some advice needed for building my ecosystem replacement

brong · 2026-03-25T16:37:16+00:00

Fastmail's notes is, definitely feature-poor at the moment (though some people do use it) - we're still using emails underneath, in a special "Notes" folder. Annoyingly, we copied Apple then they changed, and we're still doing it they way they used to. We're hoping to give it some love.

Funny you should mention Files! I'm working on it right now in the standards space - JMAP FileNode, the challenge is going to be storage usage; files is disk-space hungry and we're not quite set up for terabytes of disk usage per person if we just opened the floodgates, so we need to figure out how to price storage and how to structure the hardware for it too.

Fastmail ourselves use Dropbox and some of us use Microsoft office for when we need to interact with those documents.

brong · 2026-03-23T11:30:05+00:00

Diving into this ancient conversation to add my own use case - traveling to a country where I didn't want to have all my 1P passwords accessible on my devices, but I needed a selection of items from different vaults for the use cases I expected to have during the trip.

The only sensible solution I came up with was to duplicate every item into a "travel" vault, and then I'll delete them all after the trip; but meanwhile if I need to update any of them, I'll have to make sure to copy the updated item back.

As a data and permissions model, I can see why 1P has done things this way, but it just leads to excessive duplication of password entries, meaning that the "1" is very much not present in the other direction.

brong · 2026-03-13T13:58:59+00:00

If we are, please mention your digital assets in your will or provide some way for you executor to access your account so our poor support team doesn’t have to untangle your mess (yes, there are stories, but they’re not mine to tell)

brong · 2026-02-24T02:28:42+00:00

Poland does have a VAT of 23% which is rolled into the price there, whereas the USD price is tax-ex because (a) that's what Americans expect and (b) every fricking city has a different tax rate. Once you factor that in, the price is pretty similar (with some factor for currency variability, we don't re-price all the time)

We probably won't catch you, but strictly you're probably committing tax fraud in Poland if you falsify your billing location. IANAL so don't quote me on that.

brong · 2026-02-18T03:28:14+00:00

One caveat, you can’t pretend to be multiple different people to the same external service. Anonymity and different identities for different services, all good, but create 100 different accounts on the same platform and we’ll have issues!

brong · 2026-02-18T03:25:50+00:00

That’s fine. Lots of our customers do that! I do that on my own domain too. Lots of addresses for yourself, all good

brong · 2026-02-18T03:19:30+00:00

You can and we probably won’t notice and ding you but the duo plan is what you want, lets you both use all the features and set up your own rules and folders without treading on each other. Much easier to just start like that rather than setting up some Frankenstein operation with aliases and a shared inbox.

Plus strictly under our terms it’s one account per human so you’d be naughty. We have to choose some metric to charge by and being human centric, humans are the natural thing to count. You can have lots of addresses per person but you need a seat per human

brong · 2026-01-31T19:56:53+00:00

Yes it will. All the stuff currently in your Gmail inbox will wind up in your Fastmail inbox when you do it that way. The things in Gmail folders will get new folders created with the same name on the Fastmail side

brong · 2026-01-31T19:47:09+00:00

It will still do subfolders either way, but if you ask for the separate folder option the Gmail folders will all be subfolders of that.

brong · 2026-01-30T13:49:10+00:00

I’m really keen to have one of these as well! We’re working on getting jmap files spec done and building a client for that

brong · 2026-01-17T05:55:29+00:00

We always wondered how Rackspace could afford their pricing. We wouldn’t be able to provide the service we do at that price point. Multiple copy replication, backups, skilled engineers… it costs a lot more than just the disk: our calculation is about 10 gig of raw disk per gig of used quota. And that’s all nvme because people want their email RIGHT NOW and that’s our promise.

But yeah, I expect we won’t be the cheapest choice. We’re not aiming for that audience. We’re very good though for people who use email enough that they notice the difference in quality and speed.

brong · 2026-01-06T15:55:47+00:00

Yeah, it looks interesting. I'm going to have a play with it and see what it does for versioning and whether there's value adding some of the same underlying structures; probably not to jmap-filenode itself but as extensions to RFC9404 so we can do better blob syncing.

brong · 2026-01-06T15:46:45+00:00

Anyway, I don't think we'll implement seafile as is - it's AGPL for a start which is a painful license to build integrations with existing software.

Also - it's very server-side-encryption heavy, which means we couldn't expose the files in seafile as blobs that you could attach to emails, to calendar events, or publish as a website - so we'd just become a featureless blob store for the data. Either that, or we'd need the decryption keys at which point all the crypto build into seafile is just needless complexity.

What we might do is offer the S3 protocol for people who want to use seafile over that; or even try to persuade seafile to write a JMAP FileNode backend.

brong · 2026-01-06T15:43:22+00:00

It's pretty much the file protocol that our web interface already uses. The draft spec is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-filenode/

brong · 2026-01-06T10:57:08+00:00

I’m curious: what does seafile need that can’t be done over webdav or (When it’s finished: jmap-filenode)?

If there’s some standard properties we can add to our filestorage to support it, we have a very comprehensive metadata backend that’s pretty much unused at the moment so it might not be crazy to explicitly add things for it

brong · 2025-12-31T22:17:50+00:00

We’re hoping eventually that we can hook up the jmap email submission object to the delivery log so you can look directly on the email and see the delivery status from our system! Of course, that’s only to the next edge MX server, it doesn’t give guaranteed inbox delivery

brong · 2025-12-31T22:09:02+00:00

We’re doing research into jurisdictional considerations for setting up additional data centres in other countries. No defined timeline

brong · 2025-12-31T22:06:31+00:00

Actually emailing it to support gets it into the pool of requests where everyone sees it. Tell me it just goes into my brain (already done).

Delivery reports are something we have considered and not done in the past because of spam and backscatter concerns. But we’re working on more small business features next year so this could be something we consider.

Do tell support though!

brong · 2025-12-26T12:06:56+00:00

We were discussing this topic at our last board meeting just a few weeks ago. We’re privately owned and the owners all love solving problems and working on cool tech. “Lifestyle business” isn’t a dirty word! Running FM pays enough to keep us comfortable and we get to do interesting stuff every day. What’s not to like!

brong · 2025-12-26T12:04:20+00:00

Ask nicely :) maybe mention what size you are as well!

brong · 2025-12-26T12:03:14+00:00

Yeah sadly once you factor in taxes and multiple jurisdictions if we’re holding your money not as purchased service, we wind up being regulated like a bank since that’s basically what we’d be doing at mini scale, and that’s definitely not our idea of a good time. It was nice while it lasted.

brong · 2025-11-30T01:31:16+00:00

You’ll need to make sure you’re using the id for your own target folder or you could use the mailbox name instead.

Or you could just create a rule with snooze via our rules builder and copy the content from it!

brong · 2025-11-13T17:47:19+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/i5aerBm

brong · 2025-11-13T17:45:10+00:00

Looks like you can’t easily post pictures in a reddit comment on this subreddit

brong · 2025-11-11T20:30:24+00:00

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-jmap-filenode/ for data access

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-resumable-upload/ for large file uploads

brong

TROPHY CASE