What do you do if you want a top-notch e-mail service, but you can’t find one? Australian management consultant Jeremy Howard had an unusual answer — he created one of his own! FastMail.FM was in beta for three years, before launching in April 2002; I became a member about two months before it launched. For free (Guest) users it has an impressive array of features (10Mb of space, both web and IMAP access, server-side filtering, a large number of style sheets to make the web interface look just about whatever way you want it to), but a modest payment of US$14·95 (that’s one-off, not per month) gets 16Mb of space, SMTP access (so that one can send e-mail from one’s own e-mail client, instead of having to use the web interface) ability to edit one’s filter code directly, and more benefits. Still more benefits (bigger mailboxes, virus scanning, spam prevention, access to e-mail technical support) are available to those who pay monthly.
Monthly payments also give POP access, but few people who’ve used IMAP will want to go back... FastMail is also one of only two e-mail services good enough to have an independent discussion forum, in which Jeremy, his business partner Rob Mueller, and support team Kirill and Onno regularly participate, so problems don’t fester unsolved for weeks or even days. And as Jeremy is a businessman as well as a programmer, FM is on a solid financial footing and is here to stay. Why then should anyone suffer the inadequacies of Hotmail?