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Old 20 Jan 2017, 03:20 AM   #63
neoforum
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 24
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its not something that will have a huge impact on your life should it disappear. If it really means that much to you, cough up.
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Assuming they use a Basic account for a year (which will cost them nothing extra), they have over 18 months in which to inform their correspondents of their new email address.
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Yes, changing your email address is a bit of a pain, but with plenty of notice not a catastrophe.
You people think it's just a small inconvenience that shouldn't feel like extortion? Show me: you can either volunteer to stop using your own primary personal email address forever after July 2018, or else you can send me $30/year for life by paypal to keep it. Neither of these will have a huge impact on your life, right? If you want to keep your addresses, they're only $30/year. Cough up yourself. (But remember, this year you can send that $30 to my fastmail address, but soon I'll have to get a new gmail address, so if it's not too much trouble, I hope you'll make a note to send my money to that other address next year. I'm sure it will be as easy for you to remember the change as it will be for all my friends and family, and it's important to me because otherwise I might not get your $30 next year. Maybe I'll use your money to keep my wife's fastmail address alive. Thanks in advance!)

Oh, you *like* that email address that's been your online identity for years? Oh, you're getting elderly and you have dementia and you won't be able to remember a new one? Oh, you *like* fastmail's service that they promised they'd support for your lifetime? Oh, you don't want your old high school friends who you haven't seen in 15 years to get a bounce message if they move back to town 5 years from now and try to write you at that email address you've been using for over a decade? No biggie! You can just send me $30/year forever per address you don't want to change.

Seriously, BritTim, walesrob, et al, would it really just be a minor pain for you to change your primary email address? Or alternately, would you really have no hesitation to pay $30/year per account forever for something you had already bought (instead of using a free alternative) *precisely because* it would be yours for life for a one-time payment? If so, you probably aren't hurting for money and you might try to imagine what it's like for people who aren't as flush as yourself.

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the old Member service, while fine 15 years ago, is scarcely a viable service today.
I guess that's why they're not offering it today. Fifteen years ago, they freely chose to offer that, so for those customers, that is what they need to provide. Fortunately, according to fastmail themselves, the vast majority of their users are already on recurring paid plans, which means keeping their promises to their early users would have almost no impact on their revenue, especially since Member accounts are already "no support."

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I believe you get what you pay for, and I consider e-mail far too important to me to not pay real money for it on a regular basis,
Yet somehow 99% of people are happy with free email services like gmail--and they probably will actually end up having addresses they can use for life. Now I wish I'd been able to sign up for gmail in 2002, but unfortunately it didn't exist yet.
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