Fastmail Failed | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail Failed

tdh.me

14 pointsbpierre7 comments

Not giving out a clear error message is ugly and the rest is beyond belief, but [0] clearly mentions a limited number of messages, with more details on [1]. The smallest limit there is 400/800 messages per hour/day and rather ridiculously low traffic limits of 60/120 MB per hour/day.

The former shouldn’t really be a problem but I can see how the latter are difficult not to exceed regularly, especially if free trial accounts have even stricter limits (they are not detailed in [1]).

[0] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/email_resource_limits.html

[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html

Those numbers are for the "ad free" accounts, which are really lightweight anyway. For instance, the ad free accounts only get 100MB of storage for their email anyway, so a 60MB hourly cap is not entirely unreasonable: that's more than half your mailbox. Of course, for 40 cents a month, I think those numbers are pretty reasonable.

More appropriate would be the "full" accounts, which have a much more reasonable 300MB/600MB hourly/daily data quota. Of course, again, mailbox storage is limited to 1GB there... and so on.

I don't think the quotas are unnatural given the relative mailbox sizes. But, for full disclosure, I am a (happy) Fastmail user.

I took the lowest numbers there as some lower lower limit someone could have hit – only the Premium account seems to be somewhat usable from my perspective.

Do you know if and if yes, by how much, trial accounts are further restricted?

I was not aware trial accounts are restricted, and I can't find any info online about it, so...

So far, though, I have been quite impressed with Fastmail. (I have an enhanced account.)

Same here. Really happy with the service and though I don't make intensive usage of mail I have the Enhanced account[1]. Everything works like a charm, it's very customisable at all levels, I've imported successfully all the emails from my old gmail account and is fast as hell. The service really looks promising.

And about the tech support, I've sent a few mails and they have answered me properly. Sometimes the mail was the tipically pre-made made one though. But it have detailed information about how to solve my problem, so that's cool.

[1] I'm using the 2 month trial. I haven't introduced the credit card yet. Even paying an account is sooo cheap.

Setting up SMTP and IMAP servers isn't that hard[1], and you get a lot of cool features that you don't get anywhere else, like piping email into shell scripts, or the ability to selectively bounce spam (instead of storing it in a spam folder) and reading email via mutt in a pinch (I much prefer that to web frontends). You also get to learn a lot - every hacker should be able to send an email via telnet at least.

[1] It can be hard to get everyone to accept your email, but you can just relay it through an upstream provider like Messagelabs[2] or your ISP to solve that problem.

[2] Not a recommendation, just an example. I'm sure there are better ones out there.

If you get a server/VPS at e.g. 1&1, Hetzner or basically any other place, you won’t have any problems sending mail. Those are usually priced from ~10€/month, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Just make sure not to run an open relay, but that is rather trivial.

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