Interview With Jeremy Howard of FastMail.fm 135
Siker writes "In a world of giants such as Gmail and Rackspace, email service provider FastMail.fm is somehow doing great, with signups above the million mark and reliability above four 9s. Email Service Guide interviews Jeremy Howard, founder of FastMail.fm, to find out how. Also covered are the company's contributions to Open Source software such as Cyrus-IMAP and Thunderbird. Jeremy discusses the future of IMAP, how open protocols help FastMail.fm, and why he thinks SLAs from email providers are a con."
SLA, from the article (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
Jeremy: SLAs are generally a bit of a con. If a customer canâ(TM)t access their email when they need it, that could cost them enormously, either commercially or personally. But all SLAs Iâ(TM)ve seen only offer a small refund for a large outage â" itâ(TM)s really no help at all to the customer. So instead of offering such a miserable token, what we do instead is support independent 3rd party resources like pingdom uptime monitoring and the Email Discussions forum so that prospective customers can get a truly independent and complete view of what we offer.
I'm inclined to agree with this approach. E-mail is how everyone works today. A client e-mails me a task or a request, his way of measuring my worth to him is how fast I finish that task. If I can't reach my e-mail, the potential for injury to my reputation and the relationship with that client because of just that one 2 hours-a-year outage could be a loss of such extent that the e-mail provider couldn't possibly offer me enough compensation.
In other words, information on how well the provider does in practice is much more relevant to me than some clause for token compensation.
Re:Oh lawd (Score:1, Informative)
It referred to as
Fastmail.fm for less ambiguity. (fastmail.com is not related...)
Fastmail.fm is not a URL. It is missing the http:/// [http]
Do you have the same thoughts about articles on openoffice.org, or x.org?
Re:First post from an actual fastmail subscriber? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm also a fastmail subscriber. Can't fault reliability and features of it, although aesthetically speaking, there is room for improvement with the web interface. The only real issue I have with fastmail is the mailbox size (600MB for my service level) - when I signed up, I was only regularly using one machine to read my email on, so it wasn't an issue to get my mail via POP3, and use my local mail storage when I wanted to search old messages. Now I have four or five devices I regularly read my email on, so the Google Mail 8GB of storage is starting to look attractive, I can have all my mail searchable from any machine. My current fastmail quote isn't nearly large enough for that, and it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
Great Service (Score:4, Informative)
After my university account expired, I went with Fastmail after deciding I did not want my non-throwaway email account to be sold to spammers, open for 'harvesting', or at the whims of some company's profit motives. I went with Fastmail's $20/year account and have been a happy customer now going on 4 years. Features I like best:
They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit. SFTP access to files would also be cool! Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the .fm. This is non-standard, and I wonder how often it looks a little shady to some people who expect all emails to be of the com, edu, or org variety. Might be nice if they'd register another domain under .com that could be aliased to my main accounts.
Another feature that'd be worth the $20/year itself would be the ability to create aliases under the .edu domain in order to get cheap versions of software! I'm sure this is more difficult than it sounds, though.
Re:Great Service (Score:5, Informative)
They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit.
Go Enhanced ($40/year instead of $20), and you get 6 gigs of mailbox and 2 gigs of file space.
Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the .fm.
When I signed up (several years ago), I picked mailbox.com as my domain. Now I have my own domain, but the base address it points to is still in the mailbox.com domain, and my wife uses mailhaven.com. Didn't you know about the dozens of alternate domains they offer? They have .net, .com and .org domains, as well as others. And, of course, you can always set up your own domain (mine costs me about $10/year from 1and1.com), and host it at FastMail.
As for the .edu, I think registrars are pretty strict about who gets those; I think you have to prove you represent an accredited educational institution. I don't think FM can help you with that. :)
-Mike
Things that FM.fm provides that Gmail doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh lawd (Score:5, Informative)
To the best of my knowledge, 'Siker' (the submitter of the article) is not affiliated with FastMail.FM in any way. And since I'm the Jeremy Howard in the interview, and I very rarely nowadays post whilst unconscious, I'm also fairly sure it wasn't posted by the interviewee.
Have you actually read the article? I did try hard in the interview to provide some actually useful info, regardless of whether you are an FM user or not. For example, I provided examples of how IMAP has been extended in recent times, and pointed to some interesting proposals which show where it's going in the future.
Jeremy Howard
Re:try it! (Score:5, Informative)
FastMail.FM operates under Australian law, not US law (although the servers are in the US, they are owned by an Australian company). Australian privacy law offers more protection than almost anywhere else in the world. For instance, an Australian company that receives a request for information about an account under the Telecommuncations Act is legally required to not provide any actual email contents to the requesting law enforcement agency.
To have an account closed, law enforcement would have to jump through plenty of hoops first, and we'd check really carefully to be sure that the request was legally enforceable before we complied.
Jeremy Howard
FastMail.FM
Re:Another happy customer (Score:4, Informative)
For your own information
Re:Can I disable the spam filtering? (Score:3, Informative)
There's stuff that we block before we even know who it's addressed to. At one point (I haven't checked recently) we had over 1 MILLLION IP addresses that were being blocked from even connecting to our MX servers (for a 24 hour rolling block none less) because of their behavior.
But you can certainly turn the spam scanning right down to the point where anything that's not pretty ugly will be allowed into your mailbox. I have my spam scanning turned a fair way up, and the only false positives I've had are newsletters from companies that I do have a relationship with. Adding them to my address book fixes that up just fine.
Training my personal bayes database has certainly helped reduce the spam through to my Inbox as well (my personal domain address has been around for a while and gets ~400 spam/day)
Bron ( FastMail sysadmin )
fastmail is also a Friend Of Open Source[non-TM] (Score:1, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am an extremely satisfied enhanced-account fastmail.fm customer for many years.
One thing that people often don't pay attention to is that fastmail.fm does a lot of Open Source work. One of the fastmail.fm crew, Bron Gondwana, has made extremely important contributions to the world's best, most scalable libre-software mail spool, Cyrus IMAP. He has commit rights upstream, and he has been a very active contributor and member of the community for a few years, now. fastmail.fm is a Cyrus IMAP shop, but they help other Cyrus IMAP users all the time in Cyrus the mailing lists, they have given us details about how to set up highly scalable and redundant multi-million-user setups many times now... And it is not rare to see Bron on the LKML (Linux Kernel ML) engaging the kernel developers to fix a kernel bug or two.
This is no publicity stunt, these guys are it: the email shop anyone who likes to tout around about the importance of FLOSS should vote for with their wallets. About the only thing that could make fastmail.fm even better, would be servers in a non-openly-hostile-to-privacy, non-corporate state: the servers are in the USA.
Re:Can I disable the spam filtering? (Score:3, Informative)
FastMail.FM has fewer global filters than any email provider I can think of. However, all large email providers need some - the first time a service gets hit by an SMTP-based DDOS they discover this!
Imagine you have a botnet of 100,000 computers all trying to open SMTP connections to your server and blast through email at the same time - that's not something you want to allow. So, we have a database of IPs which have attempted to DOS us in the last few hours, and block them at an IP level. That's why there's no ability to allow users to turn off this global filtering - since it happens at IP level, we don't even know which address they're attacking.
Because most IPs are dynamic, we expire them from the blocklist very quickly (unless they keep reappearing again and again), so that innocent bystanders don't get impacted.
Re:Nice try. (Score:4, Informative)
The web interface was written from scratch and has been continually developed over the last 10 years. It's not drag-n-drop because in our experience that's not the most powerful and efficient way to manage email. It's designed to be lean, yet powerful - but folks who want something simple and full of eye candy would be best off looking elsewhere, frankly.
It does use asynchronous requests (I hope you don't mind if I don't say "AJAX" - for many reasons, I can't stand that acronym) when it provides a real advantage. For instance, many parts of the interface appear/disappear without doing full page refreshes (for speed), to addressing fields in the Compose screen have a really powerful autocomplete system, and message composition is extended in a number of ways (such as inline spell-check and automated auto-formatting of plain-text emails).