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Old 19 Jan 2017, 09:41 PM   #56
jchevali
Member
 
Join Date: May 2002
Location: London UK
Posts: 47
It occurred to me, maybe FM are discontinuing Member accounts in order to keep their options open to sell the company again.

Think about it: If they talk to someone interested in purchasing their business, it's different to say "We've got no Member accounts 'baggage', all of our user accounts are money-makers" than to say "We've got these many thousands Member accounts 'baggage', technically they don't cost us much, but they're an eyesore. So far we haven't been able to dissuade these folks to walk away, but we hope you will be able to, or that they won't disturb you much..."

I know if I was the prospective buyer which proposal would be easier to buy into.

Unfortunately it's not easy to split FM into a "good bank" and a "bad bank" (to borrow a term from financial services), because to let a spin-off walk away with Member accounts would mean they have to give away their code, which they won't do.

So strictly speaking what they should do is to turn Member accounts into Forwarding accounts, as someone has recommended, this way at least Members won't lose their address. Setting up a forwarding service costs no money! They could place limits on the number or size of email forwarded. They could even refuse letting members use SMTP, make them use their own ISP's (as long as the SPF policy would allow it). This way they wouldn't even be liable in the event of member abuse.

FastMail's a sorry move. I'm affected though I'm able to take remediation steps (I feel sorry for guys that don't). Now FM should try and engage in some damage limitation -- from a reputation point of view also (unless they'd like to sue EmailDiscussions to take these threads off so no one will know).
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