Thread: The e-mail service: A review

I tested FastMail's free e-mail service. FastMaillives up to its name; on my Sify Broadband connection of 128 KBps at the most, FastMail usually displays the inbox within seconds, while GMail is still 'Loading'. The reason is that FastMail is devoid of Ajax, Flash, and other technology that's hard on the bandwidth. It's interface is well-endowed and nncluttered, but best described as bare. If you've ever used e-mail in the early days of its popularity in India, you'll get a mental flashback by using FastMail. But FastMail has modem features. Besides e-mail,itoffersfile storage, anotepad,an address book, photo-and-file upload and other options, all nicely laid out in tabs (Figure 1).

Few e-mail interfaces are as well thought out as FastMail's-perhaps user feedback is to be credited here. Every common mail-related option is laid out on screen. The add-attachment box, subject box, and the CC and text boxes are open by default. Recently-used addresses are available in a quick-view pane. While most e-mail services only display a few words, FastMail displays the first few 'lines' of unread messages below them, so you needn't click open untitled e-mails to find out what they say. All these points seem trivial until they save you irksome mouse-clicks.

The interface is not pretty, but you can customise it. There are many colour themes to choose from, some of them user-contributed. Speed is the word at the back-end too; FastMail claims it queues no mail, and that all messages are sent immediately. An excerpt from the FastMail documentation says: "Our pages are generated by our Web application server in 100th of a second. They are sent through a 100 MBps link that has plenty of spare capacity. They then go out to the Internet through network links of seven of the most reliable and most fast backbone providers ... we never have any mail queue (all mail is delivered within seconds)."

So far so good, till we came across a sore point. If you use a free account, FastMail embeds a self-promoting text tagline at the bottom of your sent messages. The tagline is text-only -- no flashing GIFs or embedded links. The e-mail interface does show advertisements above your inbox, but so far I haven't come across the typical loud ones, only an unobtrusive line of text or a sponsored link. FastMail doesn't serve you targeted advertisements (like GMail) either. Having used FastMail a while, you'll suddenly notice the absence of a spam folder in your inbox. Mail from known spammers is blocked automatically at the server level with FastMail's custom filters. That is, for free accounts, spam--or what's detected as spam-isn't delivered to the inbox at all. Paid accounts get the additional benefit of SpamAssassin, an Apache product, for which, FastMail claims a 95 per cent spam blockage rate; this can be customised by the user for greater accuracy. For all accounts, free or paid, images embedded in e-mails are blanked out by default, to throw off spammers, who might have linked to them.

What about security? FastMailleaves no cookies on your computer, and doesn't use Java or Javascripts. In keeping with its FOSS policy, FastMail has implemented the Clam anti-virus, which is free/libre; but there are also a lot of opinions online that it is less effective with viruses than the corporate, paid-for anti-virus software. In its documentation, though, the mail service defends its use of ClamAV thus: "The best e-mail gateway anti-virus software. Don't fall for the claims of anti-virus software vendors. They specialise in anti-virus software running on Windows machines, not in detecting viruses in e-mails, which ClamAV does better than any of the commercial products." It's an intriguing claim.

And now, the sobering news. So far we've been going rah-rah over FastMail, but, depending upon your e-mail habits, there're a few points that need to be pondered over really hard. If prolonged GMail use has given you the habit of never deleting messages, no matter how dated or banal, you won't like FastMail a smidgeon. It gives its free accounts ready?-l0 MB space each. What? In this age? But there are still people who like that constrained e-mail space: it forces them to clear out the garbage.



Moreover, to trip up spammers, FastMail imposes a limit of 80 messages sent per hour, exceeding which it temporarily freezes your (free) account. Also, there's
a 40 MB monthly transfer quota for sent messages plus attachments. This is enough for the average free account user, as FastMail demonstrates in its documentation (divide 40 MB with, say, 50 KB, which is the average size of an e-mail). This includes attachments; which must, moreover, not exceed 10 MB, sent or received.
Even receiving certain e-mails is disallowed. Specifically, image-rich e-mails from Yahoo Groups, because they apparently take up too much space.

Finally, FastMail doesn't give free account holders access to its SMTP servers; to use FastMail with an e-mail client like Thunderbird, therefore, free account-holders must use their Internet service provider's SMTp'server. Otherwise, they must use the Web interface. Private users might not mind this hobbling, but companies might. So, this hobbling is intended to get them to buy the upgraded service.