Apologies for the long delay in getting this review up (especially since a few folks have been asking for it).
I’ve been using FastMail1 as my mail service for a little over 4 months now and I really regret not making the move sooner.
I decided to go with FastMail in part because they have been reliable as my SMTP gateway since 2003. This was a good decision.
The service has been fast and reliable. The available tools do what I need and work as expected. The web interface (while not designed for it), works fine in the BlackBerry 8700 browser.
There are several features they offer that have really made my life easier:
- Access on any port via their proxy server.
- SSL for checking and sending mail – one of those things never done on my own box because it’s a pain in the arse.
- Direct import from another IMAP account. I used this to do the initial migration to FastMail (~500mb of mail) and (though I was a little apprehensive about it) it worked exactly as expected.
- Additional bandwidth is given to you in your first month so that you can transfer in your existing mail without eating into your normal monthly transfer allotment. I’ve never come close to hitting my bandwidth limit and I’m a fairly heavy mail user.
- SpamAssasin filtering with direct sieve rule editing.
- Selective rule-based forwarding (I use this to choose what gets ushed to my BlackBerry).
- File storage feature – never thought I’d use this but a couple times it’s been very handy – mainly to access and print boarding passes I’ve saved as PDFs and to save attachements out of e-mails for various reasons.
I highly recommend outsourcing e-mail, and I highly recommend FastMail’s service for doing so. Life is just too short to waste time dealing with all the crap that comes along with running your own mail server. 🙂
UPDATE 2006-09-03: FastMail is currently having some trouble for some users – read more in the comments and on their status blog.
- That link has a referral ID in it for me to get some small credit if you sign up. [back]
How much space do they give you to store your mail?
Depends on the plan you choose.
Alex, can you give some insight as to how setting up your mail @ FastMail with your website elsewhere was done? Simple enough? Any DNS tricks involved?
I just forward it to my FastMail address, but they have FAQs on doing that stuff with DNS.
[…] One of the things I mentioned as a plus for FastMail1 is the great rule-based forwarding capabilities. You have the same thing on the BlackBerry side – you can choose what you want to receive and also mark certain things as high-priority and customize delivery accordingly. […]
Alex,
I was going to move my mail there at the beginning of the summer, but then they had some pretty bad downtime twice and didn’t. Thoughts?
I remember reading a little about that (Merlin @ 43 folders, etc.), but it never effected my SMTP access. Downtime happens – I thought they did a pretty good job communicating on their status blog etc. and still felt comfortable signing up. FWIW, I haven’t had any downtime I’ve noticed since I signed up.
I have been using FastMail about half the time that Alex has, but my results are the same.
If this is fastmail.fm were talking about, I think perhaps you should update your review. My mail server has been down for 3 days. FastMail keeps telling us they’re working on the problem, but my customers really don’t care why I don’t respond to their emails. Any decent IT shop would have had this problem handled in a maximum of 24 hours, yet I still have no email. Paying $19.95 a month, I had expected to receive better service than from gMail. I am very disappointed after several years of use.
I am a fastmail user and not only has my fastmail account has been out of action for 3 days and counting because of a disk failure on the server my account is stored on but it’s been troublesome 2 or 3 times in the past.
Yes, it looks like they’ve got themselves quite a mess. Luckily (for me), I seem to have been largely unaffected by this latest issue.
That’s a real shame.
AVOID FASTMAIL LIKE THE PLAGUE
I have been a PAID user of Fastmail for over 3 years, but recent troubles have me loking for alternative Email hosts.
Like alot of other PAID users my email has been out of service for now 4 DAYS.
Extremely unprofessional with no regular updates about how long the outage would last.
Try another IMAP service provider – Tuffmail etc.
Disgruntled Fastmail User
Fastmail has been a reliable and easy-to-use Webmail solution for years, but we wish they would still support POP3 instead of IMAP; and we really wish they’d come up with a way to swiftly and easily SAVE TO HARD DRIVE one’s entire accumulation of emails!
Other than forwarding emails (which is a slow process) to another mailbox that IS saved on one’s hard drive, or doing laborious cut-and-pastes, we cannot figure a way to SAVE TO HARD DRIVE the hundreds of emails sitting in our IN box.
Any ideas, folks?
Full and Enhanced FastMail accounts support POP3; Guest and Member accounts don’t.
You can use an IMAP mail client (e.g. Apple Mail) to copy (or move) messages from any IMAP mailbox (including the main INBOX) to local mailboxes on your hard drive (or to mailboxes in other IMAP accounts). A utility like fetchmail (preinstalled on OS X) is another way to copy/move messages from mailboxes on IMAP servers.
[…] King has a longer (albeit older) list of Fastmail […]
FastMail did indeed have a bit of a meltdown in 2006. They had a 3 day outage that affected a bunch of users.
Fortunately, they have been just about perfect since then. They learned what their weaknesses were and addressed almost all of them. They now have a wonderful failover system so that we never experience downtime. Over the past 2 years, I’ve had less than an hour of downtime.
FastMail should be commended for making it through a tough time in 2006, fixing it, and continuing to serve a wonderful product that lives up to its name.
They have so many features it takes too long to explain.