At Fastmail, we pride ourself on our experienced and knowledgeable customer support team. We aim to help customers as much as possible with their Fastmail issues. There are a few things to know before you contact our support team that will help you get the most out of your experience and keep things running smoothly.
Beware of scams
We only provide support via email through our support form.
At this time we do not have a customer service phone number. Any offers of phone support for Fastmail is likely a scam and may lead to attackers asking to access your computer.
We will never offer to fix your problems by remotely accessing your computer. This is a known common scam (even Microsoft experiences these tech scams). The attacker will charge you for software you don't need to fix a problem you don't actually have (best case), or install malicious programs on your computer (worst case).
We will never ask you for your password. This is a sign of a phishing email.
We will never ask you for your complete credit card information. In limited circumstances we may ask for the last four digits only of the card number and the name listed on the credit card, but we do not need any additional information than this. Anyone asking for your complete credit card number is likely a scammer.
Email coming from us is marked with a green tick in the web interface. If you're not sure if an email is from us or from a scammer, log on through the web interface and look for the green tick of authenticity.
Support limitations
We are unable to provide support to users in the following cases:
- Abusive behavior
- External software clients (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Apple Calendar, etc.)
- Browser extensions, plugins, addons, etc.
- Older browsers
- Discontinued operating systems
- Social media
More information on each of these can be found below.
Abusive behavior
We will always treat our customers with respect, and provide honest and straightforward answers to support questions.
After some unfortunate incidents, we must be clear that we will not respond to, or engage with, people or customers that threaten, abuse, or defame our staff in any way. We reserve the right the deplatform anyone who chooses to threaten, abuse, or defame our staff.
External software
Over time, we've found that most third party email clients are buggy or have poor user interface issues in one way or another. This includes popular software like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail. We cannot help with every bug or scenario you may encounter using these clients. We provide the protocols to access your email/calendar/contacts and we offer step-by-step setup instructions on how to set up popular clients. However, if you use one of them, you're expected to set up and manage it on your own.
Additionally, when things do go wrong, we can't access your machine to see what the problem is and debugging the problems remotely isn't feasible. The best we can offer in most cases is to suggest you delete your Fastmail account from the client and re-add it. This fixes all sorts of problems because the client often has corrupted local information.
Commonly reported problems that we cannot help with include:
- Microsoft Outlook takes several hours to sync
- Apple Mail deletes the password
- Apple Mail deletes mail from the server
- Most mail clients do not support sending from aliases or unsubscribing from certain folders - try Thunderbird.
We recommend using our web interface, which we are always able to help with.
Browser extensions, plugins and addons
Many browsers and email clients these days allow addons or extensions that add additional functionality to the product. Unfortunately they are regularly quite buggy and often cause subtle and hard to track down issues that may impact Fastmail usage.
If we see reports about a bug using the Fastmail web interface with a web browser that we know normally works fine, our usual first check is to ask you to disable all add-ons/extensions/plugins in the browser and try again:
- Firefox troubleshooting
- Chrome (turn off individually)
- Edge
- Safari - go to Preferences → Extensions, turn off each one individually.
Disabling add-ons/extensions usually fixes the problem.
Older browsers
We can't provide support with our web interface if you use old or unsupported web browsers. We will always support the latest versions of the common web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Opera. All of these browsers will automatically and continuously update themselves to the latest version. We recommend that you do not disable this feature, and ensure that you keep your browser up to date. We support:
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Opera
- Safari (included with macOS on Apple Mac computers)
- Edge (included with Windows on PC computers).
More information on browser support.
Older versions of these browsers are often known to be buggy and insecure, and we can't work around every bug. We make the best effort possible to support all browsers, but we can't guarantee that all features will work, and we can't help with any issues on unsupported or older browsers.
Discontinued operating systems
Operating systems that have been discontinued generally do not receive security or application updates and are thus stuck with buggy software that is often a security risk and/or lacks modern features. Again, we make the best effort possible to support all operating systems, but we can't guarantee that all features will work, and we can't help with any issues on discontinued operating systems. We will always support the latest versions of popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows and macOS.
Social media
We do not provide personal support on Twitter or Facebook. We are happy to provide answers to general questions on our Twitter and our Facebook; however, questions that need detailed answers and troubleshooting are best addressed through email or our online support form.
To provide the best possible troubleshooting for any issues you're experiencing, we need a detailed description of what's happening along with information about your account, which can't be shared easily through social media. We ask that you get in touch with our support team directly through email or our online support form when you are experiencing problems with your account or when you have a complex question.