When you use FastMail.FM you will like it so much that you will tell your friends. And when you discover the power of the advanced features available to paying members, you may well decide to upgrade your account. By providing a great free service, and an even better paid service, everyone wins!
FastMail.FM is a small company of a few dedicated programmers; it isn't currently backed by any large company and is being funded by the programmers involved. This might worry you in this 'dot-bomb' era, but we think it's definitely advantageous.
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We have an extremely low overhead. We don't have any management layer, marketing department, office space (we work from home), etc. We use high quality, open source software that we have modified to suit our needs. Our main expense is server space and internet bandwidth. Thus we can break even with even a low number of paying users.
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We have strategies in place to deal with all aspects of spammers! Many other email services have been taken down by spammers who bombarded the service innternally, or used it to bombard people externally. We've put dozens of small and large strategies in place to stop both of these spam techniques, including: making automated signups harder, having message receive and transmit rate controls, relay blocking, common spam header blocking, and etc.
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We're not going for a 'grow huge, grow fast' strategy. We're looking for reasonably slow growth with good customers. We continually strive to provide a powerful, professional, niche service to people who are sick of under-featured, slow email services that claim to be 'free'. Remember, you always get what you pay for, and 'free' means that either advertisers are paying for your time, bandwidth and attention, or it's a loss leader for some other service they want you to buy. In our case, we provide a free account, but of course we'd like you to upgrade to a paid one eventually, or at least pay for membership. Even if you don't, we hope that you recommend us to your friends and relatives; maybe one of them is looking for a full email account, even with a small cost...
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We 'eat our own dog food', that is, we use FastMail.FM ourselves. This helps us understand what works and what doesn't on the web. Too many companies think they can translate a standard application interface to a web interface. They also waste time making things ultra pretty, rather than ultra fast and powerful.
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And finally, we're creating this site out of fun and enthusiasm, we enjoy doing it, we enjoy getting good ideas from people, we enjoy good feedback and thanks, we're trying to do our best, and create the best site possible. Of course all of this takes time, energy and patience. We have that, and we hope you enjoy the results!
We wanted a name that represents what we are all about: providing the fastest email service around. Unfortunately in the .com cyber-squatting world, all the names close to what we wanted were already taken, so we chose initially to avoid the .com address space and settled on .fm as something easy to remember as a shortening of "Fast Mail". For the interested, .fm is the top level domain of the Federated Republic of Micronesia (a federation of 4 states comprising more than 600 islands in the Pacific). None of our servers are located there however - we have standard servers and a high speed connection in the US.