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FastMail.FM's systems track resource abuse and automatically disable relevant accounts. Things we keep track of include but are not limited to; the number of emails sent and received, amount of bandwidth used by sending and receiving emails, number and size of emails retrieved from external POP servers, number of signups, number of logins, etc.
You should not sign up if you plan to use FastMail.FM for sending or receiving hundreds of messages per hour, such as for spamming. Also we do not accept messages from YahooGroups that contain large attachments such as photos, movies, or music files, except for full and enhanced accounts.
What we do offer is a fast, reliable email service with good features and support. We recommend you read about FastMail.FM if you want to know more.
The following table shows the main limits for each service level. Click on the link on the left of each row for more information on the particular limit:
| Guest | Member | Full | Enhanced | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly message quota | 80 | 200 | 1000 | 2000 |
| Hourly transfer quota | 20MB | 30MB | 150MB | 500MB |
| Monthly
transfer quota (expires at the end of each month) |
40MB | 80MB | 300MB | 1000MB |
| Mailing list binaries allowed | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
See this link for detailed information on why and how bandwidth is tracked, and limitations you should be aware of.
See our pricing table for more details.
If you reach 50% of a particular hourly limit (number of emails sent, hourly transfer quota) you'll be sent a warning email (both to your FastMail.FM account, and your existing/backup email address). If you reach 100% of an hourly quota, your account will automatically be locked for one hour. This is automatic, and cannot be disabled for individual accounts. If you reach a limit, you should wait for an hour for your account to be automatically re-enabled.
When you reach 75% of your monthly bandwidth quota, you'll be sent a warning email (both to your FastMail.FM account and your existing/backup email address). You should probably upgrade your account, or purchase additional bandwidth at this point. If you reach 100% of your monthly bandwidth quota (including excess bandwidth your've bought), you'll have sending/receiving of email disabled for your account. If you reach 150% of your monthly quota, your account will be locked until the end of the month.
Yes you can, but you should be careful. Safelists often generate A LOT of email traffic, which can cause your account to reach our hourly quota limits.
If you plan to use safelists, you should signup for an top-level account, and also make sure that you don't signup to so many lists that you receive over 1000 emails each hour.
The cost of each service level is shown in our pricing table.
Comparing a standard web-hosting provider with us, a specialist email provider, is like comparing apples and oranges. While on the surface we may seem more expensive, in reality we're cheaper than other specialist IMAP-enabled email providers.
If you rely on your email working, being universally accessible, and fast, then you won't find a better solution. We're continuously aiming to be the most reliable, fastest, best supported and most accessible email provider around.
We've got 7x redundant network links, 2x redundant mail servers (in different continents), 4x redundant name servers, Cyrus IMAP ('+' addressing, full rules...), support forum for email, graphics-free auto-compressing webmail, full server-side searching/filtering, etc
Our web pages are extremely fast. Our pages are generated by our web application server in 1/100th of a second. They are sent through a 100Mbps link which has plenty of spare capacity. They then go out to the Internet through network links through seven of the most reliable and fastest backbone providers. The mail delivery server itself is IBM's Secure Mailer, possibly the fastest and most reliable in the world, and we never have any mail queue (all mail is delivered within seconds). All web pages are compressed before sending, and there are no graphics to send.
And we've got the most powerful web interface around. And we keep enhancing the service so there's new cool stuff every week. And we've got a well- supported forum with an active community.
The user name is the name that you will login with and send email to. It can only contain lower-case letters, numbers, and _. Depending on the service level you selected above, it must be a minimum length as shown in our pricing table.
While many people like short or common names, you might actually want to avoid these. Spammers have a habit of sending emails at random to <short-name>@fastmail.fm. Unfortunately we often can't stop these sort of randomly sent emails, and you might find that you end up with more spam than you might otherwise expect.
One other important point to be aware of is the use of _ in your username. Paid users get access to their own sub-domain (see here). So if you signup as "johncitizen@fastmail.fm", you can send email to <anything>@johncitizen.fastmail.fm. However, the domain name standard says that Internet domain names are not allowed to have _ in them, so if you choose a username with an _, you won't have access to the sub-domain feature.
Your password should be secure. Amongst other things this that means at least seven letters, not based on a dictionary word and not just a few characters repeated.
You need to type your password in twice, in order to be sure that you entered it correctly.
Guest level users MUST enter a valid, existing email address, where we will send a confirmation message. This helps combat email abuse. Borrow a friend's address to use as a backup account if you have no existing email address. This email will contain a hyperlink you MUST click on to activate your account.
Paying accounts SHOULD enter a valid existing email address. This address is where we will send your password if you forget it, and where any quota or resource warning messages will be sent.
We don't distribute your email address to any external sources; we will send email to it only for the following purposes:
Please be careful when you enter an address. We've been receiving a lot of bounced messages due to over quota accounts, old accounts that are no longer active, mistyped names, etc. If you want to change your email address that the confirmation is sent to you because the first one didn't arrive for some reason, simply sign up again with the same username, password, and full name, but enter a different current email address, and the confirmation email will be resent to that email address.
This is your full name. This will be attached to your outgoing emails you send to people. Most email programs and systems will display this instead or as well as your email address.
If another FastMail.FM user referred you to us, enter their user name here. We keep track of people who refer others to provide them with some rewards. Tell your friends about FastMail.FM and receive FastMail.FM rewards! ($0.75/$3.00/$6.00 for referring members/full/enhanced accounts).
For the usual legal reasons, you have to agree to the full terms of service shown here. However, you can read the following to get a general idea of what they are. You should not consider these a substitute for the real ones however:
To complete the creation of your account, agree to the conditions of service above by clicking the Signup button.
For a non-paying account signup, you will be sent an email to your existing email address with a URL/hyperlink you must click on or enter into your web browser to activate your account. For a paying account signup, you will be taken to another screen where you can enter your credit card details. Once they have been confirmed, you will be able to use your account immediately.