Fastmail now has 400,000 users
 

Diving into some history of Fastmail and Pobox with Helen Horstmann-Allen, cofounder of Pobox and now coo at Fastmail.

Interesting. With ~400,000 paying users, it seems they must have minimum of $20m revenue. Not bad!

Congrats fastmail!!
 

I wonder if a company counts as one user, or do they count each individual email account? My guess would be they count each individual using Fastmail. I also wonder how many of them are POBox.com users?

That link is behind a paywall.

If you clisk CTRL+A and then CTRL+C fast enough you can then paste the rext into notepad and read it. And when you read it you see that it's not really Fastmail's history but more sort of POBox's short history (Founded in Philadelphia in 1995, bought by this Australian email service about 20 years later).

No history of Fastmail would be complete without mentioning Jeremy Howard. Those were the days!

Here's the partial answer to my question above. I like Fastmail/POBox.com and probably would have stuck with them (I had an account starting in the early 2000s) if it weren't for a couple of customer service failures where they just didn't fix simple, basic problems in a timely manner. If I'm paying for a service I want better service than waiting days to restore email functionality that is a problem on their end, or even to get a response.

I must say I am with Pobox since 2001 and whenever I contacted support my question/problem was answered/solved very quickly!

I was able to view it also :)

“Fastmail, which traces its roots to POBox.com (Pobox), an email service started in a West Philadelphia dorm room in 1995.”

That way of characterizing the history suprised me a bit.

An archived copy of the article, not behind a paywall:

https://archive.is/hYxcx

Works ok here

Here too...

I will not renew fastmail
 

the prices are not justified. so soon, when my subscription expires, fastmail will have one less user... after 16 years of use.