EmailDiscussions.com  

Go Back   EmailDiscussions.com > Email Service Provider-specific Forums > FastMail Forum
Register FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read
Stay in touch wirelessly

FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc.

Reply
 
Thread Tools
Old 19 Jan 2017, 03:24 PM   #46
Bamb0
Master of the @
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: USA
Posts: 1,861
Its good so many people are speaking out....... Sadly I dont think they care.. They have made up thier minds
Bamb0 is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 04:37 PM   #47
neoforum
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 24
Quote:
IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH ANY PORTION OF THE SERVICE, OR WITH ANY OF THESE TERMS OF USE, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USING THE SERVICE AND ITS RELATED WEB SITES.
I'm not dissatisfied with the service or the terms. In fact, one of the terms that I was satisfied with was the promise of a lifetime account. If they decide they don't want to provide the lifetime account they sold me, that's breaching my contract with them, not changing the terms..

Quote:
FastMail.FM may terminate your access to any part or all of the Service and any related service(s) at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, for any reason whatsoever.
So maybe technically they could choose to be evil and terminate my account for some made-up reason. Probably terms like this are there to allow them to get rid of users who mis-use the service by spamming people or whatever, without having to prove they were really sending spam. The fact that they could legally be jerks doesn't mean they should be.

I suppose you're right, and people who bought member accounts in good faith, thinking they would stand by their promise to support them for life, are simply screwed, and we must now choose whether to submit to fastmail's extortion in order to keep the email addresses we've been using for 15 years and assuming would always be ours. I still hope they might surprise me and decide to do the right thing for their earliest customers. It's not like there are enough of us that an extra few subscription dollars from us could make any noticeable difference to their profits.

Quote:
Member account upgrades:
  • Basic account: FREE for 1 year ($0.00/year)
  • Basic account: $12.50 for 2 years ($6.25/year)
  • Basic account: $25 for 3 years ($8.33/year)
If I live for another 50 years or so and pay every 3 years, my lifetime cost for fastmail is being jacked up from $15 per account to either $667 (if they continue offering us the oh-so-generous 50% discount going forward) or $1293 (if not).

Here's a question for all of you who think this is a good deal: would you have paid $667 in 2002 for a lifetime email address? I didn't think so. And if no one had paid for their lifetime email address offer in 2002, would fastmail still exist today? No, because then their revenue that year would have been $0, because all of their paid accounts then included the lifetime promise.

So fastmail owes their existence to their early customers, and now they're blackmailing us by making us pay more or else forcing us to go through all the headaches of changing our addresses.
neoforum is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 04:47 PM   #48
edu
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2016
Posts: 194
Incredible... very sad to read all this
edu is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 07:13 PM   #49
Mugwhamp
Cornerstone of the Community
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Manila
Posts: 509
Quote:
Originally Posted by neoforum View Post
now they're blackmailing us by making us pay more or else forcing us to go through all the headaches of changing our addresses.
Coffee spewed out of my nose on that one. The histrionic and hyperbolic expressions in this thread are entertaining if nothing else.
Mugwhamp is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 07:44 PM   #50
samhu
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 50
Extortion is perhaps more apt (courtesy Google)

ex·tor·tion
ikˈstôrSH(ə)n/
noun
noun: extortion; plural noun: extortions

The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

synonyms: blackmail, shakedown; formal - exaction.

Last edited by samhu : 20 Jan 2017 at 02:54 AM. Reason: typo (space missing)
samhu is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 08:07 PM   #51
walesrob
Essential Contributor
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: UK
Posts: 392
Quote:
Originally Posted by samhu View Post
ex·tor·tion
ikˈstôrSH(ə)n/
noun
noun: extortion; plural noun: extortions

The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

synonyms: blackmail, shakedown; formalexaction
Really? Fastmail are forcing you to pay? And Fastmail are committing extortion to get money from you?

Maybe a sense of perspective here, its only an email service, 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.

Mugwhamp got it right; some right divas on here.
walesrob is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 08:38 PM   #52
BritTim
The "e" in e-mail
 
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,084
I agree with those who believe those complaining about the canceling of Member accounts are overreacting.

Fastmail's actions may not be totally cool, However, those affected, should they now want to switch away from Fastmail,without paying Fastmail another cent, have plenty of time to react.. 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. Alternatively, Bron has indicated Fastmail's willingness to reimburse $15.00 (for the original $12.95 or $14.95 subscriptions) in which case they have received about 8-15 years of email service for free and still have over 6 months to arrange their migration.

Meanwhile, the old Member service, while fine 15 years ago, is scarcely a viable service today. Yes, changing your email address is a bit of a pain, but with plenty of notice not a catastrophe.
BritTim is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 08:46 PM   #53
samhu
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 50
Wild guess

Let me make a wild guess - those of you here who are so easily dismissing "US$14.95 one-time fee Members" grouses aren't in their shoes?
samhu is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 09:18 PM   #54
edu
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2016
Posts: 194
If you give someone your word then you must maintain it. In this case, I don't know if for example I pay a basic account now for a year, then in 6 months FM could say that the price has changed and now I must pay some more money for the other 6 months that I paid before or I must leave, etc. Think in other examples about Fastmail not maintaning its word. FM's word is something to trust, if they can't maintain that word then FM is not a company to trust. The rest are only excuses about the price, advantages, etc.
edu is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 09:21 PM   #55
Mugwhamp
Cornerstone of the Community
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Manila
Posts: 509
Quote:
Originally Posted by samhu View Post
Let me make a wild guess - those of you here who are so easily dismissing "US$14.95 one-time fee Members" grouses aren't in their shoes?
You're right. I pay $7/year for my own domain, and I've paid FM to host it since 2004. Recommended.
Mugwhamp is offline   Reply With Quote
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).
jchevali is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 19 Jan 2017, 09:58 PM   #57
BritTim
The "e" in e-mail
 
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,084
Quote:
Originally Posted by jchevali View Post
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..
An unchanging and unsupported forwarding service costs next to nothing. The problem, as I indicated in an earlier post in this thread, is the likely expectation people will have that they can always change the forwarding address (necessitating accounts, passwords and an interface for a forwarding screen) and, most importantly, support. Forwarding already breaks in some cases, and will undoubtedly do so more in the future. In general, this breakage is outside Fastmail's control, but that will not stop people insisting on time consuming research by support to identify the cause, and advise on where to go to get it fixed. Rather than saddle themselves with that, it might even be cheaper for Fastmail to upgrade the current no-support Member accounts to no-support Basic accounts.
BritTim is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 20 Jan 2017, 12:21 AM   #58
jhollington
Essential Contributor
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 371
Quote:
Originally Posted by samhu View Post
Let me make a wild guess - those of you here who are so easily dismissing "US$14.95 one-time fee Members" grouses aren't in their shoes?
True enough, but I think it's safe to say a lot of us probably wouldn't have had this expectation in the first place, which is also probably why it's so easy to dismiss it.

The problem is there's a huge philosophical gulf between the group of happily-paying annual FastMail members and the legacy "Member" users, and it's probably difficult to bridge that gap between those who feel that an e-mail address and account borders on being a basic right and those who feel that anything important is worth paying to get done properly. I'm not even saying that one philosophy is more correct than the other — merely that it's hard for one side to really understand where the other is coming from.

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, as well as to have it set up in such a way that I'm not beholden to any one provider, regardless of how much money I'm giving them. I registered my own domain name back in 1998 — almost 20 years ago — to use as my primary email address. I've used at least a dozen different email providers in that time frame, and even gone back and forth between some a few times, but my address has never changed, and any policy changes by any one provider or another has never been anything more than a minor inconvenience.

Of course, I don't expect everybody to think the way I did, and as I've expressed earlier in this thread, I really do sympathize with those folks who feel that FastMail made them a promise of a lifetime e-mail account back in 2002, however I can also see FastMail's perspective on this as well — I think there's a middle ground here to understand that 15 years is a lifetime in "Internet time" and things do change, and of course the very fact that FastMail is making a pretty generous offer here to either refund or convert "Member" accounts is a reasonable compromise on their end.
jhollington is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 20 Jan 2017, 01:57 AM   #59
minimalist
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2012
Posts: 11
Comments from a soon to be former member:

1) Was it worth $15?

Not to me. One of my bad decisions, thinking Fastmail would stand by its word. Fastmail offered something clearly worth more than $15 at $15. So I bought it hoping for an email address good for life. Fastmail changed their mind, so now I am screwed: I made a bad choice. Would receiving $15 back help, NO. Would receiving a discount on Fastmail help, NO. At least most of the people I have recommended Fastmail to have already moved away from Fastmail. My significant other will be a significant problem however, but at least she has a guest account instead making it somewhat easier.

2) Did it become worth more with Fastmail's enhancements?

Not to me it didn't. I just wanted somewhere to receive 0-5 text emails a day, occasionally needing to see the html version.

Aside: It hasn't been possible to see the html version in webmail since the new system(realizing text has to be the default view given the above). Although why anyone would use webmail has always been a little bit of a mystery.

3) Will transferring to a new email address be easy?

Not particularly, mostly since members have been treated worse than guests - I've long wished I'd kept my guest account instead of upgrading(since many years ago downgrading) to member status. With such small storage in the member account, there is not much trash to look at to see who uses the Fastmail account.

Hey, but at least I'll gain an address to give out to businesses likely to send a lot of email I don't want.

4) Are threats of a class action lawsuit silly?

I personally wouldn't consider such a thing, but here is a situation where Fastmail has all the power and the user has none. That sounds like a potential lawsuit situation. And it's not a lawsuit over $15: clearly Fastmail knowingly mispriced the member category, just read this thread. If it was really worth thousands of dollars as some are intimating, then it is a lawsuit over thousands of dollars, Fastmail's mispricing has little to do with what the product is/was worth. Lawsuit would not prevail though.
minimalist is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 20 Jan 2017, 02:28 AM   #60
janusz
The "e" in e-mail
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: EU
Posts: 4,933
@minimalist: Words of support from another "soon to be former member"
janusz is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump


All times are GMT +9. The time now is 05:14 PM.

 

Copyright EmailDiscussions.com 1998-2022. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy