After having spent some time on fastmail, on tends to think, ’’Is there anything that can be better ?’’ Its a near perfect email provider.
Such service is the need of the hour. When all other mail providers are in competing with each other over who is displaying more ads, animations, pop-up’s etc...etc.. in short anything that is nuisance. Fastmail is a gentleman amoungst all these, who is committed not to display any graphics or ads on it.
Some of the advantages are
10 MB Storage
Very few providers give so much space. The only I can recall are mail.com and indiatimes.com and on both the sites you spend more time downloading the ads rather than your mails. Need I say more ?
Very fast
Remember why rediff became very popular initially ? They made a trick. Instead of taking a user to a page which displayed all the folders they took the user directly to the inbox. So compared to other sites users would feel that they could access their mails faster.
Same is the case with Fastmail. But they have don’t it even more elegantly. You can do most of the things on a single screens like moving mails between folders, creating folders and host of other options available on the drop-down.
Customization
I will list only those that makes it different from others.
<U>Preview of the mails</U>: See how generous they are. Allowing you to read mail without taking you to any other page. How many can do that ?
<U>Rows to display</U>: You can view up to 500 mails on a single screen. This is something much more than you can accumulate in your 10MB. I am trying to point out is there is so less navigation involved which makes it very fast.
<U>Search</U>: Now this really makes it like any of your desktop application. Its so convenient when you want to find any particular mail.
<U>Poll</U>: You can set the inbox to refresh it self after a certain amount of time.
Resource usage and BW usage is shown on the inbox screen. Very smart thing.
Some technical stuff
How its better on the technical side. Let me tell you some finer points. As not graphics etc are used this is very fast.
See the way this sends attachments. They did it very smartly. All the attachments are attached at one go and send along with the email. Others do it one by one. But attaching one by one takes time. All the email providers use the same ’’multi-part request’’ to upload the attachments to the servers. Multi part requests can upload single as well as multiple files. No one thought about this but Fastmail. KUDOS !!
Also one can access mail by POP as well as IMAP, though the former is available in paid option.
Icing on the cake
These this are not a necessity, but makes more fun for the use to use this site.
<U>Adjusting the screen size</U>,
<U>Stylesheets</U> So many of them and the best part is that you can even code your own .css file and the display will the accordingly change. This is a truely customised and personalized display.
<U>Address auto complete</U> Very useful. For the lazybones out there.
There is so much to write about it.. but the points written above are important ones.
I too use the same mail service :). Take my word for it friends, you won’t find anything better.
There is however a small bug in the application and that is when you change a particular css in the appearence options the change is not reflected untill you save it twice.
-Kaustubh