About FastMail

We will give you, for free, one of the most powerful mail services anywhere on the Internet! Free users get access to everything at the "Guest" service level, which provides all the features necessary for casual email users. If you rely on email on a day-to-day basis, or you need to send and receive large attachments, you'll need to become a member. There are three levels of membership with various privileges. For the complete details, see our complete service level comparison. Here's a quick summary with the most important differences:

Guest account

Free. 10 Meg quota, free access to IMAP (so you can use your own mail software like Outlook Express or Eudora) and web interface! No commercial use permitted.

Member account

$14.95 setup fee, nothing more to pay! 16 Meg quota. Send email without using your ISP using our SMTP server. Fully customisable forwarding service. Multiple 'personalities' to send using different addresses (send from your work address!). Notification window tells you when mail is received. No 'Sent with FastMail.FM' tag on emails. Use your account for personal or business communications.

Full account

$19.95 per year. 600 Meg mail storage quota and 30 Meg file storage quota. All Member level features. POP access if you don't have access to IMAP. Advanced spam filter available. Use multiple different aliases to keep your work, personal, and hobby email separate.

Enhanced account

$39.95 per year. 6 Gig mail storage quota and 2 G file storage quota. All Full level features. Use of your own domain name.

If you refer customers, you can get free upgrades. Refer someone who gets a full account, and get $3, or $6 for an enhanced account, or $0.75 for referring someone who becomes a member. Make sure that they put your user name in the 'referrer' field on the signup page, of course. These credits can be used for getting free account upgrades for yourself and your friends.

How does FastMail compare to other providers?

The webmail providers we tried just weren't suitable for professional people looking for an efficient email system:

Advertising messages added to the bottom of messages are inappropriate for professional communications
Advertising banners and graphics heavy pages mean that pages are slow to load
Simple things take too long (e.g. adding more than one attachment to a message often requires navigating multiple screens)
Attachment sizes are limiting. Many presentations and spreadsheets sent through email are too big for these systems
Many systems won't let you change the reply address in sent messages, which is inconvenient and appears unprofessional
Moving messages between systems or retrieving messages is almost impossible. Most systems don't have POP3 or IMAP access so you can't retrieve your mail with a standard email program. If you want to forward emails, you usually have to do it one at a time

So, we set out to create a system that was designed to be fast and effective. Here are the best features of FastMail

It's fast
- No graphics, no ads and lean HTML pages means that most screens take 2-3 seconds even over a modem. Compare that to 25-30 seconds for other systems or worse if, as is usual, they're vastly overloaded
- Since that's our name (FastMail), we're committed to continuously providing you the fastest email system possible. We understand that you want to get things done, not wait for advertiser's messages to load
It's professional
- No ads or tag-lines in sent messages (except free guest accounts, which must mention 'http://fastmail.fm' somewhere in their signature). You get to choose the signature you want to appear at the bottom of every message. Keep multiple signatures for your work, personal, club, etc. emails
- Use your own work email address as the reply address (if you prefer)
- Use the powerful spelling checker to ensure your email is error-free
- Use the AutoFormat command to format your email including bullet points, indented paragraphs, and so forth
It's unobstructed
- You can send and receive almost unlimited sized messages
- You can get email from as many external providers as you like using POP
- You can redirect (like forwarding, but keeps the original sender intact) as many messages as you want to another email address, rather than having to forward them individually
It's available from everywhere
- FastMail doesn't require cookies, Java, JavaScript, or any other technology. It will work on the browser you find at your hotel room, airport lounge, TV internet, and so forth
It's efficient
- It's designed to get things done for you as fast as possible
- For example, attaching up to 3 files to an email message is available directly from the message composing screen
- Just about every action can be accessed with 2 clicks
- You can happily open multiple windows and browse different folders in different windows at the same time
- If you are reading a message with many large attachments, a single click tells FastMail to compress all the attachments into a single zip file and send it to you
It's externally accessible
- FastMail provides both external POP and IMAP access!
- This means you can retrieve messages to a local client using POP (POP access only available for subscribers)
- Or you can leave messages at FastMail, and access all your folders, Inbox, etc using IMAP compatible mailers such as Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator. Even free guest accounts get IMAP access!

Interested? Just head back to the front page and sign up.

Do you provide internet access as well?

No. We only provide email services, you'll still need an ISP to access the internet from home. "Well my ISP gives me email anyway, why would I use you?" I hear you ask. Most people who use the internet need 3 things:

A way to connect to the internet
A way to surf web-sites
A way to send/receive email

ISP's do 1. Web-browsers, of which there are several free ones you can install on your computer do 2. Most ISP's also do 3, but they tend to do it poorly. Also, if you change ISP, you get a new email address. Annoying.

So we provide a long term, stable, email system independent of where ever you are, and whatever ISP you use. You can get an account with us, and then you have one address you can use if you change ISP's. Also, our system has many advanced features, such as virus protection, spam protection, advanced filters, aliases, ability to host your own domain, ability to access your email at home, work, or from any internet kiosk, etc. No ISP's provide these features.

Why did you create this service?

We started FastMail.FM because we were sick of trying to find a webmail provider that sought to meet our needs, rather than their advertisers' needs. The core features of FastMail are:

It's fast. No graphics, no ads and lean HTML pages means that most screens take 2-3 seconds even over a modem.
You can access your email from home or work with your favourite software, and when you're away from your computer you can access it using any web browser. Using an exciting technology called 'IMAP' your folders and messages are automatically synchronized wherever you go! You can even access your email on a laptop when not connected to the Internet!
It's professional. No ads or tag-lines in sent messages for members (joining fee of US$14.95); use your own email address as the reply address (if you prefer)
It's unobstructed. You can send and receive almost unlimited sized messages. You can get email from as many external providers as you like
It's available from everywhere. FastMail doesn't require cookies, Java, JavaScript, or any other technology. It will work on the browser you find at your hotel room, airport lounge, TV Internet, and so forth (in some places, FastMail does use cookies and JavaScript to make certain tasks easier. It will work just fine if you want to disable these features though)
It's efficient. It's designed to get things done for you as fast as possible
It's externally accessible. You can move batches of emails from FastMail to another service by redirecting them. You can retrieve messages from FastMail using POP3 or view and edit messages on FastMail using IMAP compatible mailers such as Outlook Express and Netscape Communicator.
It's got decent storage limits, up to 100MB of storage for each account.

The best way to learn about FastMail is to try it out--it's free! Just jump on over to the front-page and click the 'Sign Up' link.

What backing does FastMail have? Why do you give away a powerful service for free? Will you go bust?

When you use FastMail.FM you will like it so much that you will tell your friends. And when you discover the power of the advanced features available to paying members, you may well decide to upgrade your account. By providing a great free service, and an even better paid service, everyone wins!

FastMail is a small company of a few dedicated programmers; it isn't currently backed by any large company and is being funded by the programmers involved. This might worry you in this 'dot-bomb' era, but we think it's definitely advantageous:

We have extremely low overheads. We don't have any management layer, marketing department, office space (we work from home), etc. We use high quality open source software that we have modified to suit our needs. Our main expense is server space and Internet bandwidth. Thus we can break even with even a low number of paying users.
We have strategies in place to deal with all aspects of spammers! Many other email services have been taken down by spammers either bombarding the service inwards, or using it to bombard people outwards. We've put dozens of small and large strategies in place to stop both of these, including making automated signups harder, having message receive and transmit rate controls, relay blocking, common spam header blocking, etc, etc.
We're not going for a 'grow huge, fast' strategy. We're looking for reasonably slow growth with good customers. We continually strive to provide a powerful, professional, niche service to people who are sick of under-featured, slow email services that claim to be 'free'. Remember, you always get what you pay for, and 'free' means that either advertisers are paying for your time, bandwidth and attention, or it's a loss leader for some other service they want you to buy. Even in our case, we provide a free account, but of course we'd like you to upgrade to a paid one eventually, or at least pay for membership. Even if you don't, we hope that you recommend us to your friends and relatives; maybe one of them is looking for a full email account, even with a small cost...
We 'eat our own dog food', that is, we use FastMail ourselves. This helps us understand what works and what doesn't on the web. Too many companies think they can translate a standard application interface to a web interface. They also waste time making things ultra pretty, rather than ultra fast and powerful.
And finally, we're creating this site out of fun and enthusiasm, we enjoy doing it, we enjoy getting good ideas from people, we enjoy good feedback and thanks, we're trying to do the best, and create the best site possible. Of course all of this takes time, energy and patience. We have that, we hope you enjoy the results!.

For more information about our background and site details, see this post or this post or this post in FastMail.FM forum at Emaildiscussions.com.

I want some more information? I need some help.

For more information, use the links below.

Contact Information

Forum:	The FastMail.FM forum at EmailDiscussions.com
Email:	support@fastmail.fm - general questions abuse@fastmail.fm - SPAM/UCE problems
Address:	Messaging Engine Pty Ltd Level 20/8 Exhibition St, Melbourne, 3000 Victoria, Australia
Phone:	+61 2 9475 0859
Fax:	+61 2 9475 0859