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Originally Posted by krimlin
Can you help me to understand this discussion?
I went to archive.org and had a look at those "member" plans. Are we talking about those 15 USD accounts with 16 MB (!) that are going to be canceled?
Although I wouldn't know what to do with 16 MB storage and I don't have Fastmail's statistics on the usage of these accounts, it would be obvious for me, that they can't cause a high server load. I assume that these accounts are just an additional "plan", like "enhanced" or "full" or the new ones like "standard" etc., so I don't really get the point of additional infrastructure needed to maintain them. Or why they would slow down innovation...|
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I do not think the issue with supporting the old Member accounts is hardware resources. I think it is the fact that, as far as possible, they want to limit functionality to that available when Member accounts were discontinued. Examples of these restrictions are no POP3, no support (the idea was that documentation and this forum would be the only assistance when things go wrong), very limited spam protection, limitations on usernames and numbers of aliases, smaller attachment sizes, enforcement of smaller quotas (for instance, hourly transfer and message volumes), and number of allowed Personalities (Identities). There are others. Individually, these are no big deal. However, cumulatively, they add substantially to special case paths in the code (both on the front and back ends).
I agree with those who feel that there was an (admittedly misguided) implied promise to support these Member accounts for as long as Fastmail remained in business. If there are only a few left, maybe upgrading much of their functionality is one way of reducing code complexity surrounding their support. However, I can see why Fastmail emotionally hates the idea of improving further a deal they feel is already unfairly tilted against Fastmail.