but do you REALLY need to choose this on a per-message basis? It seems to me a feature not worth the effort to maintain.

About attaching multiple emails to an "container" message and forwarding them.... I used to do this sometimes, and I missed it. But in more recent times, when I wanted to send a set of messages this way to someone, I logged in to Classic and did it....but invariably the result was garbarge to the recipient. Their email client could not deal with the format. Has anyone confirmed that Gmail can open a message like this and deal with it sensibly? I'd bet it can't. Even if it somehow can, I'll bet the typical Gmail user doesn't know how to deal with it. They're just not accustomed to receiving stuff like that. Here's a feature that seems really cool to us power users, but it JUST DOESN'T WORK in the real world. Should it be maintained just so power users can send to other power users? By all means, tell me if I'm wrong about this.

Not to go on and on about each and every one. There ARE still a few missing that I resent a bit... my personal hobby horse is no longer being able to display message bodies always in plaintext by default, but choose richtext explicitly per-message when I want to.

Here's the takeaway: do we have to keep rehashing and rehashing this on the forum, about how they have eliminated these great features because.... they suck? What we need is for someone at FM to compose an authoritative list of all the features that people complain about losing in the transition, and give an explanation for each one, if it is still available, how to access it, and if not, what the reason was for eliminating it. I feel confident there will be an answer for each one that should satisfy most people.

robn? neilj? Bill? Can we get something like that written??

[William9]

Originally Posted by BritTim

Main areas where Fastmail is still better: ... More robust infrastructure than most free providers, so less chance of downtime ...

Is there any evidence for this statement? I can't believe that FM's infrastructure is more robust than Gmail or Outlook.com as examples. Especially based on my personal experience.

[BritTim]

You are correct that the regular version of Gmail does a lousy job with .eml file attachments. This has been a known weakness for years. Funnily enough Gmail on Android works great. For regular Gmail, there are solutions, but they are not easily discoverable. Most other email services and clients handle .eml attachments fine. Perhaps, Google feels that this is a power feature that most users do not need.

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by William9

Is there any evidence for this statement? I can't believe that FM's infrastructure is more robust than Gmail or Outlook.com as examples. Especially based on my personal experience.

Direct evidence is hard to come by and not always recent or reliable. Here is one study for Gmail and Office 365 published in 2013:
https://www.cloudsherpas.com/partner...-availability/. Key measures:

In looking at Microsoft Office 365 Incident reports over a 151 day period (9/23/2012 to 2/2/2013), we tabulated 18 unique Exchange incidents. These incidents, and scheduled downtime windows, represent a total of 4,503 minutes of downtime, or 3 days, 3 hours and 3 minutes. By our calculations, that comes to a 97.929% availability during this period; not quite the 99.9% Microsoft promises its customers. By comparison, Gmail was available 99.983% of time. Over a similar 151 day period, this amounts to an average of 44 minutes of downtime.

For Fastmail, we have objective reporting via Pingdom. Availability for March has been 100%, though an outage in February brought availability that month down to 99.78%. Even during the height of the DDoS attacks, Fastmail maintained availability over 99%.

Both Google (for email, at least) and Fastmail have good reliability Microsoft is not in the same class.

[Bamb0]

Originally Posted by Epoch

It's a real shame that they have consistently dumbed down the UI over the years.

Ya I do not wanna make Rob mad but why are they ruining the CLASSIC interface?

They should just leave it be...Just basic email and thats all........ (Like it always has been)


Seems like they are trying to force everyone to the newer/more intrusive interface!!


I dont wanna say anymore as I dont wanna risk making the FM team angry as I love thier email service....

[janusz]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

I dont wanna say anymore as I dont wanna risk making the FM team angry.

The FM team has made quite a few users angry

[ChinaLamb]

Originally Posted by Bamb0

Ya I do not wanna make Rob mad but why are they ruining the CLASSIC interface?

They should just leave it be...Just basic email and thats all........ (Like it always has been)


Seems like they are trying to force everyone to the newer/more intrusive interface!!


I dont wanna say anymore as I dont wanna risk making the FM team angry as I love thier email service....

The problem is that aspects of the classic interface are incompatible with new things on the back end. Someone should ask if they are going to fix these incompatibilities.

Lots of assumptions going around.

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by ChinaLamb

The problem is that aspects of the classic interface are incompatible with new things on the back end. Someone should ask if they are going to fix these incompatibilities.

Lots of assumptions going around.

The backend will have to support JMAP. I am finding it difficult to think of any features in classic that are difficult to implement using JMAP. I believe Fastmail is killing features they personally do not like, and that they assume few others want. The reasoning, I think, is partly maintenance overhead, but more the feeling that a simpler and more compressed interface will be more popular in the broader marketplace. They may even be right, but that does not mean it will be more appropriate for me and the customers I support.

[Bamb0]

Well I dont understand.. THE CLASSIC INTERFACE IS JUST BASIC EMAIL,why are they ruining it??

THOSE THINGS THAT WORK ON THE OTHER INTERFACE DO NOT NEED TO WORK ON CLASSIC!!

[DumbGuy]

One of the primary reasons I still continue to use the Classic UI is the "Request a read receipt" option. I use it, and I have at least 1-2 important business contacts whose email systems honor it, sending me delivery/read notifications that assist me with that knowledge. Occasionally I find another one-off recipient honors that MDN flag as well.

I occasionally use the High Priority flag as well.

More generally... Whenever I see companies/developers releasing newer versions of their software that has been dumbed down a bit in light of simplifying the look and feel, I always wonder why they don't just add an "Enable Advanced Features" checkbox that restores all the missing options power users were used to without scaring away the common user.

[Bamb0]

I have noticed over the years things always GET WORSE. People have been so dumbed down to think crap is BETTER so thats what they produce......


Its really sad.......... I wonder though how much say we have by posting on this thread here..... (Weather it will mean anything to them that we like thier service and they should not ruin it)

[quidam]

Originally Posted by janusz

The FM team has made quite a few users angry

Sure. I didn't care the modern interface is buggy, wastes huge screen areas and lacks some functionalities, as long as I didn't have to use it

[Bamb0]

Ya see thats the wrong attitude to have bud!!

We all should care about everything in this world -- EVEN IF IT DOESNT AFFECT US!!

[JMac]

Though there are some features that I miss a lot, I believe I can understand why Fastmail has been steadily navigating toward a simpler, 'easy-to-use-for non-power-users' product. They need to grow their paid user base, and most of that growth will not be power users.

With the advent of the free or nearly free email services, I imagine that Fastmail's user base was shrinking over the last decade and a half. If a trend like that continues for long there wouldn’t be much sense to keep operating the service. The only real solution is to grow the customer base, i.e., the paying customer base. Looking at Fastmail's various service plans and pricing, to try and expand with only or mostly power users would have involved significant price increases. And I don’t know that there is a large enough population of power users willing to fork up higher prices - that is, large enough to sustain Fastmail's business. The only other way to go was to go after the casual email users, or "non-power" users. That doesn’t require big increases in price and the population of casual users is considerably larger than power users. That was most likely the easier path forward.

Since most casual users will not use a lot of the so-called power features, having those features might make the UI appear too confusing to them. So Fastmail has steadily removed those features.

All of what I am saying here is my own opinion, my speculation about why Fastmail has moved in this direction over the last three or four years or so. So hopefully you folks won't blast me too hard for this post! I might be dead wrong here. But it is why I think FM is being "dumbed-down".

Thanks!

Jim

[David]

Originally Posted by JMac

Though there are some features that I miss a lot, I believe I can understand why Fastmail has been steadily navigating toward a simpler, 'easy-to-use-for non-power-users' product. They need to grow their paid user base, and most of that growth will not be power users.

With the advent of the free or nearly free email services, I imagine that Fastmail's user base was shrinking over the last decade and a half. If a trend like that continues for long there wouldn’t be much sense to keep operating the service. The only real solution is to grow the customer base, i.e., the paying customer base. Looking at Fastmail's various service plans and pricing, to try and expand with only or mostly power users would have involved significant price increases. And I don’t know that there is a large enough population of power users willing to fork up higher prices - that is, large enough to sustain Fastmail's business. The only other way to go was to go after the casual email users, or "non-power" users. That doesn’t require big increases in price and the population of casual users is considerably larger than power users. That was most likely the easier path forward.

Since most casual users will not use a lot of the so-called power features, having those features might make the UI appear too confusing to them. So Fastmail has steadily removed those features.

All of what I am saying here is my own opinion, my speculation about why Fastmail has moved in this direction over the last three or four years or so. So hopefully you folks won't blast me too hard for this post! I might be dead wrong here. But it is why I think FM is being "dumbed-down".

Thanks!

Jim

Jim: I agree with what you are saying. That said, all (or most) of the old timers here see this as a 360 degree turn in direction. I also see it as as a rejection of what Fastmail was all about, in the beginning.

I have left Fastmail (twice) in the past because of this, but have always returned, after failing to find anything better......