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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."
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Interview With Jeremy Howard of FastMail.fm

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  • Oh lawd (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Brian Gordon ( 987471 ) on Saturday October 03, 2009 @08:26PM (#29631447)

    You can tell it's a slashvertisement when the URL is casually dropped four times in the title and summary

  • Explain? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by manekineko2 ( 1052430 ) on Saturday October 03, 2009 @09:03PM (#29631625)

    Okay, so could someone who is familiar with who these guys are explain what they have to offer? From a quick look, my impression is that as a consumer who doesn't necessarily need 5 9's of reliability, there isn't much reason for me to use them over Gmail.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 03, 2009 @09:08PM (#29631645)

    i've been working in the industry for 13 years and have never seen a single SLA honored, even in instances where they are clearly at fault and the impact is huge ( week long outage in the middle of the tax season for an accounting firm).

    they are nothing more then arse covering exercises for CTO's

  • by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Saturday October 03, 2009 @09:08PM (#29631647) Homepage

    I've been using fastmail for years, and have been very happy with it. As a free email provider they are one of the best. Arguably gmail gives you more, but I use my fastmail and gmail accounts about equally, and I really like them both about the same. And fastmail doesn't have the looming spectre of gmail's targeted ads based on the content of your messages, suggesting that they care a bit more about your privacy. Google has a little bit nicer interface, and way more storage for free, buuuuut... fastmail of late has had better availability/uptime.

    Go fastmail:)

  • Nice try. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by domulys ( 1431537 ) on Saturday October 03, 2009 @09:33PM (#29631781)
    I am - like many other Slashdot'ers, I expect - just now looking at what FastMail.fm has to offer. (Note that I am an extremely happy user of Gmail, a FREE e-mail service.) Let's take a look:

    Free Account: 10MB email, IMAP

    So, I've already lost interest. FastMail.fm does not have the capacity to handle 4 of the past 10 e-mails I've received today, unless I give them my credit card.

    With regards to uptime, I concede that GMail had some issues a few weeks ago. But, look - Google is good at one thing, and that's redundancy. It's build into everything they do. With greater volume comes greater visibility and responsibility, and I'm honestly not sure I'm willing to trust "FastMail.fm" with my precious data. (What is this "fm" extension anyway? It's not that I care, it's that millions of other people do - and that's the problem).

  • Re:Oh lawd (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Sunday October 04, 2009 @12:02AM (#29632497) Homepage Journal

    Have you actually read the article? ...

    Jeremy Howard

    You must be new here.

  • by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Sunday October 04, 2009 @02:43AM (#29633119)
    Your post made be laugh. Thanks for that. But, seriously, Fastmail.FM is not a free email service. The "Guest" account is severely crippled (as you correctly point out) but is really only intended to allow people to get a feel for the service before paying to use the service for real.

    As for your point that serious FM users know all the names and positions of the key folks at FM, that is because of the open communication on the EmailDiscussions forums. It is a compact, transparent organization with good people.

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