Email services

Updated June 2020, adding links, updating Fastmail ownership, changing tenses. Updates are indented and in italics.

Recently in 2013, when things regarding PRISM started popping up in the news I saw many tweets from people musing on what non-US email solutions there were that could be used. <FT.com> <The Guardian> <TechCrunch> <TheVerge>

I don’t have a Gmail account.

When I first posted this I was using Google’s wider services (blogger / blogspot) to publish my blog, and had had an account for ages before doing anything with it. I had attempted a blog several times but not really done anything with it. When I first posted this comment I noted I might move away from blogger’s services in the future.

I’m not sure who said it but “if you’re not paying for it then you are the customer”, it is a quote that is somewhat over used when discussing “free” online services, yet it’s still an apt quotation.

With email I have gone through a few different free email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo! along with some smaller free email providers which no longer exist like start.com.au (though I have linked to it via the Wayback Machine so you can see the early 2000s design) and also ones that came with my internet service provider (ISP) or ones that were connected to my ISP’s services.

None were exactly what I wanted, after shifting through various providers I wanted something that was permanent and wasn’t tied to a specific service (like ISP-based services) and wasn’t as bloated, busy or asked compromises of you as a user as some email providers had become.

Eventually I settled on FastMail.FM, as they’re an Australian company, who are Australia-based, and continue to be an Australian company (after passing into Opera Software ownership for a few years).

When I wrote this Fastmail had recently come under Opera Software, which when I wrote this was a Norwegian company, primarily known for its web browser. Since then Opera Software’s browser and brand was sold to a Chinese consortium.

FastMail did offer free email addresses/services in 2013. I, however pay for the email services from them.

In 2013 Fastmail still offered free email services, which they no longer offer, instead there is a free trial period of 30 days.

In 2013 I paid $20 USD a year to FastMail to provide my email services, for that I get what I want. No adverts, IMAP and 1GB of email storage plus other things like 100 MB file storage (separate from the email storage).
The other thing that I use are its “aliases” function.
These are basically email redirects, so they look like regular email addresses “whatever@fastmail.fm” (there’s 50+ domains to choose from though) and then that email directs into your main email address – the one you sign in with.

This I find brilliantly useful for things I need to sign up for that I might need logins for but don’t want to be endlessly contacted for. Or I can direct these emails into certain folders from these emails addresses and deal with them later.

Now, of course you could manage these sorts of things with email/spam filters, and it’s something that I used to do with my other email addresses I had in the past.

Though just being able to have multiple “aliases” without needing several logins or having several accounts just makes things much easier.

You can also send emails and make it look like it comes from these various “aliases”, so it’s not just an email address you give out you can for all intents use it as a real email address.
At my service level of $20USD a year I get six 5-character aliases and one 2-character alias.

If you just want an ad-free service it’s fairly inexpensive at about $5 USD a year, you don’t get a gigantic amount for this. It’s without adverts and you get access to their SMTP server (for sending email), this I think is useful if you’re on a data-only connection such as an iPad with cellular data-only and want to send emails from within the Mail app.
The full list of their features and price is here.

Easily distracted

There is something to be said for the single focus of an iPad, that running a single program and focusing on the task gives you focus on that task.

On a modern computer, whatever standard by which you measure modern you can be doing several things, running several programs at once.

There is something that the iPad gives you in only allowing you do do one thing and do that one thing quite easily, but if you want to switch between programs (fine Apps) you have to double click the home button to allow you to switch.

But on a computer, on a desktop or laptop that is, it’s much easier to switch between programs, or have several running in the background of your main task.

Sometimes that’s good, in researching stuff you’ll need to have a browser open in the background with likely several tabs worth of information open to refer back to. Plus PDFs open as well with additional material.

But then there’s all the other minor distractions, at the moment I have two word processors open. Bean a small, low complexity word processor which I use to write most of my blogs, because it opens quickly, doesn’t have very many extra bells and whistles and lets me compose things quickly.
Behind that I’ve got Word open, which is what I should be working on. I likely could be working on the file that’s in Word in Bean, but Word is what I originally composed it in and will continue with it in Word.
Behind those there’s iTunes downloading podcasts, and somewhere at the back is Firefox, which is only a distraction which I should close, but haven’t.

It is an active concern, the internet lies in wait to distract me from the work I should be doing. It shouldn’t take self control like this to avoid the internet, but it does.
It was easier when the internet was dial-up, then you couldn’t just use it on impulse, you had to make a decision to use the internet, it would tie up the phone lines as well (unless you had a separate one for the internet, or fax or something). Then you used it, and while it was a decision based sort of activity you could actually do other things because load times were long.

Now it seems I’ve distracted myself from what was the main subject of this.
While an iPad does give you focus, Apple’s decision to tie down the operating system on the iPad makes it somewhat irritating from a text construction point of view. The dictionary is one of the most annoying parts, the other is the lack of keyboard shortcuts.
I don’t use the keyboard shortcuts for bold or italic often, but when I do it’s part of my regular typing process, I don’t pause to use them, I use them and then move on. But with the iPad it forces a break in the flow because you have to take your hands off the keyboard (I use a wireless one when I’m composing at length) and touch the screen. It’s not a gigantic issue, but it’s one of several annoyances which prevent me from using the iPad as anything other than an occasional text construction device.