Thanks for this response - and sorry I didn't reply to anything last night, I'd just got home from a mad day getting my kids prepared for their mid-year concert and then watching all 4 hours of it (every ensemble has to show what they've learned!) so went to bed early - I didn't see this until today Melbourne time.
On the topic of support - one thing that's hard for FastMail is that with customers who are paying every month/year/whatever, we have a billing contact which gives us a way to get in touch when their account gets locked. Non-paying accounts are just as likely to have their credentials stolen and used for spam, but they are even _more_ costly to re-identify the owner.
Refusing to try to identify the owner and just leaving locked accounts locked would get us just as much bad press as this, and be much worse for the affected users - since there would be no warning period before losing the account.
The Member service was always intended to be the same as Guest, but allow commercial use and not have ads. We decided many years ago that the ads business was not for us (it's part of why we left Opera, they were focusing more on the advertising business, and we wanted no part of it.)
We didn't actually use the term "lifetime", we said "one-time payment". I know it sounds like weasel words - but we chose to shut both Guest and Member down at the same time because they are basically the same. That payment was supposed to offset advertising revenue - it certainly doesn't offset the cost of keeping things deliverable in today's world where email accounts have become a really important part of people's online identities. Email account theft has become the way to send spam, as domain reputation makes it much easier to send through stolen accounts than just blast SMTP directly.
So we appear to be pretty horrible to the people who don't value their service enough to pay US$3/month for it, but as you noted - it became a choice between having our paying customers keep subsidising the support costs of stopping spam through those stolen non-paying accounts, or shutting them down and making our sending addresses more trustworthy for those willing to pay.
On the topic of support - one thing that's hard for FastMail is that with customers who are paying every month/year/whatever, we have a billing contact which gives us a way to get in touch when their account gets locked. Non-paying accounts are just as likely to have their credentials stolen and used for spam, but they are even _more_ costly to re-identify the owner.
Refusing to try to identify the owner and just leaving locked accounts locked would get us just as much bad press as this, and be much worse for the affected users - since there would be no warning period before losing the account.
The Member service was always intended to be the same as Guest, but allow commercial use and not have ads. We decided many years ago that the ads business was not for us (it's part of why we left Opera, they were focusing more on the advertising business, and we wanted no part of it.)
We didn't actually use the term "lifetime", we said "one-time payment". I know it sounds like weasel words - but we chose to shut both Guest and Member down at the same time because they are basically the same. That payment was supposed to offset advertising revenue - it certainly doesn't offset the cost of keeping things deliverable in today's world where email accounts have become a really important part of people's online identities. Email account theft has become the way to send spam, as domain reputation makes it much easier to send through stolen accounts than just blast SMTP directly.
So we appear to be pretty horrible to the people who don't value their service enough to pay US$3/month for it, but as you noted - it became a choice between having our paying customers keep subsidising the support costs of stopping spam through those stolen non-paying accounts, or shutting them down and making our sending addresses more trustworthy for those willing to pay.