FastMail storage increase?

[Gankaku]

I could really use a small increase on my member account. Can I take some of that extra from my enhanced and put it into my member account? LOL It would seriously be nice though to see these older accounts get a little bit of attention too.

It's good to see the increases because I feel that Fastmail is keeping up with competition. Enhanced accounts are now much larger than Gmail accounts, plus with all the added benefits. There'd only be a few additions that would make Fastmail perfect right now. (I'm sure a lot of those things are on the recommended improvements threads) Let's hope the Opera folks can have the team implement them.

[Mystakill]

I'm in the middle of rebuilding our home NAS to upgrade it from 800GB to 8TB, and there are only *five* of us using it. I'm looking forward to my kids no longer being able to scratch up, fingerprint, and slather foreign substances on our DVD collection

[cjrao]

Originally Posted by kinetic

I have a member account (the one with one time fee) but did not get any storage increase.

I am a little annoyed that they haven't increased the Member account storage. They can at least make it the same as the free account. After all we did pay, albeit small amount, to get the Member status...

[beq]

I see my Family/Superior account now has 14GB mail storage, with mail bandwidth half that at 7GB. Conversely my file storage is only 6GB, but file bandwidth is twice that at 12GB.

I like to keep my old mail, but not even using half of the mail storage. Then again I have a family member who's consuming 3GB+ per month in email correspondence (and accelerating) -- even though he gets practically no spam or commercial mailing lists.

I'm OK with the new smaller annual fee for additional storage, but I'm just as likely to stay put with my existing one-time-paid extra storage...

Originally Posted by Mystakill

I'm in the middle of rebuilding our home NAS to upgrade it from 800GB to 8TB, and there are only *five* of us using it. I'm looking forward to my kids no longer being able to scratch up, fingerprint, and slather foreign substances on our DVD collection

Can I ask what kind of NAS machine you have? Is it a 4-bay unit populated with 2TB drives?

[hankfoner]

Well, I have FULL account and am just grateful for the added storage. We've been asking for it for a long time, so good on you FM/Opera and thanks! Of course you needn't stop there and don't forget what Gmail is dishing out free.
Hank

[Merovingian]

definitely a welcome change when I noticed yesterday. Thanks FMopera!

[Heartz]

This is excellent. I finally get a refund from the storage that I bought before but never really used because I moved to my enhanced account. Another year of Fastmail Enhanced subscription for me.

[jeff248]

Thank you Fastmail!

[Mystakill]

Originally Posted by beq

Can I ask what kind of NAS machine you have? Is it a 4-bay unit populated with 2TB drives?

It's a 4-bay ReadyNAS NV+ I've had for ~3 years now. I originally outfitted it with 4x320GB drives, but that space has dwindled down due to my wife's book writing, system backups, CD & DVD rips, Linux images, most of our CD collection, and various software (I always copy installation CDs to it for easier/faster installation). Since I can upgrade in-place without having to reformat, it's just a matter of waiting for each disk to resync with the X-RAID set (like RAID5, but expandable with larger drives).

Storage costs have dropped considerably over the past few years; The 2TB drives are only $30 more expensive than the 320GB drives I bought 3 years ago. FM's costs have also gone down, but they still have to manage the cost of supporting them, which has undoubtedly gone up. $4.95 per year for 1GB of extra storage isn't unreasonable though, and it's considerably more capacious than the 100MB increments they had been providing at a higher cost.

Personally, I'd like to see FM/Opera do away with the split between mail and file storage and provide a single pool from which users can either use as needed, or allocate to mail or file storage as they see fit. It would take some rearchitecting on the back-end, but I think it'd be a great feature (and selling point).

[NJSS]

Mystakill wrote:-

I'd like to see FM/Opera do away with the split between mail and file storage and provide a single pool from which users can either use as needed, or allocate to mail or file storage as they see fit. It would take some rearchitecting on the back-end, but I think it'd be a great feature (and selling poin

I couldn't agree more, although I use FM file store, my use is restricted because of lack of space - I have lots of unused mail storage though.

NJSS

[rabarberski]

Very nice!

As far as I am concerned, 1 GB for my full account is now reasonable compared to 'the market' (i.e. price/quality tradeoff including all other fastmail features). The possibility to shift quotas around (across mailbox-file space) would make it top-notch, but no deal-breaker for me!

[apl]

Apple's MobileMe accounts have that feature, I have 10 GB of storage that I can split between file storage and mail.

One thing to consider here is the total amount of storage the we have with our FM accounts, if you simply add the mail and file allocations together and multiply by the number of users that FM have then you have a very large storage requirement.

I'm guessing that the mail storage is really a pool that your account can grow into with the upper limit being set at your account quota. I'm currently pushing the limits with a whopping 1% of usage which means that the remaining 99% would be available for other users, it's not real dedicated storage or likely to be used by most.

I also use IMAP which means that I would need the same amount of free space at my end which is why I keep my mail paired down, I have started setting up auto purge to delete old email.

File storage is a different matter, since I don't need to keep a local copy I will tend to store more, I also use it for photos, file downloads and temporary storage. This could be a pool at FM's end but would need more real storage available.

What I'm trying to say is that I think it will be more than a change to their backend to give us an account where we can change the allocation between files and mail, it could be that we end up with less combined storage to achieve it.

Just my thoughts.

Regards Alan

[rabarberski]

Originally Posted by apl

I also use IMAP which means that I would need the same amount of free space at my end which is why I keep my mail paired down, I have started setting up auto purge to delete old email.

You don't necessarily need the same amount at your local computer, because in most email clients (e.g. Apple Mail, Thunderbird) you can specify whether you want to locally cache/store emails. The downside is that searching through your mails (with spotlight for example) might be less thorough though.

[janusz]

For the record: official announcement

[apl]

Originally Posted by rabarberski

You don't necessarily need the same amount at your local computer, because in most email clients (e.g. Apple Mail, Thunderbird) you can specify whether you want to locally cache/store emails. The downside is that searching through your mails (with spotlight for example) might be less thorough though.

That's true but I was using POP originally and liked that I could search and read email offline, when I switched to IMAP which makes more sense when using more than one computer with the account I found the lack of offline search difficult to live with. Once you switch on local storage then it behaves much like it did with POP but synchronised between all the machines I use. The downside is that your local requirements are the same as the remote requirements. Not downloading makes sense with an iPhone though.

Regards Alan