Opera Acquires Fastmail.fm 78
mattcsn writes "Opera Software just bought email service provider Fastmail.fm. Here's hoping that Opera uses a light touch and keeps the email service as unchanged as possible. From the article: 'FastMail has included a FAQ, in which it says that users who wish to not transfer their accounts over to Opera have to go into settings and indicate just that. Not acting upon the email the company sent out to its users or actively accepting the transfer will result in Opera assuming control over the mailbox and the account registration details. As to the reason for selling, FastMail says the market was getting increasingly competitive and that Opera's expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market would help the company grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.'"
Opera Software (Score:3, Insightful)
For once I actually think the service will stay as it is. Opera's business isn't offering mail services, but their web browser contain mail functionality, and Opera has a good track record of a good company. What it seems to be is that they're looking to have a specific email provider in the browser, and buying Fastmail.fm is great for that.
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personally i can't wait to use fastmail.fm in opera on my Courier.
You're not alone! My favorite browser and e-mail service together. wow!
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Opera has had operamail.com for many years, but as far as I know, it has not been linked with the My Opera social networking site. As you can see from its current state, the operamail service has not been maintained for years. According to the TOS on that site, it's been outsourced to Outblaze - another mail company I know nothing about. It seems obvious that this new acquisition of FastMail.fm will change that.
(Disclaimer: I work for Opera, but I am not involved with our email products. The above represent
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I hope the service stays as it is, I've been a Fastmail user for years and they've always been a pretty solid, inexpensive service.
It does seem like a good marriage to me, with both sides bringing something positive to the table that shouldn't interfere with each other's core businesses. We'll see if Opera enables Fastmail to continue its excellent service or if they mess around with a good thing and ruin it.
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Same as many other free browsers which get part of their revenue from search engines + licensing fees from manufacturers who want to incorporate Opera tech into their products (Nintendo or some TV manufacturers for example); possibly also carriers including Opera Mini by default in handsets they offer.
Re:Opera Software -- good track record? (Score:2)
What for? (Score:2)
Seriously, why is Opera doing this?
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Neither that, nor he is aware of business relevance outside his borders [liveinternet.ru].
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There's no email client involved in this purchase (as far as I know).
Fastmail, which I've been using since last August, is an good email service with a good web front end.
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Opera is the most widely-deployed mobile browser.
So Opera has been surpassed by the Browser Market and now by buying the e-mail client they are trying to gain some ground, which I do not see happening.
Really, Mr. Analyst! Please enlighten us with more of your carefully-researched gems of insight.
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Oh, so Opera has lost the invaluable DWRECK18 market. That's definitely the sign of a company in deep crisis.
Reliable, fast and standards compliant (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazingly clean, browser friendly interface along with superb IMAP support. That was why I originally subscribed to fastmail.fm and it went even better, not worse.
There is a huge level of expertise in fastmail.fm and I believe they use best of the technology but it has never been some "nerd" service, they used the ideas to make it more friendly to newbie user. Of course, there isn't a chance you can compete with free and brands like "Google", so it could never get into place where it deserved.
Hopefully, with Opera, it will be more known and used.
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Opera already has a bunch of online services grouped together as "My Opera" - some browser-tied, such as server-side bookmarks & history with sync, or Opera Turbo; and some generic ones [opera.com], such as blogs. Given that Opera has a built-in email client, it would make some sense for them to also provide an email service to pair with that (so if you start Opera and click "e-mail", it'd offer you to create an Opera account if you don't already have one).
As for "why" in a sense of how they will make money on that
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I would guess Opera Mini will get soon a nicely integrated creation process and access to email account; so Opera Software will jump on the badwagon of hundreds of millions of people getting their first email adress (people in so called "3rd world countries", having access to the internet only via fairly simple phones; phones on which Opera Mini is very popular, it certainly helps it being #1 mobile web browser). Opera can also offer it in nice package to mobile carriers, I guess.
Who knows, perhaps next ste
in other news (Score:3, Informative)
Tuffmail [tuffmail.com] remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.
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Tuffmail [tuffmail.com] remains cooler, and has not sold out. Happy customer for several years.
Wow Google apps really prices out all these guys by a lot
Re:in other news (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails and stick with companies that make their money at offering email as a service. Tuffmail won't compromise your privacy because they'll go out of business if they do. Whereas Google owes you nothing.
I was a Fastmail.fm customer for years until their huge outage a couple years back. I switched to Tuffmail, and haven't looked back. Great service, rock solid reliability, never a lost email, no more than a few hours of downtime over the last several years.
I know of no other service that offers that kind of reliability for the very reasonable price Tuffmail charges.
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Yeah, I think I'll pass on giving a company that makes its money advertising access to all my private and business emails
"Advertising"? What is this "advertising" you speak of?
Gmail IMAP [google.com]. I don't see the ads because I don't use the webserver. And I don't send outbound mail. I don't need to; I use an ISP mailbox for primary mail. GMail is just a receive-only convenience as far as I'm concerned.
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Gmail IMAP [google.com]. I don't see the ads because I don't use the webserver.
Ads are less intrusive than the datamining which will occur regardless of whether you see the ads. To me, anyway.
I use an ISP mailbox for primary mail.
Do you mean that you use your ISP's SMTP server? What about when you're on the road?
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So Google is aware that certain World of Warcraft accounts have expired. Gosh. Maybe they'll tailor the web ads they can't show me to offer me the non-existent opportunity to buy online gold. w00t.
Anything that matters would be GPG encrypted. And nothing that matters goes to this account anyways.
Do you mean that you use your ISP's SMTP server? What about when you're on the road?
On the road == business. "Leisure travel" is for suckers. "Travel" and "Travail" are based on the same Latin root for damn good r
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Wow, the narrowmindedness overwhelms me.
Not everyone is addicted to their Crackberry.
Some of use actually find *occasional* access to personal email while on vacation to be rather useful, since some communication is better handled in writing than over a phone.
And, last but not least, some people actually write letters home, and email is a great way to ensure that they arrive in a timely manner.
Read the stuff before clicking "I agree" next time (Score:2)
You specifically grant them (unless you pay) the rights to analyze your mail. It is up to them to use it whatever sense they want. Just because you don't see ads, it doesn't mean they are harvesting the personal mails.
There are some people who really feel disturbed about that kind of policy and please don't bring up "what about your ISP root user?", I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
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Yeah. So they can scan my email. The Gmail account is mostly throwaway stuff, so they can conclude from harvesting my email... that I get a trivial amount of throwaway stuff. Seriously. I think the Gmail account has handled less than 10 total emails. Ever.
I don't use my ISP's junk either. Never did.
Of course you are. You're using their routers, their CO equipment... that's no less (and no more) sacrosanct than the ISP's SMTP servers. 15 seconds with IOS and one Wireshark session and your emails would belo
Gmail's issue is more political (Score:2)
I moved to VPN long time ago, in fact with Fastmail like services TLS/SSL support, they could never "wireshark" me.
Of course, I keep Yahoo mail since 1998, I just didn't like Gmail's (and Google in general), "You get it free, now sell your soul to us" attitude. If there were more people like me, they would seek for another solution. Of course, people jumping up and down saying "spyware" when poor shareware tries to check for updates using Gmail, it doesn't matter to them.
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Uhh, just because you don't see the ads doesn't mean they aren't using the data to advertise to you.
You see Google ads all over the web. I'd be willing to bet a few pretty pennies that Google correlates information, knows who you are, and uses info about you to serve up ads, either on Google or via their AdSense ads all over the web. If they also host all your email, whether you are looking at it via the web or not, they can still use that data and provide it to advertisers.
I'm not a tin foil hat type, an
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Yet IMAPS and SMTPS are nowhere to be found. Your ISP and any network you connect to your mail from can be spying everything. At least GMail is encrypted.
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Dunno what you are talking about, Tuffmail supports TLS and SSL over a variety of ports [tuffmail.com], for both IMAP and SMTP traffic.
All the email I ever send to or retrieve from Tuffmail has been over a secured connection.
In fact, you can even manage your Sieve filters over an SSL connection.
Additionally, their webmail client (which ain't so great, but I only use it in emergencies) uses HTTPS.
This takes about 2 seconds to discover on their website - not exactly hidden information.
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I was a Fastmail.fm customer for years until their huge outage a couple years back.
When did they have a significant outage? I opened my account in 2004.
Opera has, as far as I know, a fairly good reputation. I hope this works out well.
Re:in other news (Score:4, Informative)
We put a lot our eggs in one basket for a bit - we had a 2Tb (yeah, I know - not so big by today's standards) RAID6 set die when 3 disks failed. This is before we had replication. It took about 2 weeks to get everyone back online as we streamed from backups as fast as we could!
Our infrastructure is a lot more fault-tolerant now. We actually lost a RAIDset about 3 weeks ago when two drives failed within about an hour of each other (a RAID1 of 150Gb drives - it was about 80% rebuilt)
Users didn't notice anything at all, but there were a couple of days when a subset of our users didn't have a realtime-replicated copy of their mail store as replication re-synced all their data to the new drives.
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I like tuffmail's server-side spam policy [tuffmail.com] but how does it compare to Gmail's? Is it the same or more stringent - or can it be configured to be more stringent?
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Yet they don't offer encryption. Lame.
And $50/year won't give you 7GB of storage.
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Yet they don't offer encryption. Lame.
What is your motive? You've posted that twice in this thread, yet the site is clear in several places that encryption is offered. Perhaps you want to see this comprehensive matrix of encryption offerings on various ports for various services [tuffmail.com].
And $50/year won't give you 7GB of storage.
I have more interesting things to worry about than some upper limit which I'm not an eighth of the way to reaching. Incidentally, the Tuffmail text filter is great for stripping HTML and attachments from mail for archiving (as well as reading on restricted platforms).
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None. I follow the guide to configure the client and they explicitly selected "No encryption".
I apologize for my mistake.
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While google apps mostly works just fine and is certainly a good product, sometimes it can take awhile to convince google fix an issue when problems do occur.
On the other hand, Tuffmail usually responds very quickly to issues.
Re:in other news (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news, real geeks have their own root server with their own setup (including greylisting and amavisd with spamd and clamav).
Please hand in your geek card, appliance user! ;)
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In other news, real geeks have their own root server with their own setup (including greylisting and amavisd with spamd and clamav).
Well, I was running an Alpha OpenVMS-based mailserver until I moved to Tuffmail, if that counts as unnecessary geekery. The server had uptime countable in years, but when it turned out that the hardware was underpowered and the electricity overconsumed for my growing needs, I had the choice of migrating to the nowadays turnkey Linux solutions people dare to call "geeky", or finding someone who could do it for me.
And I say that as someone who loathes the mediocrity of most outsourcing efforts (Google, I'm lo
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whereas the guys at Tuffmail seem to find it interesting enough to do it even better than I did.
Not to mention the fact that effectively fighting spam as well as the big guys (Google, Postini, Tuffmail, Fastmail, etc) is a complete PITA.
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Not correct. I had much better spam fighting than them.
Setting it up, is pretty hard. But there is a really great and complete HOWTO on the Gentoo Wiki (something with “complete” and “mail” in the title).
But when you are done with that, it just works. :)
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Out of interest, what are the great tech buyouts that have worked int he last 15 years? What are the top 5 synergy-tastic deals and where are they now?
I can think of quite a few actually.
Of the top of my head, Google's purchase of YouTube ended up working out very well. I honestly think that without Google's support, YouTube would have died by now (or at least be a few orders of magnitude smaller entity).
Another one I can think of is IBM's purchase of OTI, which led to VisualAge then to Eclipse, which is now used as the platform for just about every IBM software product, from Lotus Notes to WebSphere.
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Do not transfer = Cancel (Score:5, Informative)
What if I don’t want Opera to take over my account?
Go to http://www.fastmail.fm/ [fastmail.fm] login to your account, then go to the Options -> Cancel Account screen and enter your password to confirm you want to cancel your account.
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The submitter was trying to incite opt-out anger.
users who wish to not transfer their accounts over to Opera have to go into settings and indicate just that.
Notice that not is in italics and "have to". The submitter wants to imply that fastmail is forcing users to opt-out of something new that they are doing, rather than just saying that Opera is going to be the new boss, and if you don't want to use a service run by Opera, you can cancel your account.
Fastmail had stopped investing. (Score:4, Informative)
Fastmail has served me very well over the years, but a couple of years ago they stopped making improvements and adding new features.
I wondered whether they decided that they wouldn't ever be able to compete with stuff like gmail and so they decided to stop investing and just milk it for whatever revenue they could get. This wasn't a terrible thing, mind you - the service kept working very well, but it did fall further and further behind. Gmail, in particular, is now offering a better service for free, so I doubt that fastmail was getting many new subscribers.
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Fastmail does everything I could want it to do. All you really need out of an email provider is standards compliance. Any bells and whistles you need are provided by the client.
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I agree. One of Fastmail's big draws was its lightweight, fast-loading, reasonable web interface. Sadly, that interface has stagnated and is barely keeping up.
I don't do local e-mail clients anymore (other than my smartphone). For any desktop e-mail needs, it's the web browser. So a lot of the value is in the web browser.
For example, Gmail had autosave way-way before Fastmail (to protect against browser crashes). Fastmail, as a commerical e-mail provider, should've been jumping on copying that, to match the
Gmail's spam filtering better? (Score:2)
I've deliberately subscribed (also "unsubscribed") some FastMail aliases to some botnet spammers lists. I never got a single piece of spam on these addresses. Subscribing to same lists with other providers produces a steady flow of spam. This has nothing to do with Sieve because most spam never reaches this stage at FastMail. With my Gmail address I don't need to subscribe: the spam finds its way to that address, and there's lots of botnet spam getting into Gmail. True, it's getting into the junkmail "folde
Re:Fastmail had stopped investing. (Score:4, Informative)
I guess you haven't seen what's going on behind the scenes. We haven't been quite so public, but personally I've been doing a LOT of work improving the Cyrus imap server that we run on. It's stability and the reliability of the replication system has improved enormously over the past few years, and most of that has been due to FastMail investing time (mostly mine :) ) in not only working on Cyrus itself, but in the monitoring and introspection tools we use to make sure that the replicas are truly up-to-date.
We've almost fully rolled out UTF-8 support internally throughout our interface, which you'll notice if you have to deal with emails with more than one character set at any point. In the past we did everything in a user's default characterset, which was OK for most people but a pain for some.
And heaps of minor fixes that most people don't ever see :)
No, FastMail have kept improving their service (Score:2)
The FastMail team have an extraordinarily high level of clue. No wonder Opera got out their chequebook ...
Will have to wait and see... (Score:2)
I was just thinking about paying them for the excellent service I've had for free for the last 10 years. I've had a free account with them for that long, and have always been extremely happy. Never paid for an upgrade because I never needed it. I think I'll hold off now and see how Opera handles the takeover.
What will the future bring? (Score:2)
The acquisition FAQ says that they are excited to work on new webmail interfaces.
However, I just don't get that spirit of insight and innovation from the Opera team or the Fastmail team. I don't think they really have the chops to look past gmail and think about what the next best e-mail experience is. I feel that they will forever be constrained by the old-school thinking of the underlying protocols.
I cancelled my account a few months ago (Score:2)
I knew nothing about Opera acquiring them and there was nothing particularly wrong with fastmail.fm, but there was nothing particularly good about them either. I was hoping to get spam filtering good enough that I could have my phone alert me about new mail but even after months of training their spam filter it still let through far too much spam.
I have resorted to just leaving Thunderbird running on a desktop computer to delete spam and manually checking my phone when I feel like it instead of having it ch
Opera is a good company.. done webmail before (Score:3, Insightful)
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Operamail is is just rebranded Outblaze (which was bought by IBM recently).
I don't think Opera has much to do with the inner workings of it, although the interface did just get a revamp and all references to paid subscriptions were removed.
Maybe next they'll up the quota?
quick (Score:1)
Which country is home base now? (Score:2, Interesting)
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That would be me, hopefully :) Not forever, but for a while. Long enough for the kids to pick up a new language while they're still young and for me to learn all I can from the people there and teach them everything I know!