FastMail

FastMail
Web address www.fastmail.com
Commercial? yes
Type of site
 Webmail, POP3, IMAP4
Registration required
Available in 36 languages
Owner FastMail Pty Ltd
Launched 1999 (1999)
Current status Online

FastMail is an email service offering paid email accounts for individuals and organizations which is available in 36 languages.[1] The company is FastMail Pty Ltd of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.[2] In 2010 the company was acquired by Opera Software. On September 26, 2013, FastMail announced that it had split from Opera and became a privately held independent company.[3] Its servers are located in New York City and Amsterdam, the previous backup location in Iceland is being replaced by the server location in Amsterdam.[4]

History

Fastmail was originally founded by Dr Bruce Davey and Jeremy Howard, to provide superior email service for customers of the Optimal Decisions Group.

The provider's sole product line is email services (and included accessories), but it was owned by Opera Software, (known best for its web browser) from 2010 to 2013.[5][6][7][8]

On October 18, 2012 it was announced that new signups for the free service level had been discontinued.[9] Existing free FastMail accounts would not be discontinued, but if a free account was deactivated because it was not logged into in over 120 days, it would not be reactivated. The company stated that they had decided to focus FastMail as a "premium brand" with only paid accounts.

When first established in 1999, the service was intended to differentiate itself through providing features that were not yet available from other market players. Early on, this included the ease and speed of email transport and access, personalities and IMAP[10] and SSL[11] support, and an independent public forum[12] and wiki among user support options. Over the years, these features became commonplace, but features such as WebDAV, secure LDAP, opportunistic inter-server encryption, reliability via minimization of single points of failure, and highly customizable filtering via Sieve are current differentiators, and other enhancements typically appear on pace with the market.

On October 23, 2014, FastMail moved their primary domain from fastmail.fm to fastmail.com.[13]

Features

FastMail offers 113 domains[14] which users can choose from. Also they offer hosting of external domains.[15]

Technology

The site developers are among the most active contributors to the widely used Cyrus IMAP open source software project[16] and include the lead developer and maintainer of Perl module Mail::IMAPTalk.[17] They are actively developing JMAP - a new open email protocol.[18]

YubiKey inserted into a USB port

FastMail offers paid email accounts for individuals and organizations, with varying service levels and prices. Their individual accounts currently offer a 30-day free trial period.

FastMail also provides for two-factor login using a YubiKey. While associating one or more YubiKeys with your FastMail account will not prevent normal logins, it does allow for logging onto your email account with just a YubiKey and its auto-generated one time passwords, making it suitable for accessing email on public machines.

See also

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, March 22, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.