Fastmail Wiki page was removed (FYI)

[Ilgaz]

Hi,

There were couple of guys marking every feature as "Spam" and "advertisement", there were a sane guy explaining why Fastmail.fm's features listing wouldn't be spam and another post by me telling my frustration about the vandalism level at Wikipedia.

Now, I checked again, the fastmail.fm Wikipedia article has been DELETED.

I don't think it is a nice idea to have a e-mail providers article deleted with SPAM accusations.

I am not very good at Wikipedia but I think this provides explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...&page=FastMail

A trying to be funny guy claims all credit for deleting the article and IMHO Fastmail admin/staff shouldn't ask him "nicely" (check his page) , they should bring it to Wiki policy makers instead.

I checked mr. Aili's "talk" page, there are many, many frustrated Wiki article authors asking why Mr. Aili deleted their articles.

I decided to side with "The Register" on Wikipedia matter from now on. Openly claiming a mail provider spamming a "user encyclopaedia" is a serious offence IMHO.

[robmueller]

Hmmm, the notability requirement is an interesting one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:N

If you click the "Companies" link on the right hand side of that page (bizarrely, the URL parser in this forum keeps breaking the URL when I try and paste it in here)

Criteria for companies and corporations

A company or corporation is notable if it meets any of the following criteria:

1. The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company or corporation itself.
* This criterion includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books, television documentaries, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations2 except for the following:
o Media reprints of press releases, other publications where the company or corporation talks about itself, and advertising for the company.1
o Works carrying merely trivial coverage, such as newspaper articles that simply report extended shopping hours or the publications of telephone numbers and addresses in business directories.
2. The company or corporation is listed on ranking indices of important companies produced by well-known and independent publications.3

---

Criteria for products and services

A product or service is notable if it meets any of the following criteria:

1. The product or service has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company itself.
* This criterion includes published works in all forms, such as newspaper articles, books, television documentaries, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations5 except for the following:
o Media re-prints of press releases, other publications where the company or corporation talks about its products or services, and advertising for the product or service. Newspaper stories that do not credit a reporter or a news service and simply present company news in an uncritical or positive way may be treated as press releases unless there is evidence to the contrary.1
o Works carrying merely trivial coverage, such as simple price listings in product catalogues.

Now I never saw the original article, but if it didn't include links to the articles at The Age, PCWorld and About.com, then it's pretty easy to see why it wasn't considered notable. If it did, then you might have an argument for the notability issue, but then the spamming issue depends highly on the content itself.

Maybe you can take the original articule you wrote and put it up on our wiki at http://wiki.fastmail.fm, then people can edit it a bit to ensure it meets wikipedia guidelines, then we can try and put it up there again.

Rob

[hadaso]

What I've seen is that FastMail was tagged for "speedy deletion". It seems that there are other webmail providers that have their Wikipedia articles, so presumably they are "encyclopedic". Personally I don't see why an online encyclopedia should have entries for services or comparisons of services, but it has articles for some webmail services and a comparison page. I think there is a case for having a Fastmail.FM entry in the Wikipedia, but to be justified it should have encyclopedic content, and to achieve that it should show FastMail's unique contributions to the history of email usage, or its unique role in enabling users to fully use the email protocols in ways otherwise only available to people maintaining their own mail servers, and not its unique offerings in a form resembling an advertisement of a service.

I have put the {{hangon}} tag on the page and put an explanation on the page's discussion and tried to write a bit, but frankly, what I wrote sucks and should be completely rewritten with more precise info and details like dates etc. It needs to show the history of fastMail with dates and show how FastMail innovated in its time (and still is). So I hope people can come and help in this.

A tag has been placed on FastMail.FM, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article seems to be blatant advertising which only promotes a company, product, group or service and which would need to be fundamentally rewritten in order to become an encyclopedia article. Please read the general criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 11, as well as the guidelines on spam.

If you can indicate why the subject of this article is not blatant advertising, you may contest the tagging. To do this, please add {{hangon}} on the top of the page and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would help make it encyclopedic, as well as adding any citations from reliable sources to ensure that the article will be verifiable. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Fan-1967 23:07, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

The speedy deletion of this page is contested. The person placing this notice intends to dispute the speedy deletion of this article on its talk page, and requests that this page not be deleted in the meantime.

Note that this request is not binding, and the page may still be deleted if it is considered that the page unquestionably meets the speedy deletion criteria, or if the promised explanation is not provided very soon.

[hadaso]

Now I see Rob's post here (I had the compose post screen open for more than an hour I think while I was looking at webmail related stuff on Wikipedia, so I missed it and didn't see it after I posted).

Anyway, now the FastMail.FM article was deleted, and it certainly didn't meet the "notability" criteria. Also, I personally don't think Wikipedia should have articles about particular services unless there's an a reason like some innovation introduced by that service.

I think that the WebMail article in Wikipedia is full of misconceptions (starting with confusing "webmail client" with "webmail service", and listing bugs in some popular webmail service specific webmail applications as "disadvantages of webmail"). I think our community (EMD) has knowledge it can contribute to the wikipedia. People here know quite a lot about the history and development of webmail. The Wikipedia article doesn't have anything except for some partial documentation of "Gigabyte" offerings by webmail services following the appearance of Gmail. I think people here know enough to write up some of the history of web based email from the early era of pre-MS Hotmail (and earlier?) through various innovations introduced by various services over the years till today's post-Gmail era.

(Another thing: not having an article in Wikipedia makes links to the non-existing FastMail.FM article stand out in red )

[Sherry]

This is totally non techey and may be unrelated to what you're looking for but, just in case ---

Rob/Jeremy have written code and submitted it to open source projects many times. Since their main business is IMAP then perhaps they have written/programmed/invented code that was implemented and became a permanent part of IMAP? I think Rob and/or Jeremy also wrote something for the software they use for the replicated systems and submitted it for others?


Sherry

[Rip Slagcheek]

uh, i think it's an ad.

cached on google:


FastMail
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view per Wikipedia policy. Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (help, talk)

FastMail is an Australian email provider with data facilities in New York. They provide web-based email, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, WAP & SMS services.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Features
* 2 Membership levels
* 3 Reliability & Outages
* 4 See also
* 5 External links

[edit] Features

The main attraction of the service is its speed - very few images are used in the interface, with almost everything being text-based.

Users can pick from over a dozen domain names for their address and can set up mail aliases so primary addresses can be protected from spammers. Messages can be composed as text, but WYSIWYG and HTML editors are available. Messages can be fetched from other email services to FastMail accounts and arrange for the service to automatically fetch messages every 3 or 12 hours.

It also features a choice of simple or powerful interface.

One uncommon feature of FastMail is its security. Logins are done over SSL by default, and SSL/TLS-wrapped IMAP is available. Though many mail providers provide IMAP, few provide encrypted access.

[edit] Membership levels

There are four plans:

* Guest (free)
* Member ($14.95 one-time)
* Full ($19.95/year)
* Enhanced ($39.95/year)

[edit] Reliability & Outages

FastMail's relatively fast growth has resulted in the following multi-day outages:

* November 2005: 4 day outage for all users

* August 31, 2006. Access for affected users did not return completely until September 4, 2006, though some regained access as early as September 3, 2006. During the outage, messages were either queued for later delivery or bounced (Account being moved) back to the sender.

* October 27, 2006. Server 3 failed, resulting in 3 days of no access for affected users

[edit] See also

* Web mail
* Comparison of webmail providers

[edit] External links

* Official website
* FastMail Wiki
* Fastmail Forum

This article or section needs sources or references that appear in credible, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. Please include appropriate citations from reliable sources.
This article has been tagged since December 2006.

[robmueller]

It would be nice to get a proper article up there that does meet the notability requirements (links to articles) with some history of the company and email and specifically mentioning that we were one of the first to offer and champion IMAP access.

I think the best thing would be to start it on our wiki at http://wiki.fastmail.fm, and once it's looking good, copy it over. Anyone want to start?

Rob

[hadaso]

I think that the Wikipedia is quite right that the article as it were resembled an advertisement more than an encyclopedia article. A list of features is not something for an encyclopedia (neither is a list of outages).
]
I do believe there is a place for FastMail in the Wikipedia.

It is probably quite unique in the webmail scene in several ways. I think other webmail providers that provide free accounts are all companies whose main business is not email, and for them email is an application that make users keep coming back. There used to be other webmail providers that offere d free accounts whose main business was email, but that was in the early days, and it seems that FastMail is the only one left of the medium to large players. FastMail is an email-only provider that has lasted more than half the time webmail existed. Other email-only providers that have lasted a reasonable time and are still here seem to be pay only services.

FastMail's webmail client philosophy is unique: others commonly offer reduced functionality of an email client. FastMail sort of does the opposite: put in the webmail client functionality that is not provided by the popular email clients.

And I think it would be more useful to get the "webmail" page say more about FastMail, and it will have to be things that FastMail has pioneered or are unique to FastMail, and not just a list of features or saying "it has so many features.

[Sherry]

Article on FM's beginning.

FastMail reinvents a slicker, quicker wheel

Sherry

[robmueller]

Jeremy has quite a few links to articles on his page:

http://jhoward.fastmail.fm

Rob

[robert@fm]

Originally posted by hadaso
I think that the WebMail article in Wikipedia is full of misconceptions (starting with confusing "webmail client" with "webmail service"

Surely, since webmail is by definition accessed via a web browser (which isn't mail-specific), there's no such thing as a "webmail client"?

[placebo]

I think SquirrelMail and Horde, for example, qualify as webmail clients. Although you access them through a web browser, they can provide different interfaces to the same IMAP mailboxes.

[hadaso]

Originally posted by robert@fm
Surely, since webmail is by definition accessed via a web browser (which isn't mail-specific), there's no such thing as a "webmail client"?

I think of a "webmail client" as software that is on one side communicating with an email store and on the other side with the user through http. A "desktop client" does the same but communicates with the user through hardware on the same computer (or rather through the OS api that operates that hardware. Just as you can have an email client work on a unix host that communicates with a mail storeserver through POP/IMAP/SMTP or the file system if the mail is in the same filesystem as the client and communicates with a user interface through X).