Business and Family accounts released

We’re proud to release our business and family accounts feature for full general use. We’ve been testing these new features for many months on our beta server, and already have several hundred families and businesses using the new features.

As a summary, there’s basically 3 new types of accounts being released today:

1. Family accounts
2. Business accounts
3. Reseller/IT support accounts

Family and business accounts are similar, the main difference is just the name and size of accounts that they each can hold.

Business accounts

• Basic - 60M email, 2M files (eg documents)
• Standard - 600M email, 100M files (eg documents)
• Professional - 8G email, 500M files (eg documents)

Family accounts

• Lite - 30M email, 6M photos (eg photo galleries)
• Everyday - 400M email, 600M photos (eg photo galleries)
• Superior - 4G email, 6G files (eg photo galleries)

Business and Family Features

Each family or business can have any number and mix of each corresponding account type. Each family or business can also have one or more administrators. The administrator(s) of the family/business can create/edit/delete accounts easily via the web interface and all billing is centralised.

The main advantages of having your accounts under a family/business are:

1. Management of multiple accounts from a single screen
2. One or multiple administrators per family/business
3. Sharing of email and files folders between users in a
   family/business
4. Individual address books per user, and a global address book that’s
   shared between all users in the family/business
5. Family/business login screen. If you use your own domain, you can
   point http://mail.example.com to our servers and you’ll get a
   small login screen that lists your family/business name

Folder sharing allows you to share folders between any accounts in a family or business with the same domain. Due to technical limitations, you can’t share between users in different businesses/families, or between users in a business/family and not in a business/family, or between users in the same business/family with different domains.

Just login to the account you want to share the folder from and go to
Options -> Folders -> Sharing / Access control and enable sharing for the folder and select who you want to share it with. You can do the same on the Options -> Files -> Sharing for file storage folders

Migrating existing accounts

If you want to migrate any existing FastMail accounts to a family or business, you can just create the family/business, and import the accounts into the new family/business after you’ve created it. We’ve done this for hundreds of accounts already, and there’s no interruption to service at all. You get a pro-rata refund of any remaining subscription, so no money is lost during the import process.

If you want to migrate external accounts to a FastMail business, you can just create the business, add the domain and users at FastMail, and then use our forwarding tunnel and IMAP migrate feature (Options -> Migrate IMAP) to migrate users across one by one, and finally switch the MX records for the domain to point to us

Reseller accounts

A reseller account is just a standard business account that’s been marked as a reseller, and is then able to create sub-businesses. So the way this works is that you create a business account for yourself, and then we mark your account as a reseller account, and you can create sub-businesses and manage those sub-businesses from the one screen.

This is designed for businesses that manage the IT infrastructure of a number of other businesses and want to keep each business logically separated but be able to manage them all from one place. The advantage of this over putting all the accounts in one business are:

• Each business gets a separate billing cycle, so when a new business
  comes along, you don’t have to worry about being half way through a
  billing cycle
• Each business has a separate name, user list, domains list, aliases
  list, distribution lists, global address book, etc. This allows you
  to keep each business nicely separated from each other
• Because each business has a separate name, you can direct each
  business to their customised “business login” screen

Documentation and questions?

The current documentation is rater limited. More documentation is coming soon.

• A summary of feature:
  http://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/features.html#business
• A discussion of the design decisions:
  http://robm.fastmail.fm/business.html

If you have any questions, please email businessandfamily@fastmail.fm