EmailDiscussions.com - View Single Post - FastCheck shutdown

spiderman · 6 Aug 2016, 11:08 PM

Hi all,

Indeed after all these years it is time to retire FastCheck! The FastServices API that FastCheck uses under the hoods has been discontinued and it would be quite a bit of work to rewrite that part of the code.
I originally wrote FastCheck for myself, and contacted the FastMail team after a while to see if they would be interested in hosting an API needed to work over firewalls and proxies, which were very common at the time. I am not sure how many users actually used FastCheck in total (FC never "phones home"), but I'm pretty amazed that people were still using it over 14 years after the first version! A couple of years ago, there was a small update in the FastServices API and at first I was thinking about retiring FC back then, but a lot of users actually asked for an updated version, so I uploaded a new version. But this time a lot more work would be needed. And given that the Internet has evolved a lot since then and the good alternatives now (Gmail Notifier Pro...), I think it makes sense to retire FastCheck now :-(.

Thanks a lot to the FastMail (and ex-FastMail) team for their support and the FastServices API, and for the FastMail community in general and FastCheck users in particular for all your support, feature suggestions...

I still use FastMail as my main account (since they were in early Beta) and I enjoy it more and more each day :-).

Eric

6 Aug 2016, 11:08 PM	#12
spiderman Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Cork, Ireland Posts: 802 Representative of: Fastcheck.org	FastCheck shutdown Hi all, Indeed after all these years it is time to retire FastCheck! The FastServices API that FastCheck uses under the hoods has been discontinued and it would be quite a bit of work to rewrite that part of the code. I originally wrote FastCheck for myself, and contacted the FastMail team after a while to see if they would be interested in hosting an API needed to work over firewalls and proxies, which were very common at the time. I am not sure how many users actually used FastCheck in total (FC never "phones home"), but I'm pretty amazed that people were still using it over 14 years after the first version! A couple of years ago, there was a small update in the FastServices API and at first I was thinking about retiring FC back then, but a lot of users actually asked for an updated version, so I uploaded a new version. But this time a lot more work would be needed. And given that the Internet has evolved a lot since then and the good alternatives now (Gmail Notifier Pro...), I think it makes sense to retire FastCheck now :-(. Thanks a lot to the FastMail (and ex-FastMail) team for their support and the FastServices API, and for the FastMail community in general and FastCheck users in particular for all your support, feature suggestions... I still use FastMail as my main account (since they were in early Beta) and I enjoy it more and more each day :-). Eric