Publication details: October 2008, Linux for You magazine, India
Byline: Suhit Kelkar
Review
Most people probably haven’t heard of the FastMail.fm e-mail service, but those who have will tell you it’s named so for a reason. FastMail will already have completed loading your inbox in the time that it takes most better-known e-mail services to ask you to ‘please wait’ for the service to load. Interestingly, this service runs almost entirely on free software, and seems to have absorbed a certain amount of the FOSS community’s spirit. It engages with its users in a bustling, and frank online forum in the style of a GNU/Linux distribution. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this intriguing enterprise. We’ll do an overview and test the service.
Established in 1999, FastMail [www.fastmail.fm] is a trust from the land of speedsters like Brett Lee, it’s Aussie mate, based in Melbourne. The .fm root domain is from the Federated Republic of Micronesia, a cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean, while FastMail’s hardware set-up is located in the US.
FastMail promotes itself by offering free accounts, and it’s in the business of selling larger and better-featured paid ones to families and enterprises. It will also offer you a choice of domain names. At the time of writing, apart from yourname@fastmail.fm, there’s @rushpost.com, @123mail.org, @speedpost.net, etc—in fact, there are 104 in all. Of these, most domains are also available for free accounts. FastMail also seems to make a trickle by displaying advertisements in the Web mail interface.
It’s a small enterprise. Apart from Rob Mueller and Jeremy Howard, there are two non-executive directors, and a few ‘contract programmers’, according to the FastMail documentation.
Openness in software and business
FastMail uses ‘nearly 100 per cent’ FOSS software, says founder Jeremy Howard. “I say ‘nearly’ since IBM only provides binary versions of their RAID configuration and monitoring tool... but I think that’s the only piece of closed source software we use,” he adds. FastMail uses a Debian-based distribution around a custom patched Linux kernel, a kernel-level firewall, an Apache Web server, Cyrus IMAP/POP server, Postfix ‘secure mailer’ and a Perl-based main application, besides SpamAssassin and ClamAV.
When asked, Howard does not go into the figures of the business, but shares that use of FOSS has saved the service “…hundreds of thousands of dollars”. However, “That’s not the main reason we use it,” he says. “We use open source software because it is far better for our needs than the alternatives... We often use cutting-edge hardware to get the best possible performance out of our infrastructure. We’ve worked closely with Linux kernel developers to ensure that it is tuned correctly for this hardware. We’d never be able to do that with Windows!”
Another benefit of FOSS is that the FastMail team can patch its software itself, instead of begging for the same service from a vendor. It has contributed several patches to the Cyrus IMAP server, for instance. That makes its software more reliable, Howard says. “In summary: if we used closed source software, our expenses would be higher, and our uptime would be lower...” It is, he concludes, good for business.
FastMail seems to have—excuse the cliché, but—a philosophy of openness. They’ve mentioned, in a part of their profuse online documentation, all the details of their hardware, right down to their cabinet map. It’s published online at nyi.brong.fastmail.fm/cabinets.html. FastMail uses IBM x345/x346 and x3550, and Sun’s x4500 servers; they have even uploaded photos of their cabinets online at cabinets.robm.fastmail.fm. Simple gestures like these make FastMail feel more like a FOSS community project than a stuffy e-mail service provider. Should I mention the lively wiki community gathered around it (at www.emaildiscussions.com/ forumdisplay.php?forumid=27), which uses that space to post queries and suggest improvements directly to the FastMail staff?
The e-mail service: A review
I tested FastMail’s free e-mail service. FastMail lives up to its name; on my Sify Broadband connection of 128 KBps at the most, FastMail usually displays the inbox within seconds, while GMail is still ‘Loading’. The reason is that FastMail is devoid of Ajax, Flash, and other technology that’s hard on the bandwidth. Its interface is well-endowed and uncluttered, but best described as bare. If you’ve ever used e-mail in the early days of its popularity in India, you’ll get a mental flashback by using FastMail. But FastMail has modern features. Besides e-mail, it offers file storage, a notepad, an address book, photo-and-file upload and other options, all nicely laid out in tabs (Figure 1).
Few e-mail interfaces are as well thought out as FastMail’s—perhaps user feedback is to be credited here. Every common mail-related option is laid out on screen. The add-attachment box, subject box, and the CC and BCC text boxes are open by default. Recently-used addresses are available in a quick-view pane. While most e-mail services only display a few words, FastMail displays the first few ‘lines’ of unread messages below them, so you needn’t click open untitled e-mails to find out what they say. All these points seem trivial until they save you irksome mouseclicks. The interface is not pretty, but you can customise it. There are many colour themes to choose from, some of them user-contributed.
Speed is the word at the back-end too; FastMail claims it queues no mail, and that all messages are sent immediately. An excerpt from the FastMail documentation says: “Our pages are generated by our Web application server in 1/100th of a second. They are sent through a 100 MBps link that has plenty of spare capacity. They then go out to the Internet through network links of seven of the most reliable and most fast backbone providers ... we never have any mail queue (all mail is delivered within seconds).”
So far so good, till we came across a sore point. If you use a free account, FastMail embeds a self-promoting text tagline at the bottom of your sent messages. The tagline is text-only -- no flashing GIFs or embedded links. The e-mail interface does show advertisements above your inbox, but so far I haven’t come across the typical loud ones, only an unobtrusive line of text or a sponsored link. FastMail doesn’t serve you targeted advertisements (like GMail) either.
Having used FastMail a while, you’ll suddenly notice the absence of a spam folder in your inbox. Mail from known spammers is blocked automatically at the server level with FastMail’s custom filters. That is, for free accounts, spam—or what’s detected as spam—isn’t delivered to the inbox at all. Paid accounts get the additional benefit of SpamAssassin, an Apache product, for which, FastMail claims a 95 per cent spam blockage rate; this can be customised by the user for greater accuracy. For all accounts, free or paid, images embedded in e-mails are blanked out by default, to throw off spammers, who might have linked to them.
What about security? FastMail leaves no cookies on your computer, and doesn’t use Java or Javascripts. In keeping with its FOSS policy, FastMail has implemented the Clam anti-virus, which is free/libre; but there are also a lot of opinions online that it is less effective with viruses than the corporate, paid-for anti-virus software. In its documentation, though, the mail service defends its use of ClamAV thus: “The best e-mail gateway anti-virus software. Don’t fall for the claims of anti-virus software vendors. They specialise in anti-virus software running on Windows machines, not in detecting viruses in e-mails, which ClamAV does better than any of the commercial products.” It’s an intriguing claim.
And now, the sobering news. So far we’ve been going rah-rah over FastMail, but, depending upon your e-mail habits, there’re a few points that need to be pondered over really hard. If prolonged GMail use has given you the habit of never deleting messages, no matter how dated or banal, you won’t like FastMail a smidgeon. It gives its free accounts— ready?—10 MB space each. (Only paid accounts get 6GB or less, depending on tariff scales at www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html.) What? In this age? But there are still people who like that constrained e-mail space: it forces them to clear out the garbage. Moreover, to trip up spammers, FastMail imposes a limit of 80 messages sent per hour, exceeding which it temporarily freezes your (free) account. Also, there’s a 40 MB monthly transfer quota for sent messages plus attachments. This is enough for the average free account user, as FastMail demonstrates in its documentation (divide 40 MB with, say, 50 KB, which is the average size of an e-mail). This includes attachments; which must, moreover, not exceed 10 MB, sent or received.
Even receiving certain e-mails is disallowed. Specifically, image-rich e-mails from Yahoo Groups, because they apparently take up too much space. Finally, FastMail doesn’t give free account holders access to its SMTP servers; to use FastMail with an e-mail client like Thunderbird, therefore, free account-holders must use their Internet service provider’s SMTP server. Otherwise, they must use the Web interface.
Private users might not mind this hobbling, but companies might. So, this hobbling is intended to get them to buy the upgraded service.
Final cut
FastMail is the very opposite of GMail or Inbox. It doesn’t offer a Texan ranch for space; there’s a little space, and you’ve to make regular deletions to keep it unoccupied. The reason to use the free account, then, is its power and simplicity, and its free/open philosophy. And despite FastMail’s hobblings and nobblings, there’s a refreshing mom-and-pop corner shop cosiness in its complete transparency. Here is a service, you feel, that tells you everything; and that won’t land you in a soup. Not that others will, but you’re especially reassured with this one. Besides being fast and feature-rich, it uses free software. Well, I’ll be keeping my account!
(Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License)
Byline: Suhit Kelkar
Review
Most people probably haven’t heard of the FastMail.fm e-mail service, but those who have will tell you it’s named so for a reason. FastMail will already have completed loading your inbox in the time that it takes most better-known e-mail services to ask you to ‘please wait’ for the service to load. Interestingly, this service runs almost entirely on free software, and seems to have absorbed a certain amount of the FOSS community’s spirit. It engages with its users in a bustling, and frank online forum in the style of a GNU/Linux distribution. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this intriguing enterprise. We’ll do an overview and test the service.
Established in 1999, FastMail [www.fastmail.fm] is a trust from the land of speedsters like Brett Lee, it’s Aussie mate, based in Melbourne. The .fm root domain is from the Federated Republic of Micronesia, a cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean, while FastMail’s hardware set-up is located in the US.
FastMail promotes itself by offering free accounts, and it’s in the business of selling larger and better-featured paid ones to families and enterprises. It will also offer you a choice of domain names. At the time of writing, apart from yourname@fastmail.fm, there’s @rushpost.com, @123mail.org, @speedpost.net, etc—in fact, there are 104 in all. Of these, most domains are also available for free accounts. FastMail also seems to make a trickle by displaying advertisements in the Web mail interface.
It’s a small enterprise. Apart from Rob Mueller and Jeremy Howard, there are two non-executive directors, and a few ‘contract programmers’, according to the FastMail documentation.
Openness in software and business
FastMail uses ‘nearly 100 per cent’ FOSS software, says founder Jeremy Howard. “I say ‘nearly’ since IBM only provides binary versions of their RAID configuration and monitoring tool... but I think that’s the only piece of closed source software we use,” he adds. FastMail uses a Debian-based distribution around a custom patched Linux kernel, a kernel-level firewall, an Apache Web server, Cyrus IMAP/POP server, Postfix ‘secure mailer’ and a Perl-based main application, besides SpamAssassin and ClamAV.
When asked, Howard does not go into the figures of the business, but shares that use of FOSS has saved the service “…hundreds of thousands of dollars”. However, “That’s not the main reason we use it,” he says. “We use open source software because it is far better for our needs than the alternatives... We often use cutting-edge hardware to get the best possible performance out of our infrastructure. We’ve worked closely with Linux kernel developers to ensure that it is tuned correctly for this hardware. We’d never be able to do that with Windows!”
Another benefit of FOSS is that the FastMail team can patch its software itself, instead of begging for the same service from a vendor. It has contributed several patches to the Cyrus IMAP server, for instance. That makes its software more reliable, Howard says. “In summary: if we used closed source software, our expenses would be higher, and our uptime would be lower...” It is, he concludes, good for business.
FastMail seems to have—excuse the cliché, but—a philosophy of openness. They’ve mentioned, in a part of their profuse online documentation, all the details of their hardware, right down to their cabinet map. It’s published online at nyi.brong.fastmail.fm/cabinets.html. FastMail uses IBM x345/x346 and x3550, and Sun’s x4500 servers; they have even uploaded photos of their cabinets online at cabinets.robm.fastmail.fm. Simple gestures like these make FastMail feel more like a FOSS community project than a stuffy e-mail service provider. Should I mention the lively wiki community gathered around it (at www.emaildiscussions.com/ forumdisplay.php?forumid=27), which uses that space to post queries and suggest improvements directly to the FastMail staff?
The e-mail service: A review
I tested FastMail’s free e-mail service. FastMail lives up to its name; on my Sify Broadband connection of 128 KBps at the most, FastMail usually displays the inbox within seconds, while GMail is still ‘Loading’. The reason is that FastMail is devoid of Ajax, Flash, and other technology that’s hard on the bandwidth. Its interface is well-endowed and uncluttered, but best described as bare. If you’ve ever used e-mail in the early days of its popularity in India, you’ll get a mental flashback by using FastMail. But FastMail has modern features. Besides e-mail, it offers file storage, a notepad, an address book, photo-and-file upload and other options, all nicely laid out in tabs (Figure 1).
Few e-mail interfaces are as well thought out as FastMail’s—perhaps user feedback is to be credited here. Every common mail-related option is laid out on screen. The add-attachment box, subject box, and the CC and BCC text boxes are open by default. Recently-used addresses are available in a quick-view pane. While most e-mail services only display a few words, FastMail displays the first few ‘lines’ of unread messages below them, so you needn’t click open untitled e-mails to find out what they say. All these points seem trivial until they save you irksome mouseclicks. The interface is not pretty, but you can customise it. There are many colour themes to choose from, some of them user-contributed.
Speed is the word at the back-end too; FastMail claims it queues no mail, and that all messages are sent immediately. An excerpt from the FastMail documentation says: “Our pages are generated by our Web application server in 1/100th of a second. They are sent through a 100 MBps link that has plenty of spare capacity. They then go out to the Internet through network links of seven of the most reliable and most fast backbone providers ... we never have any mail queue (all mail is delivered within seconds).”
So far so good, till we came across a sore point. If you use a free account, FastMail embeds a self-promoting text tagline at the bottom of your sent messages. The tagline is text-only -- no flashing GIFs or embedded links. The e-mail interface does show advertisements above your inbox, but so far I haven’t come across the typical loud ones, only an unobtrusive line of text or a sponsored link. FastMail doesn’t serve you targeted advertisements (like GMail) either.
Having used FastMail a while, you’ll suddenly notice the absence of a spam folder in your inbox. Mail from known spammers is blocked automatically at the server level with FastMail’s custom filters. That is, for free accounts, spam—or what’s detected as spam—isn’t delivered to the inbox at all. Paid accounts get the additional benefit of SpamAssassin, an Apache product, for which, FastMail claims a 95 per cent spam blockage rate; this can be customised by the user for greater accuracy. For all accounts, free or paid, images embedded in e-mails are blanked out by default, to throw off spammers, who might have linked to them.
What about security? FastMail leaves no cookies on your computer, and doesn’t use Java or Javascripts. In keeping with its FOSS policy, FastMail has implemented the Clam anti-virus, which is free/libre; but there are also a lot of opinions online that it is less effective with viruses than the corporate, paid-for anti-virus software. In its documentation, though, the mail service defends its use of ClamAV thus: “The best e-mail gateway anti-virus software. Don’t fall for the claims of anti-virus software vendors. They specialise in anti-virus software running on Windows machines, not in detecting viruses in e-mails, which ClamAV does better than any of the commercial products.” It’s an intriguing claim.
And now, the sobering news. So far we’ve been going rah-rah over FastMail, but, depending upon your e-mail habits, there’re a few points that need to be pondered over really hard. If prolonged GMail use has given you the habit of never deleting messages, no matter how dated or banal, you won’t like FastMail a smidgeon. It gives its free accounts— ready?—10 MB space each. (Only paid accounts get 6GB or less, depending on tariff scales at www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html.) What? In this age? But there are still people who like that constrained e-mail space: it forces them to clear out the garbage. Moreover, to trip up spammers, FastMail imposes a limit of 80 messages sent per hour, exceeding which it temporarily freezes your (free) account. Also, there’s a 40 MB monthly transfer quota for sent messages plus attachments. This is enough for the average free account user, as FastMail demonstrates in its documentation (divide 40 MB with, say, 50 KB, which is the average size of an e-mail). This includes attachments; which must, moreover, not exceed 10 MB, sent or received.
Even receiving certain e-mails is disallowed. Specifically, image-rich e-mails from Yahoo Groups, because they apparently take up too much space. Finally, FastMail doesn’t give free account holders access to its SMTP servers; to use FastMail with an e-mail client like Thunderbird, therefore, free account-holders must use their Internet service provider’s SMTP server. Otherwise, they must use the Web interface.
Private users might not mind this hobbling, but companies might. So, this hobbling is intended to get them to buy the upgraded service.
Final cut
FastMail is the very opposite of GMail or Inbox. It doesn’t offer a Texan ranch for space; there’s a little space, and you’ve to make regular deletions to keep it unoccupied. The reason to use the free account, then, is its power and simplicity, and its free/open philosophy. And despite FastMail’s hobblings and nobblings, there’s a refreshing mom-and-pop corner shop cosiness in its complete transparency. Here is a service, you feel, that tells you everything; and that won’t land you in a soup. Not that others will, but you’re especially reassured with this one. Besides being fast and feature-rich, it uses free software. Well, I’ll be keeping my account!
(Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License)
