FastMail.FM, a Norweigan company, has been providing email accounts for 10 years. Their reputation for reliability and fast response has made Opera take notice, and on the FastMail Blog, they announced that Opera had agreed to purchase the e-mail provider.
Their service provides:
- Secure Email using WebMail, IMAP, POP and SMTP
- Secure DAV file access
- FTP LDAP access to Address Book
- XMPP Jabber support for Instant Messaging
Their online storage and service reliability has made them a viable e-mail service provider. They ensuring that stored emails and files will always be available, and are never lost, damaged or corrupted.
The reason for selling, according to FastMail, was that the market was becoming more competitive. However, Opera’s expertise in web browsers and in the mobile phone market, would allow the company to develop and take on the next challenges in running and building an email service. They felt that they could not go at it alone.
Opera 4 was release in 2000, and it included its own e-mail client. After this acquisition, Opera will be able to provide a consistent e-mail environment across all their products. Opera currently has over 50 million users of its desktop browser and more than 55 million users of Opera Mini, a mobile Web browser that works on almost all handsets available today.
A FAQ is provided on the blog site which deals with issues like privacy of accounts, new features, what one has to do now, such as the billing cycle, pricing, features, reliability, security and other information to calm the nerves of FastMail customers. For the most part, the transition should not cause any problems, either for Opera or FastMail customers.
The FastMail technical website has details about their current system of mail storage, raid, replication, backups, and checksums. See FastMail Reliability for full details.
Source: FastMailBlog, FastMail.com
Opera.com MyOpera.com blog site.
