Exciting News about Pobox and FastMail

This article was originally published as part of the Pobox blog. Pobox was acquired by Fastmail in 2015.

Dear Customers,

It is with great excitement that I am writing to tell you about a new era at Pobox. After 20 years, I am incredibly pleased to announce that Pobox is joining the FastMail family to bring you the very best in independent email service.

As the email gurus among you know, when people discuss great places to get email, the company virtually always mentioned in the same breath with Pobox is FastMail. Quite a few of you are already both our customers! They are experts in IMAP, have an incredible webmail interface, and a full complement of smartphone apps, supporting push notifications, robust calendars and contacts, and other features you’ve told us are important to you.

We’ll be adding our expertise in email forwarding and personal domains. Together, we’ll be pooling our knowledge on deliverability, security and the robust and speedy email delivery we’re both known for.

What changes are coming?

While it all sounds great from a big-picture perspective, I know you are all most interested in how your services may change.

For Pobox Basic and Plus customers, you shouldn’t see any changes — our plans for the foreseeable future are to continue running all Pobox services as they stand today.

For Mailstore customers, there will be changes, and I hope you’ll agree that they are a significant upgrade in features! Over the next few months, we’ll be migrating your mailboxes to the FastMail platform — adding their great webmail interface, access to their smartphone apps, improved calendars and more.

Current accounts will continue to have access to today’s prices through 2017 (or your current expiration date, whichever is later.)

Why now?

Any acquisition always prompts questions. I will start by saying Pobox is doing great. Interest in independent email is high and growing each year, as the many of you who have joined in the last several years know.

That said, we are a small company, and our tagline from the start has been “lifetime email”. To me, securing a future where accounts could truly last a lifetime meant joining forces with a larger entity — especially one who had our same values at their heart. Two years ago, FastMail bought themselves back from Opera, after Opera had a change of direction. That signaled to me the commitment of their management team and staff to the kind of email you expect. A chance encounter by our technical leads at a conference indicated a shared philosophy (and programming language!) After several months of regular communication with their team, I feel very confident that this move will mean Pobox will be here to provide your email service for many, many years to come.

The staff will be staying on, and we are happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have that I haven’t already addressed. While I know there is always concern going into any change of control, I hope all of you will end up agreeing that FastMail is a great steward for the service you already love!

Still in love with email since 1995, Helen Horstmann-Allen

President IC Group pobox@pobox.com https://www.pobox.com