FastMail Overview

FastMail - professional email

Paying for email - free vs. fee?

A comprehensive and well researched review of FastMail was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in late 2002. Many of the points made in that article struck a chord with this long time user of numerous "free" email services, so with high hopes and nothing to lose I visited the FastMail site and registered a free Guest account. The service quality and functionality were everything I had read about and more, and I cheerfully signed up for an Enhanced account within days.

Now why would anyone choose to part with $$$s for a specialist email service when every Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the planet bundles at least one "free" email address with each subscription, and Hotmail and Yahoo addresses are available at no charge? A good question which I hope to answer fully here.

Let's begin by looking at how you get your mail from your ISP. In the following examples I have assumed that your primary ISP address is 3bears@isp.net and that you have registered a domain called 3bears.com which is configured so that all mail addressed to your domain is rerouted to your primary ISP address.

ISP mail services use a protocol called POP for delivering messages to subscribers whereas FastMail uses a much more powerful and functional protocol call IMAP.

How POP mail delivery works

Incoming mail addressed to 3bears@isp.net is held in your private mailbox on your ISP's server. Some ISPs provide multiple addresses that share a single mailbox. For example, in addition to your primary address you might have three aliases; papabear@isp.net, mamabear@isp.net, and babybear@isp.net. Mail addressed to any of these identities would also be deposited in your 3bears@isp.net mailbox.
You use a mail client, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, etc., to download email messages from your ISP's server on to your local PC. A copy of each message is stored locally in your mail client's inbox and the original is deleted from the server unless you have specifically configured your mail client to leave it there. Before you can view an individual email item the whole message, including attachments, has to be downloaded.
With almost all mail clients, message filtering, e.g. to get rid of unwanted junk mail (aka SPAM), is only possible once messages, including attachments, have been fully downloaded. There are some tools available that allow you to preview headers and delete directly from the server. At the time of writing, the best of these is probably MailWasher but the free version of MailWasher is limited to one mail account and doesn't support Hotmail. Mailwasher Pro, which does support Hotmail and multiple POP accounts, currently costs US$30.

POP mail drawbacks

Because POP mail services are so ubiquitous it's easy to assume that their apparent popularity is based on features, quality, useability, reliability, etc. The reality is quite different. POP mail services are certainly popular with ISPs but that is because most of the onus rests with the subscriber rather than the service provider. Your ISP simply "passes the parcel" and it is your responsibility to continuously remove your mail from the server. ISPs can and do limit the size of your mailbox to encourage you to do this frequently.

Few ISPs provide virus checking at the server and many provide no SPAM filtering. Those that do frequently resort to sledgehammer tactics that are not in the best interest of their customers. I have personally had mail from a business contact deleted without explanation by my ISP on the basis that it was (supposedly) sent from a domain that appeared on a blacklist compiled by someone else. I was not warned or informed and neither was the sender. We only uncovered the problem when I phoned the company concerned to find out why they had not sent something I requested. How many other valid messages have simply disappeared without trace?

If you have a need to access your mail from more than one location, for example from home and work, then it would be good to have your mail stored on the Internet so you could access it from anywhere at any time. This runs 180 degrees counter to the POP strategy of downloading and deleting. It's true that you can set up your mail client at work to download and leave a copy on the server and at home to download and delete but this carries the risk that someone at home downloads and deletes before you get a chance to download at the office. It also means that you may download the same item twice. This can be a real waste of time when the item is large and you are using slow dial up links.

It is also a very annoying waste of time when someone sends you an email with a 5MB attachment that you have no interest in. Unfortunately, you have to download the whole thing, including the 5MB attachment, in order to find out that you didn't want it in the first place!

Other considerations

If you have your own domain then it's virtually certain that you are using your domain registrar's free mail rerouting service. Registrars like NameCheap, DirectNIC, GoDaddy, et al, are specialists in their field but they are not specialists in the field of mail delivery, so whilst their mail rerouting generally works well it does fail from time to time resulting in delivery delays.

FastMail benefits

The IMAP protocol used by FastMail was specifically designed to work efficiently with email messages and attachments and provide rich functionality to the end user. Here are just some of the many compelling benefits of FastMail.

All of your mail is stored on FastMail servers until you choose to delete it, and you access your messages at very high speed using any web browser from any PC, anywhere. You can also access your FastMail mailbox using a mail client, such as Outlook or Outlook Express, that supports IMAP.
IMAP treats messages and attachments separately. You do not have to open/download attachments before reading message text.
FastMail provides extremely powerful message filtering tools that can be used to delete / file / route / copy messages at the FastMail server. There is no need to download messages first, as is the case with POP.
FastMail filtering, in combination with a built-in SPAM recognition and rating system, gives you the means to eliminate all of those annoying unsolicited messages that sooner or later plague everyone's email account.
If you have your own domain you can use FastMail to manage your mail instead of taking any chances with your domain registrar's free mail forwarding service. FastMail is a professional mail service with a track record for reliable and timely mail delivery that is simply outstanding.
Virus checking is performed at the server.
FastMail provides an SMTP gateway for outbound messages so you don't have to rely on using an ISP's SMTP gateway. This is a very important benefit for anyone with a need to send mail while travelling - e.g. from Internet cafés or friends' PCs.
You can route copies of incoming mail to other mailboxes. You could, for example, send a copy of selected items to your ISP mailbox and/or your work mailbox and/or a 3rd party mailbox. Of course there is no need to do this because you can access your FastMail mailbox from any PC, anywhere, but you may still have reasons for wanting to do so.
You can automatically aggregate mail from POP3 and Hotmail/Yahoo accounts into FastMail. This is particularly useful for managing Hotmail accounts which inevitably seem to attract a phenomenal amount of SPAM, much of it of the adults-only variety. Using FastMail's powerful built-in filtering capability it is very easy to eliminate all the unwanted garbage and only retain genuine messages.
You can very easily maintain multiple identities for sending mail. For example, you might regularly want to send mail from papabear@isp.net, mamabear@isp.net, babybear@isp.net, 3bears@isp.net, and threebears@hotmail.com. With FastMail this is as simple as registering all of your regular "personalities" and then selecting any one of them from a dropdown list whenever you send a message.
You can easily send mail as appearing to come from anyone. Just use the hash symbol (#) as a separator between your addressee and the apparent sender. For example, in the "To" address field you could code the following...

To: unclebear@grizzly.com#nooneyouknow@nowhere.com

...and unclebear would receive the message as if it had come from nooneyouknow@nowhere.com which is a very handy way of sending an anonymous message!

For the owner of a domain there is the potential to send from fun personalities and throwaway identities. For example...

To:	unclebear@grizzly.com#yourfavouritenephew@3bears.com
To:	nephewbear@grizzly.com#unclepaddington@3bears.com
To:	register@honeypot.com#honeypot_registration@3bears.com

If you ever sign up for things on the Internet you run the risk that the address you provide becomes the target of SPAMmers. By providing a unique address, such as honeypot_registration@3bears.com, you know who is responsible if/when such SPAM arrives, and of course it's a breeze to set up a FastMail filtering rule to deal with any unwanted mail from a specific address.

FastMail Packages

FastMail offer a range of packages to suit all tastes and pockets.

A Guest account is free and comes with a generous 10MB of storage.
A Member account costs US$15 one-time for 16MB storage, SMTP, mail forwarding, and virus checking.
For US$20/year a Full account includes 600MB storage and adds 30MB of file storage (good for a web site), POP access, advanced SPAM filtering, and 6 aliases.
For US$40/year a top of the range Enhanced account includes a massive 2GB of storage, 5 aliases, and professional management of email for your private domain.

FastMail is very reliable and the quality of support is nothing short of outstanding. Click here to go to the FastMail site. You can register a free Guest account to start with and upgrade later. This is a good way to try before you buy. Not all features are available to guest accounts but you will certainly be able to get a good feel for the service capabilities before having to part with any $$$s.

Enjoy...

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Last updated: 30th July, 2006.