Opera acquires e-mail service Fastmail.fm

Fastmail has always been a small company, there are just 3-4 main developers (myself, Bron, Richard and recently in the last year, Kurian), and a couple of support staff scattered around world. For that small size, I think we've managed to build a pretty great product with lots of niche and power features, loyal users, and apart from a small disaster in 2006 (2-3 day outage for a big chunk of users), we've also been incredibly reliable, especially in recent years.

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/lzdx4pr0pdhk/ http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html

Fastmail was nicely profitable, but not spectacularly so. We're basically all geeks, and we don't have a marketing or sales department that can grow our customer base significantly (we tried, but it didn't work out, and we probably should have put more effort in, but didn't... because we probably preferred to spend time just building neat stuff, or fixing that edge case bug, or doing that fun thing... like I said, geeks).

I think we had to face facts a bit, we were a small fish with limited resources in a market that has become severely more competitive in recent years. We needed to invest a bunch of time and money in updating our interface, and adding new features (especially better mobile syncing).

And coincidentally, it's around that time that Opera came along and started talking to us. Despite being half a world apart, there's a lot of fit between the companies. They use a lot of perl, we do to. They're a company run by technology people, creating a product that's loved by geeks, is highly customisable, has a loyal fan base, and despite it's small size, punches above it's weight. I think that describes us pretty much as well.

So the timing was right, and Opera have an interest in picking up email as a core competency, and a bunch of ideas on what they want to improve, what they want to build. The other Fastmail guys were also interested in new opportunities, and we're all becoming Opera staff and are committed to working there for a few years at least. There's already plans for some staff to move to Norway to work, a change of life after 5 years of just 3 of us in a single office (apparently the Norwegian lessons are paying off... Jeg vil gjerne et øl til)

So it'll be an interesting change, and something new I'm looking forward to. I've been working for Fastmail for 10 years now. It's been a great time. I've loved building the product and the company. Like anything, there's been ups (it's fun developing a site that customers really love and tell you about) and downs (some people are addicted to being able to access their email, and running a 24/7 email service means that if people can't get to their email for even just 1 minute, you'll start hearing about it). After 10 years, it'll be strange having a boss again. I've met a bunch of the Opera people, and it'll be really great working with them. I know the other staff are looking forward to it as well.

It'll also be great to have Neil on board as well. He worked for us over a couple of summers, and basically designed the entire "new" web interface, all the HTML, CSS and JS. We've already got 80% of a whole new AJAX interface done (remember in programming though, the first 80% takes 80% of the time, the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the time), and I'm looking forward to completely finishing that off, and working on a bunch of new stuff.

Hmmm, this story went on longer than I expected. Hope it's interesting to someone...

For mails generated by user interaction, eg. "You have a new answer to your question.", they have the limit of 2000 per hour. Can cover you for the first 2.000 - 3.000 users. And mail from their servers don't trigger spam filters at Google, Hotmail etc.

I hope they keep the Business accounts running. Here's the features and pricing table:

http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

On the other hand, I've been using the paid Fastmail service for over 4 years now and one thing they did head and shoulders above the bigger players was their service and support. Plus they were always pretty geeky, making sure the expert user had lots of configuration options to tweak every possible thing. Their sieve filtering was perhaps the best out there and the old web interface rocks.

What I fear is Opera trying to make FM into a mass consumer product losing the technical edge and going for the more flashy features like online chats rather than putting in better sieve capabilities or something like better Pine/Alpine support. How I wish this doesn't kill FM (I've prepaid for 2 years more). I would hate to make a email service switch since that is my primary communication medium online.

I am displeased that the FAQ doesn't mention any relevant privacy concerns, even though for many people the fact that FM was a small company with a good track record and privacy policy was an important reason to choose the service.

I also recognize the dismay of this comment:

- 'FastMail's practical approach to user privacy has always been to be extremely protective of customer privacy'. ...or we may just sell your all of your data to a third party, giving you zero days notice or an option to cancel without refund.

I really wished they would have at least given us some time to figure out what we want to do.

I admit that once Gmail started offering IMAP support I started migrating over to Gmail, but I still use my fastmail accounts for other purposes.