Dec 24: Twenty five years of Fastmail

This is the twenty-fourth and final post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 23: Ten years of JMAP. Thanks for reading, see you again next year.

As we conclude this year’s Advent posts, we are reflecting back over 25 years! Fastmail was founded in 1999, to fill a gap which existed at the time — in the space between ISPs, slow and ad-riddled free email services, and clunky, bloated Enterprise systems, there was no professional email service for a small business or sophisticated email user.

So we built one! Fastmail: a slick, professional, web-based email service.

In the 25 years since, we have seen many changes in the email landscape and the world around us. The advent of Gmail and conversations as a standard email model. The rise of encryption focused services like Protonmail (with the pros and cons of storing email as opaque, unsearchable blobs). Highly opinionated “reinventions” of email like Hey. And of course the multiple premature announcements that email was dead, to be replaced by the latest new craze.

We were purchased by Opera Software in 2010, but after some changes in Opera’s strategic direction, thankfully a handful of the staff managed to buy the company back in 2013. We then purchased another email service Pobox in 2015, who had been running an email service even longer than us. We have recently finished merging their product into our system; who knew it was going to take so long to integrate everything!

Through all of this we’ve been grateful to have such loyal customers. We regularly hear from customers how much they appreciate the Fastmail service. Our fantastic customer support. The continuous, thoughtful, and well designed improvements to our product. The high performance and reliability of our service. The ongoing commitment to integrity, privacy, and longevity.

The result is that we have a greater than 90% annual renewal rate, and an ongoing stream of new customers from the word of mouth recommendations of existing customers. We have and continue to grow every year in a sustainable and deliberate way. We’re insanely grateful for this. We get to focus on making email better for our customers, to work with and build cool technology — with really smart colleagues. We can solve complex problems, build well-designed solutions, and improve email standards without having to always hustle for the next sale.

It’s an enviable position to be in. Email remains the largest open federated communication network on the internet. Not controlled by a single company. Not part of any walled garden that can change at any time. Through open standards, email allows you to choose the best provider and to move your email where is best for you. As we said in our first post of this series, we will continue to “Make email better”, for our customers and for everyone.

We love our work, and the customers who trust us with their email and make this all possible. So cheers to you, Fastmail’s customers. We get to make email better, the product you use and the ecosystem we all operate in, while having fun and working on interesting problems with great people.

Here’s to another 25 years.