

FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera - robmueller
http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-staff-purchase-the-business-from-opera/

======
beagle3
If anyone at Opera is reading this:

Please open source Carakan and Presto - don't let them rot, and us hackers
have what to learn with them (and potentially do with them). GPL is fine, and
may let you still monetize it.

(And ... it's not like it's giving you any advantage - you've switched away
from both)

~~~
telephonetemp
Opera Mini still uses Presto. It is quite popular still, especially where
people can't get 3G or better coverage.

~~~
rplnt
And I don't know anyone (from the few people I know that use Opera) who
switched to the new Opera (since it sucks).

------
coffeecheque
I'm a big fan of Fastmail, and I'm tentatively excited about this
announcement.

Missing CardDAV/CalDav sync ability is sorely missing, so it's good to see the
developers talking about it.

I'd also like to see (and would pay for) options where the data is located in
other countries, away from the United States. It's really symbolic, but also
practical: I'd like my data closer to where I live.

~~~
josteink
Seconding this.

Currently I'm fine having that live in owncloud, but should fastmail start
supporting it, I may want to sync these data-sets.

Not sure I want to move everything into one place and one place only though.
If it was one thing my migration from Google Apps taught me, it was that
having too much stuff auto-integrated in one place makes it much harder to
have control of your own data.

It severely limits your options to mix and mash best of breed services as you
see fit.

~~~
da_n
How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of
bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data at random which
would be unacceptable to me. I am using Baikal for CardDav and CalDav which
has been very reliable so far, and BitTorrent Sync for Dropbox replacement
which is less reliable and has some bad bugs (one of which is it being closed
source).

~~~
josteink
_How do you find Owncloud, is it reliable enough? I have heard it has a lot of
bugs, can be very slow and in rare instances deletes data_

Good question.

I have mixed impressions of owncloud so far depending on what area of the
product you are using.

The good parts: Contact and calendering managament. Just works. Integrates
nicely with Android, Thunderbird, etc. _Not_ very good synching back to Google
though. I don't really care about that, but now you know.

The not so good parts: I tried running it on my NAS, because that would be the
storage-backend for the file-sync service anyway. I quickly discovered that
the code is not _near_ efficient enough to be deployed on underpowered devices
like this. It needs optimization, or to be put on proper hardware. I chose the
latter and redeployed.

On my NAS, with enough data getting synched across clients could take _days_.
So don't even think about putting this on a Raspberry Pi or something silly
like that.

The worse: Using owncloud's files-module as a drop-in Dropbox replacement, you
will be surprised by how well supported all kinds of platforms are. If you
treat it as a Dropbox replacement though, you will encounter issues.

I tried putting my code/project/build-folders under owncloud and hack away,
much like I've done with Dropbox. Even with a limited amount of clients, you
will quickly encounter at least some bugs. The most annoying thing I
encountered was probably getting _conflicts_ when only one of the clients had
updated the file.

The client updated the file, called back to owncloud with the changes, and
then got a response back that this update cannot be done cleanly.

It then proceeded to the code/build/project files involved in the conflict and
rename the local and the "server"-version to $file.conflict345678543 &
$file.conflict1234567 or something to that effect. Needless to say that broke
my code, my build and needed to be cleaned up.

If you think that sounds annoying, imagine it happening several times during a
30 minute coding session.

So yeah. The owncloud file-service currently suffers and cannot be treated as
a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Hopefully it will get there, but outside
coding, I haven't experienced anything like that and it seems to chug along
just fine. With a high CPU-usage though.

So yeah. There are good, not so good and directly bad things about it. If it
fits your use-case is up to you.

~~~
da_n
Thanks for your detailed reply. It pretty much mirrors things I've heard
elsewhere, it seems file sync is one issue in particular which can be slow and
prone to errors, it is a shame as an all in one solution would be great.

Funnily enough I have both Baikal and BitTorrent Sync running on a Raspberry
Pi (model B/512) and it is handling it surprisingly well, I even use it as a
destination backup server for some VPS's and local computers (using
duplicity). I just wish the Pi had more RAM as BTSync is a bit of a memory
(and CPU) hog when you start to hae a lot of files involved, it is under
strain. My compromise has been to tar a lot of folders I rarely access to cut
down the number of individual files it needs to track, not ideal. I was
thinking of buying one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing I think it is
called, which is more powerful but still power effecient enough to be left on
24/7.

~~~
sigkill
A question re: BTSync/RPi - I've got around 40-50 gigs synced up between my
x86-64 computers (might be on the order of fifty thousand plus files) and the
maximum memory it occupies is around 60-70 megs. It idles at 42MB. Since you
already have the set up that I am looking into, I think you're the right
person to ask, can the RPi handle that much? If not, what are the signs of it
slowing down? If it helps, my hypothetical RPi would be connected via wires
instead of USB-Wifi dongle.

~~~
da_n
Looking at it, I have about 10k files and it is only using about 12% memory,
perhaps not as bad as I thought. 50k should be absolutely fine I would think.
Here is the output of top showing btsync at idle:

    
    
        PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
        2993 btsync    19  -1  122m  60m 2988 S  11.9 12.4 610:05.84 btsync
    

I have noticed that the CPU takes a beating during any sync operations, tends
to grab 100%. I limit the CPU for the btsync process to 60% max and also
overclocked the Pi up one level (after installing a heatsink kit). Here it is
during typical filesync operations:

    
    
        PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
        2993 btsync    19  -1  122m  60m 2988 S  63.8 12.4 612:51.33 btsync
    

To limit the cpu I use cpulimit and put this in my /etc/rc.local

    
    
        /usr/bin/cpulimit -e btsync -l 60 -b >> /dev/null

~~~
sigkill
Sweet. I guess I'll be ordering one after all. And thanks for the cpulimit
code as well. I had no idea you could do such a thing at all.

------
nly
This is more interesting for what it means for Opera than for what it means to
Fastmail. First they abandon their browser engine, now a top-notch webmail
offering. What do Opera even offer these days that you can't get elsewhere?
What 'long term vision' is Rob speaking of?

~~~
benologist
Unless Opera are building themselves their own little Firefox OS kind of thing
they're pretty much fucked moving forward. On the desktop their move to webkit
successfully destroyed every reason to use Opera and doesn't measure up
against rivals, and they've been netscaped out of mobile.

~~~
jarcoal
I don't think many people used Opera because of it's rendering engine; they
used it because of the GUI and high-level features.

Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to
their customers.

~~~
mih
The Myopera forums are rife with users complaining about missing features in
the Opera 15+. Any unique features which distinguished Opera have been axed
and most solutions seem to point towards using browser addons to accomplish
what was previously in-built. They might have gained a few users, but it
appears the majority of the current userbase will be sticking with Opera 12
for the time being.

~~~
tripzilch
I heard that they ditched the fit-to-width feature (ctrl-F11), do you know if
this is true?

It's one of those features other browsers simply do not have (Opera has a
couple more but this one's pretty unique) that I really do use several times a
day, and I'm not "upgrading" until I know they won't take that away.

Not that it matters too much, features or not, I'm thinking to switch to
Firefox because these are times no longer to be using closed-source software.

~~~
gsnedders
Fit-to-width did all kinds of magic at a layout engine level — it's not that
simple to just reimplement on top of a new engine. And then there's the
question as to whether Google would let an implementation would ever get
upstreamed to Blink.

~~~
sp332
Why would Google not want such a cool feature?

~~~
gsnedders
It'd be a deep, pervasive runtime option across a lot of code.

------
dingaling
During the Opera tenure, FastMail moved to new, larger premises in Melbourne
and took on quite a few new staff. They did a lot of work on the My Opera Mail
web client, which will hopefully be folded back into the main FM product.

They also built-out data centre capacity, including facilities in Iceland.

So all around I think FM benefited greatly from the three years under Opera,
though I'm not convinced the reverse is true.

------
frenger
Please please make this an excuse for a move away from hosting in the USA. A
claim to respect privacy necessitates that.

~~~
e12e
Where would you prefer it be hosted?

I suppose an argument might be made in favour of Germany -- but I'd be
surprised if they don't have a similar infrastructure in place for wire-
tapping as we know _know_ is in place in the US. UK and France is out. Russia
is an open spyocracy of sorts. Iceland?

~~~
da_n
I'm currently looking into setting up a VPS in Iceland or Germany and running
my own mail server from it, moving away from Fastmail. It saddens me as I both
dislike managing my own mail server and really like Fastmail, but having my
email routed through the US is no longer feasible.

~~~
presty
what hosting provider are you looking into, for iceland?

~~~
da_n
So far I've looked into 1984hosting.com and orangewebsite.com, both pricey
compared to what I'm used to but I guess that is the price of better privacy.
There is a cheaper one called icelandvps.com but they are owned by a UK parent
company so I am little unclear about what that means for Iceland law, privacy
etc. It may be cheaper to go to a German host, I am not yet decided.

~~~
tiatia
Dude, I am looking too. Try this: [http://www.edis.at/en/server/linux-
vserver/iceland/vrs-micro...](http://www.edis.at/en/server/linux-
vserver/iceland/vrs-micro/)

Austrian company but they offer hosting in Iceland. I once tried Malaysia. Bad
idead, lot's of spam from Malaysia. Lost 50% of my Email due to
blacklisting...

~~~
da_n
Nice link I'll definitely give them a try, thanks!

------
autonomy77
Not impressed with Fastmail - I tried their free offer, wasn't impressed, and
didn't sign up for the paid service. I've since had over 100 (yup) emails
telling me of my "OVERDUE PAYMENT" (the caps are theirs), and they ignore
correspondence requesting that they stop. Marketing via harrassment -
interesting tactic, and incredibly bad form, IMHO.

~~~
dombili
> I've since had over 100 (yup) emails telling me of my "OVERDUE PAYMENT" (the
> caps are theirs),

Oh god, yes. This was annoying as hell. I actually liked their service but at
the end of the month I didn't think I was using email enough to justify paying
40 bucks a year, so I decided to keep using the one I got for free when I got
a domain. But even if I was going to buy, I wouldn't have just because of this
harrassment. Here's a screenshot from my inbox:
[http://i.imgur.com/meNhlAr.png](http://i.imgur.com/meNhlAr.png) (there are
some more that couldn't fit into the screenshot)

~~~
Osmium
That's absolutely crazy. I'm a paying Fastmail customer, and that really puts
me off. I'm "trialing" them for 6 months at the moment with a personal domain
before I decide whether I want to permanently switch to them, and so far had
been very impressed... but that makes me think twice. I hope they're paying
attention to this!

------
D9u
I've been a Fastmail user for years, ever since I realized that their web UI
was compatible with my Windows Mobile Phone. (pre iPhone era)

Here we are now, and the rest of the net has caught up to mobile access,
mostly. Though my initial reasons for using Fastmail have become moot points,
I'll continue to use my Fastmail accounts with fond memories and hope for
improved resistance to governments' exceeding their mandates.

------
drill_sarge
I wonder what "strategic changes" they did at Opera? So far they have shut
down all their interesting projects (like Opera Unite), their browser has been
highly customizable (the UI, not even needing addons) which was abandoned
completely in Opera 15. Now they have some half-assed Chrome clone for
Desktop, Coast browser which is also nowhere near final, Opera Mobile (not
mini) is getting more and more generic like all other mobile browsers...

------
unknownian
Does that mean myopera mail is being shuttered? I hope not. It was like a free
version of fastmail.

------
jimmcslim
Have been a paying customer of Fastmail.fm since early 2003. It just works and
I hope it continues to for many years to come!

------
throwawayyyz
I love Fastmail and have been a paid user for many years now, but I hate the
new AJAXy interface, in particular the infinite scroll as currently
implemented. Slow, annoying, and makes it difficult to reach old emails.

~~~
whichdan
Fastmail has one of the few interfaces that gets infinite scrolling /right/.
The outer mailbox div has overflow-y: auto; and the inner div is the combined
height of every message in that folder -- my inbox has 11381 messages, and the
height is 364192px. When the scrollbar is moved, JS automatically determines
which messages to load. Messages themselves are tiny AJAX requests that take
less than 100ms each.

This is from the perspective of using Chrome on high end hardware, but I
couldn't ask for a better web interface.

That said, they aren't joking about needing a new mobile interface: the
current one is usable, but definitely lacks the same polish as the desktop
version.

~~~
lessnonymous
That infinite scrolling is AWESOME. I absolutely HATE everyone else's version
that makes dragging the scrollbar useless as it jumps around.

~~~
masnick
I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much
better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to
jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.

------
breakupapp
I use Opera just to maintain separate cookies haha.

~~~
nikcub
You can do that with Chrome, Firefox and Safari as well - check out my project
tmpbrowser, which is a simple app that creates temporary throwaway browser
sessions:

[https://github.com/nikcub/tmpbrowser](https://github.com/nikcub/tmpbrowser)

------
antihero
I'm looking forward to better mobile support. Currently I can't sync contacts
at all because the only Android LDAP contacts app seems not to be purchasable.

~~~
josteink
I went with contact-management (and calendar-management) via owncloud.

There's two apps in the Play store, one for CardDAV[1] and one for CalDAV[2].

That setup works for me.

[1]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync)

[2]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib)

~~~
antihero
I just wish OwnCloud wasn't a slow PHP script. Can FastMail sync with any
cardDAV server? Because I might just write on of those or something.

------
lubos
the most annoying thing about fastmail is their high cost for storage. their
new web-based client is top-notch performance-wise. a lot better than gmail.

------
johnnymonster
Is FastMail a joke? I get more storage for free at dropbox and sugarsync. What
exactly is this service bringing to the table? It feels like a 1998 business
model to me...

~~~
subsection1h
I don't require GBs of mail storage because my mail is automatically deleted
before its 180 days old. Mail that's older than 180 days can be accessed by
USG employees without a warrant.

FastMail provides me with mail accounts for $10/year[2] that provide enough
storage for 180 days and include required features like custom domain names,
domain aliases, email aliases, etc.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/when-will-our-email-
be...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/when-will-our-email-betray-us-
email-privacy-primer-light-petraeus-saga)

[2]
[https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/family.html](https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/family.html)

