A brief history of Fastmail

Fastmail has been offering the human alternative for email for over 20 years.

We are dedicated to the idea that everyone deserves a positive experience with their email. Email is the key to your online identity, and it needs to be reliable and private.

Human to human email

Fastmail began in 1999, offering a modern and robust webmail option that gave users control over their own data. Security and privacy have always been key parts of our service. We have kept this focus over the years while also making improvements to our product to provide a better experience for our customers. In 2012 the Fastmail interface moved from HTML-only web view to the powerful and modern AJAX-based web application that allowed users to get more from their webmail experience. In 2018 we made another leap forward with our powerful JMAP based interface which now allows us to make new features that are natively supported in the standard. We are always looking at new technologies and ways to bring new features to our customers and new technologies to the email industry.

With a subscription based service paid for by customers, Fastmail has no split loyalties. We do not make money selling customer data to advertising companies—we just build the best email products possible for our customers.

Fastmail's contribution to email

Fastmail believes in the open standards process. Good technology should be available to everyone, and not kept behind a walled garden. In recent years, too many companies have been making their technology available only to their own customers. This means that users are locked into products built only by a particular company, and it can be confusing and frustrating to synchronize different services.

Open technology standards improves things for everyone. Fastmail has recently been involved in the creation of a new email standard, JMAP, that is set to replace the often difficult to manage combination of IMAP, POP, and SMTP. In making JMAP an open standard, we can ensure everyone can benefit, and choose the email service that works best for them.

Fastmail is also involved in the development of the open standard Cyrus email server. Open source helps us to make our own products better while contributing to the industry as a whole.

Looking to the future

Fastmail has a commitment to our customers and to the industry as a whole to provide a quality email service for human communication. We aim to have a solid technical foundation on which to build products needed by real people. With no split loyalties, our customers are our priority and our biggest asset.

Fastmail will continue to provide the human-centric alternative for email, and will continue to work with the industry to support more open standards and make technology that benefits everyone.

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