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FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc. |
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20 Jan 2017, 03:42 AM | #76 | |
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Location: London UK
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Similar also though not identical the YHA Youth Hostels Association in England. They sold very expensive life membership years ago, I remember mine cost £390. While they have not reneged on the deal, in the years that followed they closed plenty of hostels that weren't economical, most in secluded and idyllic locations. The network isn't near as good now as it was then, and now other independent hostels chains are better value. I suppose nothing good lasts forever, and $FM isn't an exception. And stuff that runs on promises or ideals has a short shelf life. The sharing economy and all that... specialized email services and all that... a façade for entrepreneurs to attract enthusiasts and carve up a niche, then after they're successful, they forget. It's the same everywhere. |
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20 Jan 2017, 04:01 AM | #77 | |
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I long ago upgraded from my member account, but I think FastMail is in the wrong here. The company did sell its service touting a lifetime address, and it needs to stick by its promise. It didn't sell a "lifetime on the internet" address; it sold accounts with the promise that the address would belong to the user for as long as he or she wanted. FastMail may now see its past decision as a mistake, but it just needs to suck it up and own up to it. The company is, of course, free to encourage legacy member account holders to move to its new offerings. Its current offer is more than generous. Still, the company needs to accommodate those who don't want to switch and keep their e-mail address. Arguments that doing so would be impractical don't really fly. FastMail could certainly implement forwarding, for example. It might be somewhat of a pain for the company to do this, but that's not really the users' problem. Finally, like many others, I do find much of the b****ing and moaning to be excessive and tiresome. FastMail isn't out to screw some of its users over. I think most of us understand the company's motivations, and the complainers might consider letting FastMail off the hook for a naive promise made 15 years ago. You got your $15 worth of service, and your over-the-top complaints do little to persuade anyone of anything other than an overblown sense of entitlement. |
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20 Jan 2017, 04:03 AM | #78 | ||||
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 24
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About 10 years ago I stopped using a mail.com address that I had, and I *still* occasionally get personal emails there from friends who had that address, including from people I've told about my new address several times. Some people just aren't very good at keeping track of everyone else's current email addresses. I never said it was *technically* difficult to change email addresses. If you really think it's so easy, you wouldn't hesitate to take me up on my challenge to do it yourself, or send me $30/year. I bet you could both change your own primary email address *and* send me $30 in barely more time than it took you to write that message. But you won't, not because it's difficult to do, but because it would be a big pain for you going forward. Quote:
I suppose you don't mind when people break their promises to you and wouldn't mind paying money to people who had broken a promise? Hey, remember yesterday I offered to send you a cookie today if you you gave me $0.10, so you did? Oops, I got busy and decided I don't have time, so I'm breaking my promise. Sorry about that. But tell you what, why don't you give me $3 now, and then it will be worth it to me to send you that cookie that I already promised you. It's not like $3 will break your budget. Do you feel like sending me that $3? No? I can't imagine why. Quote:
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Last edited by neoforum : 20 Jan 2017 at 04:56 AM. |
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20 Jan 2017, 05:44 AM | #79 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,090
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If I had failed to take out insurance in the form of my first personal domain around 15 years ago, I would not have the problem of being unable to contact people with my old email address, except those who have lost their old addresses and failed to inform me. I have all the email addresses of everyone who has sent email to me since I first had email about 20 years ago. In most cases, the email itself is archived, though some over 10 years old is on backup disks, and would be painful to access. My main problem is trying to remember who half of those people are! |
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20 Jan 2017, 12:39 PM | #80 |
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 50
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Conflicting and Irreconcilable
It seems to me that through all the static, this discussion boils down to two conflicting (and irreconcilable) views
1) Those of "one-time payment" Members, who feel that Fastmail is obligated to uphold the pledge it made during its formative years by continuing to stand by the service it promoted and sold. Additionally, what Fastmail proposes will, through no fault of these Members, result in them incurring a recurring charge for the continued use of Fastmail, or the inconvenience of abandoning an email address they have used for 8-15 years. 2) Those from people who are not "one-time payment" Members who, by choice, have been paying a subscription for their email service in one form or other and feel that it is fair for Members to start paying for their Fastmail service, and that if they don't want to do so, can, without much effort, complete the process of informing contacts/organizations of their impending email address change and move quietly on. There is also a small fraction who insists that if one really wanted to ensure email address continuity, getting one’s own domain is the only way to go. These savvy folk seem to not see that only a tiny fraction of email users even know what that is, let alone choose to do so when they start using email. Just look into a typical address book; how many personal domain name email addresses do you see in it? And speaking about fractions, it has dawned on me that if the discussion about the ending of the classical interface (which started the same time as this one and which on Page 4 states only 1-2 percent use regularly) can garner over twice the number of replies this thread has, we may well be talking about an even smaller fraction of Fastmail users still on a "one-time payment" legacy account. (Not a valid conclusion if Fastmail has not yet informed many legacy Members of the impending change). Anyway, as we are not privy to how many such legacy accounts there are out there, here's a bit of speculation on my part. Pick a number - 1000? 5000? At the lower number, the sum involved would be USD3k/month, and at the higher end, USD15k/month. And that's with a 100 percent conversion rate from "one-time payment" to "subscriber". If this amount is so critical to Fastmail, maybe we all shouldn’t be so smug about the longevity of any of our Fastmail email addresses? Just a thought. Last edited by samhu : 20 Jan 2017 at 03:46 PM. Reason: typo |
20 Jan 2017, 01:00 PM | #81 | |
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20 Jan 2017, 01:22 PM | #82 |
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My other two cents: I have learned from bitter experience that the only reason to trust in the continued operation of a product or service is because the product/service is sustainable and profitable as an ongoing concern.
I use Fastmail, and I trust that they will continue to provide a quality product, not because I take on faith any promises that Fastmail staff have made in the past. Instead, I do so because I believe they have a sustainable business model, because Fastmail's key staff are passionate about the product, and because Fastmail as a whole has the right incentives to continue development and innovation. My email is very important to me, and as such I am very happy to continue paying a substantial amount for it -- after all, such an arrangement aligns Fastmail's incentives with my priorities. |
20 Jan 2017, 02:18 PM | #83 | |
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Actually, the philosophical gulf here is between those who feel that when you voluntarily offer something as part of a contract, it's not OK to reneg on it later just because you changed your mind, and those who see nothing wrong with "hooking" people or raising funds with an attractive promise and then later going back on it because "Internet time" is somehow different, or some other hand-waving excuse. It's not very fair to treat the customers complaining here as "unreasonable" because they in good faith chose to take up this promise over other alternatives they may have had - and at the same time defend as "understandable" the actions of the company who (voluntarily!) made said promise and now wants to weasel out. Just so we're clear, I don't have a Member level account and I absolutely don't mind paying yearly for FM service and have been doing just that for more than a decade. But, I also happen to believe that it's not right to break promises to customers, especially not over reasons as nebulous as "we have decided to no longer support this account type to help simplify our internal architecture". I'd love to hear what exactly this simplification entails and why it is in fact necessary, because right now this is just using technical-sounding language to justify what looks very much like a business decision. I think this may well be what's so upsetting to those affected - that this is apparently being done "just because", without any obvious reason that people could weigh. We know these accounts are lightweight in terms of resources and FM says there's a "limited number" of them left, so what exactly is the problem with keeping them around? This is more difficult to fathom than the shuttering of the Classic interface, because while Classic reportedly takes 20% of developer time to maintain and has an evident architectural impact, Member accounts are accounts like any other, with no obvious overhead like that. Or am missing something big here? Last edited by walpurg : 20 Jan 2017 at 02:27 PM. |
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20 Jan 2017, 02:51 PM | #84 | |
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20 Jan 2017, 02:51 PM | #85 |
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 243
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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... Personally, if the internal numbers for these accounts aren't significantly different than my assumptions named above, I would just let them stay. It's obvious for me, that people who are fine with such small accounts for almost a decade, won't start to pay for something else, but just go away to a free alternative. Also, I think that the explanation on the Fastmail site for discontinuing these accounts is pretty bad. However, as a consumer I am always aware of the fact that there is nothing like a "lifetime account" with any company. So, as a conclusion: I use an "enhanced" account since 2009 and I'm pretty happy with the service. There were times when FM was a really small team, then they "went" to Norway, now they are independent again and actually expanding and buying other services. But unfortunately, there were always situations with extremely bad comminication towards customers (reliability issues, or when they introduced the new interface, to name just two), and I think that this again is a bad example, although it only affects a few users. I think that it's a technically super-skilled team, but I have to accept that there might be desisions I won't be happy with any time in the near or far future, if I continue to use Fastmail. And this is also a part of "reliability" when I decide to renew my account or not :-| |
20 Jan 2017, 03:39 PM | #86 | |
The "e" in e-mail
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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. |
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20 Jan 2017, 03:58 PM | #87 |
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Why do they have to do anything just make them into normal accounts then no extra coding would be required, unfortunately they made them almost unusable hoping to get people to stop using them, and in my case it worked.
Fastmail claim there are not many customers involved, so really there would be no major financially loss. Last edited by Terry : 20 Jan 2017 at 04:19 PM. |
20 Jan 2017, 05:02 PM | #88 | |
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20 Jan 2017, 05:33 PM | #89 | |
The "e" in e-mail
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Member accounts are not eligible for advanced spam filtering. Fine, you say, just a simple switch: do it or do not. It is not quite so simple. Yes, checking whether SpamAssassin should be called, bypassing the relevant code is pretty easy, but what of the supporting code in sieve scripts? There is a whole section in sieve script creation and editing that needs some sensitivity to whether spam checking is being done. This needs maintaining as the code in that area changes. There is also code around recognizing if the sender of emails is in the user's address book, and whether DMARC checks for the sender pass. To avoid upgrading the Member account experience, these also need to be suppressed. Then there is a part of the user interface around spam settings. These ought to be disabled. Nothing horrendous, but it adds up. If these special cases are for 0.1% of the user base (my guess) they are seriously annoying. Maybe, as I said in an earlier post, the pragmatic solution is just to upgrade the Member account experience when keeping separate code paths requires anything other than negligible maintenance. Emotionally, I appreciate why Fastmail just hates doing that, knowing they are making a deal already tilted heavily in the users' favor, even less fair (from Fastmail's point of view) as time passes. |
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20 Jan 2017, 06:00 PM | #90 |
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Join Date: Nov 2014
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@BritTim
Assuming it's a 0.1% situation as you've supposed, FM would have to be a real princess to have this deep emotional problem with implementing your idea. |