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Email is a highly competitive market with a low barrier to entry and thousands of companies offering similar services. It is nothing like hardware, so your comp

Email is a highly competitive market with a low barrier to entry and thousands of companies offering similar services. It is nothing like hardware, so your comparison is bizarre. By the way, I was asking for the point of view of an expert. If you are not an expert on email services, then I have no interest in hearing you speak condescendingly to me.

ggm 8y ago
Once you add the words like Gmail or replace Gmail or instead of Gmail then no, it's not thousands of companies offering similar services. Running a service in Port 457 is the least of the offerings. It has to have spam detection as good as Postini, sieve, IMAP, utf-8 support, tls certificate management, a web portal, DNS and related domain management. The killer is five nines availability. That's pricey. I used to run mailsystems and maintain mailsystems code in the 1980s. I don't do it now because it has too many moving parts. I got a grandfathered domain into hosted by Google and it's worth a damn sight more than the apparent market force bottom price. Hardware or software or service your competitors have to be comparable or at least bearable to apply price pressure. I do not judge fastmail as price competitive because they (like apple) are competing in quality. Not price.
- charmides 8y ago
  Thank you for the insight.
michaelt 8y ago
So, there are two separate-but-related products here. The first is e-mail. The second is an extremely hard-to-validate promise of future work, such that (a) cutting-edge security and privacy protections are maintained; (b) properly designed regular backups and redundant infrastructure ensure your e-mails won't be lost; (c) staff ethics, training and oversight will protect against insider threats; (d) protection against spam and phishing will be effective - but will not block legitimate e-mails; (e) e-mails you send will get delivered and not marked as spam or silently discarded, even when sending to the likes of gmail; (f) no e-mails sent to you will be silently discarded or otherwise lost; (g) if issues do arise, that they will respond promptly and competently; and (h) as webmail technology advances and market conditions change, they will keep up-to-date and stay in business. There's no way for me to validate most of these things. Instead, we rely on a supplier's "reputation" - an amalgamation of their past performance, their visibility and their marketing. There are many e-mail providers. There aren't many e-mail providers widely known as reputable. In other words, Fastmail doesn't face much price competition within the market of "e-mail services recommended by users of Hacker News" even if they do within the market of e-mail services generically.

ggm 8y ago

Once you add the words like Gmail or replace Gmail or instead of Gmail then no, it's not thousands of companies offering similar services. Running a service in Port 457 is the least of the offerings. It has to have spam detection as good as Postini, sieve, IMAP, utf-8 support, tls certificate management, a web portal, DNS and related domain management. The killer is five nines availability. That's pricey. I used to run mailsystems and maintain mailsystems code in the 1980s. I don't do it now because it has too many moving parts. I got a grandfathered domain into hosted by Google and it's worth a damn sight more than the apparent market force bottom price. Hardware or software or service your competitors have to be comparable or at least bearable to apply price pressure. I do not judge fastmail as price competitive because they (like apple) are competing in quality. Not price.

charmides 8y ago
Thank you for the insight.

michaelt 8y ago

So, there are two separate-but-related products here. The first is e-mail. The second is an extremely hard-to-validate promise of future work, such that (a) cutting-edge security and privacy protections are maintained; (b) properly designed regular backups and redundant infrastructure ensure your e-mails won't be lost; (c) staff ethics, training and oversight will protect against insider threats; (d) protection against spam and phishing will be effective - but will not block legitimate e-mails; (e) e-mails you send will get delivered and not marked as spam or silently discarded, even when sending to the likes of gmail; (f) no e-mails sent to you will be silently discarded or otherwise lost; (g) if issues do arise, that they will respond promptly and competently; and (h) as webmail technology advances and market conditions change, they will keep up-to-date and stay in business. There's no way for me to validate most of these things. Instead, we rely on a supplier's "reputation" - an amalgamation of their past performance, their visibility and their marketing. There are many e-mail providers. There aren't many e-mail providers widely known as reputable. In other words, Fastmail doesn't face much price competition within the market of "e-mail services recommended by users of Hacker News" even if they do within the market of e-mail services generically.