If you are looking for a new email provider, you are half-way to stumbling onto a great discovery... if you are anything like me (distrusting of EVERYTHING), you are probably suspicious of an email provider you never heard of. The .fm ending, the foreign location, and even ALL the great reviews....
You would be very wrong, and would be missing an amazing service I hope to have forever....
I took a chance after finding lycos and yahoo so lacking (actually, I would have just taken yahoo-premium if I could find an address that was even CLOSE to my name.... at the end, I would have had to add 7 numbers, and that is just not cool)
Fastmail.fm is simply the fastest, coolest email service I have ever used, including applications like outlook and netscape (though those can be linked to fastmail)
You might find all the rave reviews suspicious (if you are a new yorker like me!) but they are really ALL true from what I have seen... the group of users ( I have no idea how large), LOVE the service, and find it such a BIG improvement over ANYTHING else, that we can’t stop raving about it too friends....
And you don’t HAVE to have the .fm ending at all, there MANY possible endings to choose, but I went with fm to help promote the product (in my mind) and because it is distinctive (I was able to get my-first-name@fastmail.fm, so I needed something distinctive!)
Your biggest concern could be that since you don’t know it, it might not be around forever... I share that concern, but it stinks, I now realize: 1) with spam nowadays, you will likely have to change providers every couple of years anyway, even if this thing went under, 2) more importantly, fear of a provider not being around in 10 years is not a good reason to suffer out on the great services this site has, vs. the crappy services of big name rivals.... 3) with the dedicated user base and following, this service could last incredibly long, or it is bought out by a big rival in which case you are safe either way...
Whatever, my advice: just try it for a while, and I guarantee you will be blown away! (only thing, I went with the $19.95/yr level, cause it is cheap and it is my main email... that is the perhaps the biggest bargain I ever got on the internet... I am not sure the free levels are as good, but even they will be better than the premium services of yahoo/hotmail.... as in all of life, you get what you pay for, but here, you get sooo much more)
Good luck, and I hope this helped you...