Update to Terms of Service
 

From the blog:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/09/11/tos-update/

Thanks for the heads up. None of the changes appear to be substantive.

I'm no longer a FM customer, but my curiosity go the best of me and I read the new ToS. One clause caught my attention: FM reserves the right to terminate the account "if your account is inactive for an extended period of time".

That's a bit rich for paid accounts, isn't it?

Yes I would say so....If someone is paying them EVERY MONTH who cares how long they dont check it??

As a practical matter, I cannot see FastMail deciding to say "please stop giving us money" in any practical situations. The old ToC encompassed this anyway, it was just not listed separately.

The termination by inactivity clause is worse than "please stop giving us money". It means "you gave us money, now get lost".

That clause may be in there so that if you are doing something illegal in or with your account it can be closed.

The inactivity clause is in the old TOS also. My guess it's there in case of pathological behavior by a few users.

Bill

I would assume that sending in payments counts as "activity."

If the account is inactive, it is difficult to see what illegal activity might be going on associated with the account.

If the account is set up for automatic renewal, that is not necessarily the case. As I indicated above, though, I think it is academic unless FastMail decides it wants to withdraw a product (in our case the main FastMail service) altogether.

Here's the actual clause. It appears to be rather open ended. In defense of FM, I strongly suspect that their terms are similar to many others, since these tend to be vetted by lawyers. Read some of the terms on some free services and you might be surprised what is there.

I did not mention an inactive account.

Who cares if someone WHO IS PAYING THEM doesnt log in for a year???

This is the most bizarre thing I have ever heard!!

Why do they care as long as they are getting $$$$$$$$$$??

:confused:

I am sorry if you think I was implying you were. Almost all the posts in this thread revolve around termination due to inactivity. I though you were continuing that discussion with the point that inactive accounts might need to be terminated if they were involved in illegal activity. Apparently, you were referring to a different part of the ToC, and I am sorry. To avoid confusion, if I might make a suggestion, it would be good to quote the clause you are commenting on in similar situations in the future.

On most email servers this only applies to FREE accounts as if they arent checked it looks like they were abandonend....... But FM got rid of thier free accounts so they shouldnt care........

My understanding is that one of the purposes of updating the TOS was to bring ALL of FastMail's services into alignment... so I wouldn't worry much about them including that statement in there (at least not yet), since firstly, it is a pretty normal thing to include in a TOS, and more importantly, since this also applies to FastMail's subsidiaries, Topicbox, Pobox, Listbox, all of which may or may not offer free accounts in the future, and might still have free accounts from the past. So IMO they are just covering their bases of what was and may be. In fact, even FM itself might want to launch another service with free accounts, etc... who really knows?

FM is clearly branching out with several acquisitions of small services, so they might have big plans in the future and this is a harbinger of things to come.

And for all we know, FastMail itself might STILL have a small group of another class of freebie accounts that they gave out for other reasons in the past that have never been publicly promoted, that are just sitting around doing nothing right now. So who knows for sure, but the inclusion of that statement doesn't worry me at this stage for paying customers.

And BTW, I do agree that it would be ridiculous for FM to cancel a paid account for lack of logins, and I don't believe FM would be that dumb. They've made plenty of mistakes, but that would be insane.