6 ms·

What they have to launch is a cheaper service. Their prices are laughable, although I can understand that, given they have no competition.

brongondwana 9y ago
We're not interested in a race to the bottom. We provide a high quality service and we charge enough to provide that service. We're clear about our values: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.
- nanoniano 9y ago
  I disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Not only does FastMail have a lot of competition, they have a lot of cheap competition. Bear in mind, they not only have to beat companies like Slack here which offer their service free to a certain extent, but old mailing list classics like Google Groups as well.
  - calcifer 9y ago
    Really? $0.1 per day ($0.16 w/ custom domain) for high quality, privacy oriented email is a high price? I would gladly pay quadruple that if I had to.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - fbnlsr 9y ago
      My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. I was fortunate enough to get a Google Apps account back when it was a free service, and I have been providing all the Google services for me and all my family for free for several years. Fastmail looks absolutely incredible and I've never heard the slightest bad thing about them, but it'd cost me $250/month to get the same level of service I get now for free. :/
      - calcifer 9y ago
        > My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. That's exactly the reason I migrated to Fastmail. Ever since Google shutdown Reader, I've been slowly replacing Google services with alternatives as much as I can. Gmail -> Fastmail Calendar -> Fastmail Reader -> Self-hosted Commafeed Drive -> Self-hosted Nextcloud etc.
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    As others have already noted (and I should stop reading this and go to bed, it's after midnight here and I have to work in the morning!) we have plenty of competition, and it's either plastered with ads or similarly priced, because that's what it costs to run a service while giving your staff a decent living and continuing to improve your service over time. As I said here: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/ ... one of the most common questions was "aren't you worried about giving away all your secrets?" Actually, we really are not. Running an email service is hard work, and providing the speed, reliability and stream of new features would not be easy to replicate. So we're happy to share our stories... We contribute a lot to open source, and we're doing a lot in the standards space now to make sure email remains open. Topicbox is built on top of a draft of the JMAP protocol which is currently being worked on at the IETF, and will be updated to follow the standard. We have staff going to CalConnect to work on calendaring standards in a couple of weeks because we're investing in advancing the field as well. That also costs money, and we're self funded, so we can't afford to sell email accounts at a loss. It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. It's a simple business proposition, money for service. I'm proud to charge money for what we do.
    - kop316 9y ago
      As a new customer of Fastmail, that was the exact reason I went to you. I like that Fastmail cares about my privacy and doesn't track me, fully supports open standards, interoperates with other services seamlessly (so I can decide what features I want and do not want to use) and I can fully download and delete my data if I want to. It is well worth the premium, please keep up what you do!
    - josteink 9y ago
      > It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. As an actual, paying customer I just want to express just how much I appreciate that someone is actually doing this. The internet has lots of creepy companies spying on your every move. Actually paying for a service and knowing that there's nobody looking over your shoulder feels really good. I wish there were more companies like that.
  - sleepyhead 9y ago
    Yeah if only someone else would launch an email service!
- exfmcustomer 9y ago
  You provide high quality service when it works. When customer support is needed, not so much.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Are you localized in regional datacenters yet such as SGP? Not so much a problem on the web combined with a CDN, but old school IMAP can be quite chatty, combined with high RTT latency, it becomes quite noticeable.
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    Good morning from Melbourne. I myself am not localised in datacentres all around the world, so I had to sleep. That's why we're working on JMAP! Localising comes with a ton of downsides, including the fact that of the 3 other datacentres we've installed into, none have been anywhere near the quality of services that we've had from NYI over the years. https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ (and yes I see another comment in this thread that I'll reply to in a second about a 1 hour network outage we had... it's the biggest outage we've had in years. Our other datacentres have had much bigger downtimes during that period) Particularly with the increase in mobile clients that change networks regularly, we don't see a future in old school IMAP as the preferred way to access email. Please check out the JMAP working group for what we see as the future :) https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ So we prefer to consolidate in a few high-quality datacentres and build protocols which work well from anywhere in the world.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Is there followup post-mortems to incidents like this which is over a month ago? [Fastmail] Services have been restored. The problem was a a network peering issue, leading to our services being unavailable to parts of the internet. We're working with our network provider to understand what happened and what improvements we can make in the future. Thank you for your patience. An 1hr15mins of connectivity issues is quite significant imo. Wary after the Imgix several hours of 500/504 disaster and still no technical post-mortem..
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    Hmm... this is the Aug 5th incident right? Here's the post-mortem from NYI: "On Saturday, August 5, 2017, there was scheduled maintenance period on a core switch in our NYC Datacenter Facility that was scheduled from 10:30PM - 2AM. Customers that were directly connected to this switch were notified that there would be a service impacting maintenance but there was no expected impact beyond these specific connections. For some time during this maintenance, traffic from some upstream peers, including Cogent and the NYIIX Peering Exchange, experienced increased latency and intermittent loss of connectivity, due to a misconfiguration that did not effectively re-converge this traffic to other upstream providers. This incident started at approximately 11:30PM and was resolved by 12:30AM. We have resolved the root cause of the issue, added additional monitoring and updated our notification procedures to ensure that all customers are notified in the future for such maintenance windows, even when there is no expected service impact. We are also upgrading our notification systems and customers will be contacted in the near future to confirm the contacts listed on the account to ensure that all such notifications are properly received." This is the first time I've seen them mess something like this up in a very long time, and they're really good about fixing their proceedures afterwards. We've been offline for similar lengths of time during the nasty run of DDOS attacks on providers a couple of years ago, but having upgraded to Fibre to the rack, 10G drops to the external bladecentres and DDOS protection services on our public IP range plus hidden private ranges for our backhaul services, we have successfully mitigated all the driveby attacks since. ... that and we haven't been a target for a bit (touch wood) - though we will write up something the DNS attacks at some point, they were a bit spectacular. Went from 200 req/sec to 100,000 req/sec for random hostnames on our servers. The engineering challenges to cope with that while still providing our powerful custom DNS options are quite interesting in retrospect. Not so much at the time!
lettergram 9y ago
IMO it's not unreasonable. <$400 / month for 200 employees seems fair, especially given their standard email service is $3 / month / user. It's also for Enterprise, which typically has a higher price tag.
- nanoniano 9y ago
  I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)
  - tcfunk 9y ago
    You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email. BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
      - tcfunk 9y ago
        Never heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.
        ams6110 9y ago
        They (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?
interfixus 9y ago
Fastmail has plenty of competition. Some of it with markedly lower prices, but one of it with a comparable quality and smoothness of operation. Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.
- geomark 9y ago
  How is fastmail's spam filtering? I've been using Zoho mail for a while and like it except their spam filtering is quite poor.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    Re: Zoho, when things go wrong expect days of issues and no real replies, but green status pages due to old school sharding behind the scenes (only small number of customers effected so well stay green, I.e. no mail for three days). Premium customer? Call their support number, yep a voicemail, a callback? not within 24hrs. Terrible company. Sloppy products. Dont ever recommend this to clients, even if the client is a cheapstake and 5 free accounts appeals just say 'not on my name'
    - ams6110 9y ago
      I wanted to try Zoho about a year ago, but couldn't even get through their sign-up process without errors that prevented completion. Never went back. First impressions and all.
    - bauerd 9y ago
      Zoho Mail? Don't even get me started … We had so many laughable problems with that service. Like being unable to remove a user account because the whole management UI was just plain broken. We tried removing the account for I don't know how many months. When I let them know about the issue I got a response asking for a scan of the CEO's ID card. Finally they fixed it but then the login broke. When I tried logging in to the management UI, all I got was a redirect back to the login screen. Hell I could go on. Moved everything off to AWS WorkMail and learned my lesson.

brongondwana 9y ago

We're not interested in a race to the bottom. We provide a high quality service and we charge enough to provide that service. We're clear about our values: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/ and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.

nanoniano 9y ago
I disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Not only does FastMail have a lot of competition, they have a lot of cheap competition. Bear in mind, they not only have to beat companies like Slack here which offer their service free to a certain extent, but old mailing list classics like Google Groups as well.
- calcifer 9y ago
  Really? $0.1 per day ($0.16 w/ custom domain) for high quality, privacy oriented email is a high price? I would gladly pay quadruple that if I had to.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - fbnlsr 9y ago
    My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. I was fortunate enough to get a Google Apps account back when it was a free service, and I have been providing all the Google services for me and all my family for free for several years. Fastmail looks absolutely incredible and I've never heard the slightest bad thing about them, but it'd cost me $250/month to get the same level of service I get now for free. :/
    - calcifer 9y ago
      > My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. That's exactly the reason I migrated to Fastmail. Ever since Google shutdown Reader, I've been slowly replacing Google services with alternatives as much as I can. Gmail -> Fastmail Calendar -> Fastmail Reader -> Self-hosted Commafeed Drive -> Self-hosted Nextcloud etc.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  As others have already noted (and I should stop reading this and go to bed, it's after midnight here and I have to work in the morning!) we have plenty of competition, and it's either plastered with ads or similarly priced, because that's what it costs to run a service while giving your staff a decent living and continuing to improve your service over time. As I said here: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/ ... one of the most common questions was "aren't you worried about giving away all your secrets?" Actually, we really are not. Running an email service is hard work, and providing the speed, reliability and stream of new features would not be easy to replicate. So we're happy to share our stories... We contribute a lot to open source, and we're doing a lot in the standards space now to make sure email remains open. Topicbox is built on top of a draft of the JMAP protocol which is currently being worked on at the IETF, and will be updated to follow the standard. We have staff going to CalConnect to work on calendaring standards in a couple of weeks because we're investing in advancing the field as well. That also costs money, and we're self funded, so we can't afford to sell email accounts at a loss. It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. It's a simple business proposition, money for service. I'm proud to charge money for what we do.
  - kop316 9y ago
    As a new customer of Fastmail, that was the exact reason I went to you. I like that Fastmail cares about my privacy and doesn't track me, fully supports open standards, interoperates with other services seamlessly (so I can decide what features I want and do not want to use) and I can fully download and delete my data if I want to. It is well worth the premium, please keep up what you do!
  - josteink 9y ago
    > It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. As an actual, paying customer I just want to express just how much I appreciate that someone is actually doing this. The internet has lots of creepy companies spying on your every move. Actually paying for a service and knowing that there's nobody looking over your shoulder feels really good. I wish there were more companies like that.
- sleepyhead 9y ago
  Yeah if only someone else would launch an email service!
exfmcustomer 9y ago
You provide high quality service when it works. When customer support is needed, not so much.
sitepodmatt 9y ago
Are you localized in regional datacenters yet such as SGP? Not so much a problem on the web combined with a CDN, but old school IMAP can be quite chatty, combined with high RTT latency, it becomes quite noticeable.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Good morning from Melbourne. I myself am not localised in datacentres all around the world, so I had to sleep. That's why we're working on JMAP! Localising comes with a ton of downsides, including the fact that of the 3 other datacentres we've installed into, none have been anywhere near the quality of services that we've had from NYI over the years. https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ (and yes I see another comment in this thread that I'll reply to in a second about a 1 hour network outage we had... it's the biggest outage we've had in years. Our other datacentres have had much bigger downtimes during that period) Particularly with the increase in mobile clients that change networks regularly, we don't see a future in old school IMAP as the preferred way to access email. Please check out the JMAP working group for what we see as the future :) https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/ So we prefer to consolidate in a few high-quality datacentres and build protocols which work well from anywhere in the world.
sitepodmatt 9y ago
Is there followup post-mortems to incidents like this which is over a month ago? [Fastmail] Services have been restored. The problem was a a network peering issue, leading to our services being unavailable to parts of the internet. We're working with our network provider to understand what happened and what improvements we can make in the future. Thank you for your patience. An 1hr15mins of connectivity issues is quite significant imo. Wary after the Imgix several hours of 500/504 disaster and still no technical post-mortem..
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Hmm... this is the Aug 5th incident right? Here's the post-mortem from NYI: "On Saturday, August 5, 2017, there was scheduled maintenance period on a core switch in our NYC Datacenter Facility that was scheduled from 10:30PM - 2AM. Customers that were directly connected to this switch were notified that there would be a service impacting maintenance but there was no expected impact beyond these specific connections. For some time during this maintenance, traffic from some upstream peers, including Cogent and the NYIIX Peering Exchange, experienced increased latency and intermittent loss of connectivity, due to a misconfiguration that did not effectively re-converge this traffic to other upstream providers. This incident started at approximately 11:30PM and was resolved by 12:30AM. We have resolved the root cause of the issue, added additional monitoring and updated our notification procedures to ensure that all customers are notified in the future for such maintenance windows, even when there is no expected service impact. We are also upgrading our notification systems and customers will be contacted in the near future to confirm the contacts listed on the account to ensure that all such notifications are properly received." This is the first time I've seen them mess something like this up in a very long time, and they're really good about fixing their proceedures afterwards. We've been offline for similar lengths of time during the nasty run of DDOS attacks on providers a couple of years ago, but having upgraded to Fibre to the rack, 10G drops to the external bladecentres and DDOS protection services on our public IP range plus hidden private ranges for our backhaul services, we have successfully mitigated all the driveby attacks since. ... that and we haven't been a target for a bit (touch wood) - though we will write up something the DNS attacks at some point, they were a bit spectacular. Went from 200 req/sec to 100,000 req/sec for random hostnames on our servers. The engineering challenges to cope with that while still providing our powerful custom DNS options are quite interesting in retrospect. Not so much at the time!

lettergram 9y ago

IMO it's not unreasonable. <$400 / month for 200 employees seems fair, especially given their standard email service is $3 / month / user. It's also for Enterprise, which typically has a higher price tag.

nanoniano 9y ago
I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)
- tcfunk 9y ago
  You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email. BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
    - tcfunk 9y ago
      Never heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        They (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?

interfixus 9y ago

Fastmail has plenty of competition. Some of it with markedly lower prices, but one of it with a comparable quality and smoothness of operation. Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.

geomark 9y ago
How is fastmail's spam filtering? I've been using Zoho mail for a while and like it except their spam filtering is quite poor.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Re: Zoho, when things go wrong expect days of issues and no real replies, but green status pages due to old school sharding behind the scenes (only small number of customers effected so well stay green, I.e. no mail for three days). Premium customer? Call their support number, yep a voicemail, a callback? not within 24hrs. Terrible company. Sloppy products. Dont ever recommend this to clients, even if the client is a cheapstake and 5 free accounts appeals just say 'not on my name'
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I wanted to try Zoho about a year ago, but couldn't even get through their sign-up process without errors that prevented completion. Never went back. First impressions and all.
  - bauerd 9y ago
    Zoho Mail? Don't even get me started … We had so many laughable problems with that service. Like being unable to remove a user account because the whole management UI was just plain broken. We tried removing the account for I don't know how many months. When I let them know about the issue I got a response asking for a scan of the CEO's ID card. Finally they fixed it but then the login broke. When I tried logging in to the management UI, all I got was a redirect back to the login screen. Hell I could go on. Moved everything off to AWS WorkMail and learned my lesson.