fastmail.fm

...When you first go to fastmail.fm the front page looks very professional. There are some positive quotes from companies like The Times and PC World at the top which is very reassuring. The information about the features and different account levels is there on the front page so you don't have to go hunting around for these details.

There are four levels of membership, these are:

Guest, which is free and this is what I ...
...MB of bandwidth per month. At this level the downside is that you have taglines on all emails you send and also adverts at the top of the webpage. These adverts are not troublesome and only load after the rest of the page has loaded so it won't slow you down. Your username has to have 7 or more characters and you can have a maximum of 100 entries in your address book, but each entry can list several email addresses etc. You can access your emails ... more

A couple of years ago I had finally gotten fed up with the amount of spam being sent to my Yahoo email account on a daily basis, and decided that it was time to change email addresses once again. I saw that some of my friends were using fastmail and decided to give it a go.

Fastmail is a web based email provider like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, but it also lets you access your emails from Outlook Express, Eudora etc. The basic level is free and is fine for most people, paid accounts get more storage space and additional features.

When you first go to fastmail.fm the front page looks very professional. There are some positive quotes from companies like The Times and PC World at the top which is very reassuring. The information about the features and different account levels is there on the front page so you don't have to go hunting around for these details.

There are four levels of membership, these are:

Guest, which is free and this is what I have. You get 10 MB of storage space and 40 MB of bandwidth per month. At this level the downside is that you have taglines on all emails you send and also adverts at the top of the webpage. These adverts are not troublesome and only load after the rest of the page has loaded so it won't slow you down. Your username has to have 7 or more characters and you can have a maximum of 100 entries in your address book, but each entry can list several email addresses etc. You can access your emails via the web, IMAP or WAP, but not POP3 or SMTP. At this level you do not get mail forwarding but you can retrieve emails from external POP3 (and some Hotmail) accounts so you can consolidate all your email in one place (but can retrieve from only 2 external accounts). You get basic virus scanning and spam protection. Commercial use is not allowed and if you don't login for more than 45 days your account will be closed.

Member, this costs a one off setup fee of US$14.95 and there is no annual fee. This gets you 16 MB of storage space and 80 MB of bandwidth per month. Usernames only need to be 5 characters in length, you can have 200 entries in your guestbook and you can retrieve emails from 4 external POP accounts. In addition to the features at Guest level you get SMTP for sending emails, advanced virus scanning, and mail forwarding. You also get your own sub domain (so anything sent to anything@username.fastmail.fm will get to you). You can also have one extra alias (same username at 1 additional domain). Commercial use is allowed and your account will be closed after 120 days of no login. With all the paid accounts you can purchase an extra 100 MB of storage for a one-time fee of £24.95.

Full, this costs US$19.95 per year. For this you get 600 MB of storage space and 300 MB of bw/month (+600 MB on signup). You can have usernames with only 4 characters, can have up to 1000 address book entries and can retrieve emails from up to 10 external POP accounts. In addition to the features at Member level you get personal technical support rather than automated, can access your emails via POP3, and you get advanced spam protection. You also can have 6 regular (5+ chars) and 1 short (2+ chars) aliases to help keep your personal and work emails separate. Unlike Guest and Member levels your account is not closed after a period of inactivity (also long as you continue to pay the annual charge).

Enhanced, this is the top level and costs US$39.95 per year. For this you get 6 GB of storage space, 1 GB of bw/month (+2 GB on signup) and 1 GB of file space (your own web site). You can have usernames of only 3 characters, 10000 address book entries, and can retrieve email from 20 external POP accounts, and can have 30 regular and 3 short aliases. You also get priority technical support and can use your own domain name.

For most individuals guest level is sufficient, but if you send/receive lots of emails then upgrading to Member might be worth doing. I can't see the need for Full or Enhanced unless you are using it for commercial purposes or have a website.

On the front page there is a link to a very useful page that lets you compare membership levels at a glance. I can't tell you about my experience of signing up as it was so long ago, but I don't remember having any problems other than that it didn't like my password at first as it wasn't secure enough. This though is a good thing, and if someone does try to hack into your account fastmail displays a message on your mailbox page saying there has been a failed login attempt, and gives you the date, time and IP address, and this message stays there for 2 weeks.

I have guest level membership and you get 10MB of storage, I'm not sure how this compares with other providers. If like me you keep every email you ever receive/send then 10MB gets used up eventually. I also use my account to transfer files between computers. So every so often, mainly when I want to send/receive a large attachment or transfer files, I have to do purge and delete old emails to remain under the 10MB (I generally have between 7 - 8 MB). This does however force me to clear out my inbox every so often of emails that I don't need anymore, otherwise they would stay there forever! One good thing is that if you are sent an email that sends you over your 10MB limit, you do receive it but can then no longer send or receive emails until you are back under. I'm not 100% sure but I don't think fastmail automatically deletes your oldest emails if you do go over. Also once you reach 90% of your storage allowance you get messages warning you so you can do something about it before you reach your limit. You can upgrade your account to get more storage if you want but I haven't as for the majority of the time 10MB is enough.

Fastmail allows you to customise your account in Account Preferences from the Options tab. You can change your background and screen size, set your time zone and set your email preferences. I think you can upload any picture to be your background which is a nice feature.

To read an email in your inbox you click on the 'Subject' not the 'From' address. If you do click on the 'From' address it will take you to the compose page to send an email to that address. This is frustrating at first until you get used to it. From the mailbox page you can do the standard things such as mark emails as read/unread, forward, delete etc but you can also report the message as spam/not spam, bounce the message back to the sender, and save the address of the sender. When you send an email or reply to one it automatically asks if you want to save the address, which is very useful.

When sending an email fastmail lets you format it. You can change the font type (choice of 8), size, use bold, italics, underline or strikethrough your text. You can change the colour of the text and background and insert web links and pictures. You can even use subscript and superscript and there is an undo button. Adding attachments is very easy.

One feature that is available at guest level is that you can have 2 personalities. This is what fastmail says about personalities: 'A personality defines a combination of From-address, Sent Items-folder and Signature. For instance if you have a home email address, and a work alias you use, you can create two different personalities so you can send mail from either address, and also file the emails into separate Sent Items folders and put different signatures on the outgoing messages.' You can access external POP and Hotmail accounts to retrieve emails to your account, so you can set up a personality for that external account and send messages from fastmail that look like they are from that external account.
You also get a notepad and you can store up to 1MB of files as a guest.

The only issue I have with my account is that once or twice when I have tried to sign up for something on the internet I've had the website tell me that my email address is not valid, probably due to the .fm at the end. You can choose when you sign up what domain name you would like (what you want after the @) from a list of options and @fastmail.co.uk would solve this problem.

To sum up it's the best email account I've had (have tried loads e.g. Lycos, yahoo, hotmail, excite, googlemail). I have had very few problems with it and it does what it says, mail is sent fast, pretty much instantly. I have never had any problems with spam unlike other email accounts I've had. I like the uncluttered layout, and it is easy to use. You do get ads at the top of the screen but they are not intrusive unlike some providers. I use firefox and have had no problems with compatibility. I would definitely recommend fastmail to anyone. 

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