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FastMail.FM supports IMAP access to your email for all account level. We only support POP access for Full and Enhanced users. We highly recommend that you use IMAP where possible.
POP is a very simple protocol that only allows downloading of messages from your Inbox to your local computer. Generally, once transferred, the email is then on your local computer and is removed from FastMail.FM.
IMAP is a much more advanced protocol that allows you to see all your folders on FastMail.FM, and quickly view subjects and message bodies of emails, but delay downloading of larger emails (such as those with attachments) to a later time if you want. IMAP also allows you to synchronise mail folders between your home machine and FastMail.FM on the web, so that you see the same folders and messages wherever and however you access your email.
|
IMAP |
POP |
|
| Flexibility | Can view just message headers, and then choose which messages to download | Have to download all messages at once |
| Can delete/move a message without having to download it | Have to download all messages | |
| Can download just text body of a message | Have to download entire message (including any large attachments) | |
| Synchronisation | Can view messages in all folders | Can only download messages from Inbox |
| Any changes made via web interface or email software (eg move message, add flags, etc) appears in the other automatically | Once downloaded, changes only made on local email software | |
| Can access messages both at home/work, and on the road through the web interface | Once downloaded, can only access messages at home/work | |
| Safety | All messages kept on FastMail.FM servers, including realtime replication to a backup server, and nightly incremental backups of all emails to yet another server kept for 1 week | Once downloaded, copy only exists on your local computer, if it crashes, email is lost |
To understand the power and usefulness of IMAP, we recommend you look through the following example usage scenario using Outlook Express.
FastMail.FM supports both POP and IMAP access to your mail by external clients such as Outlook Express/Netscape/Eudora/Pine/etc. All users get IMAP access, not all users get POP access. See the pricing table for details.
Please see this FAQ entry to understand the differences between POP and IMAP and why we recommend IMAP.
If you already know how to setup your email client, see the server details FAQ entry for the server details you need.
For detailed instructions on setting up IMAP access to your FastMail.FM account, check the following links depending on your email software:
If your email client is not listed here, you'll have to check its documentation on how to setup an IMAP server and see the server details FAQ entry.
FastMail.FM supports WAP at http://wap.fastmail.fm/
You can access the beta WAP service (sometimes used for testing new features) at http://wap.fastmail.fm/beta/
Login with your full email address and password (you can replace the '@' with '=', '/' or '#' if your phone doesn't support entering @). Alternatively, use 'wap.YOURDOMAIN.EXT' as the hostname and just use your username, the same as with web.
You can create a bookmark to log you in automatically as follows:
http://wap.fastmail.fm/?U=username&P=password&F=INBOX
NOTE: while guests can use this service to view the email, they can not send. This is a technical limitation caused by the fact that the WAP software uses the regular SMTP servers.
NOTE: the WAP server supports https, but uses a self-signed certificate, so you will certainly get complaints from your phone about the certificate being used. Unless you use 'wap.fastmail.fm' you will also get a complaint about the name not matching, and some phones will refuse to communicate securely at all.
NOTE: if you enter your username or password incorrectly you will get PHP's totally insane error message "too many failed login attempts" error. This really just means your login details were wrong. Please check that your phone is not automatically capitalizing the first letter of your username or password.
We've made our setup instructions above as clear as possible, and with the generous help of volunteers, we've covered more email clients than any other system we know. All the configurations have been tested and used by other people and are known to work.
It's impossible for us to diagnose every problem with every email client, computer, network connection, etc, so unfortunately we can't provide individual help to users. Things to try:
Incoming mail server and port
POP
Note that "Guest" and "Member" users DO NOT have POP access to their accounts. Use IMAP instead or upgrade to "Full" or "Enhanced" access.
IMAP
Outgoing mail server and port
SMTP
NOTE: Non-paying users cannot use the FastMail.FM SMTP server, but paying users may. Non-paying users must use their ISP's SMTP server instead.
The documentation for setting up each client shows where to put the appropriate information. To understand how this is possible, see this page for an explanation of how email is sent and received on the Internet.
We support encryption via SSL on port 465, as well as TLS over the any of the other ports listed above.
Our SMTP ports are for authenticated SMTP only, you'll need to make sure your software supports authenticated SMTP and also setup a username and password.
If your IMAP client supports it, you should try and set up the following folders
FastMail.FM has a special proxy system whereby you can access each service (POP, IMAP or SMTP) through any port number. The server names are:
IMAP: imap.proxy.fastmail.fm
IMAP/SSL: imaps.proxy.fastmail.fm
POP: pop.proxy.fastmail.fm
POP/SSL: pops.proxy.fastmail.fm
SMTP: smtp.proxy.fastmail.fm
SMTP/SSL: smtps.proxy.fastmail.fm
If you use these server names, you can use any port to access these services. Commonly open ports are 80, 21, 25 and 443. Note that if you use SSL you'll get a warning about a non-matching certificate (it's set to 'www.fastmail.fm'): you can safely ignore this.
If you use Thunderbird, you can use the remember mismatched domains extension to avoid getting the warning message each time.
Note that if you are behind a firewall with no ports open and where the only access to the Internet is through a HTTP proxy server (as is the case at some companies), using the above technique will not work for you. In this case, you can still circumvent this restriction by using a rather advanced technique called http-tunneling, but be warned that this might be considered a violation of your company's regulations. See also this "Firewall avoidance measures" forum thread for more information and some software suggestions.
It depends on the email client. Outlook Express, for instance, is somewhat inefficient. However Mulberry, Netscape 6+, or Mozilla are quite fast. For instance, to read an email with a large attachment, POP or IMAP with OE must download the whole message, whereas other IMAP clients download just the body without the attachment for you to read, and you can then decide to read the attachment. IMAP downloads exactly the same amount of data as POP, so it is not necessarily slower.
POP works poorly with webmail in general. Once a message is retrieved with POP and filed into a local folder, it is now lost from the server. Which means your mail is no longer ubiquitous. Although this may not seem like a big deal at the time, at that one time this year where you desperately need to access an email you've sent or received and you're away from home you'll be thankful for it!
Since anyone who uses the web interface at all should be using IMAP, people who really genuinely need POP are probably not well served by FastMail.FM--almost all ISPs include a standard POP account with their package, and there are many other free POP services around which really have nothing to differentiate them. However we have found that POP is extremely costly to provide for free, because the people who use it are mainly treating it as a free file transfer service to distribute images, movies, and software.
To encourage a 'best practice' configuration and to discourage abuse of our system, we have decided not to provide POP for free accounts. However we do believe in providing complete choice to those who will pay for it, which is why we provide POP to full and enhanced users.
As for authenticated SMTP, all ISPs provide you with an SMTP server to use. We would prefer that people used their ISP's SMTP server--you've paid for it already, after all! Allowing free users to use our SMTP server simply adds to our costs, without providing any benefit to most people other than a slightly simplified setup.
See here
Opera 5/6 doesn't support authenticated SMTP. And it doesn't support IMAP either! :-( We don't recommend using Opera 5/6 for mail. Opera 7 has a much improved email client called M2 which works well. If you are using Opera 5/6, we recommend either upgrading to Opera 7, or try Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org), Netscape 7 (http://www.netscape.com), Eudora (http://www.eudora.com), or Outlook Express (http://www.microsoft.com).
If your external account supports the POP access to it's mail, then you can retrieve mail from that account into FastMail.FM. Most ISP email accounts are accessed using POP. To set up FastMail.FM to retrieve mail from your ISP's POP server, go to the 'Pop Links' screen and read the instructions here
Yes! You create a Pop Link and set the type to 'Hotmail'.
See this Microsoft knowledge base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q198854
Yes. You can access your folders by logging in via POP with a special username+foldername login name. For examle, if you have a folder called "Jokes", you can access this folder via POP by logging in using the special username "yourusername+Jokes@fastmail.fm" Note that folder names are case-sensitive