Dec 24: Working at FastMail

FastMail Blog

This blog post is part of the FastMail 2014 Advent Calendar.

The previous post on 23nd December was the open protocol, JMAP. And this is the end!

Technical level: low

FastMail has been around for 15 years now, via a short detour as part of Opera Software and then back to being our own company again.

Some History

I was hired in 2004 as the fourth member of a small technical team in Melbourne. Rob M was living overseas at the time, so I worked with Jeremy (one of the original founders, he’s moved on to other things now) and Richard. We had no office, but I would catch the train and tram to Port Melbourne and work with Jeremy in his lounge room.

After working for a big corporate where (no joke) I couldn’t have a server to do my work for the 6 months I…

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Dec 3: Push it real good

FastMail Blog

This blog post is part of the FastMail 2014 Advent Calendar.

The previous post on December 2nd was an intro to our approach to security. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow.

Technical level: lots

Bron (one of our team, you’ve heard of him) does this great demo when he shows FastMail to other people. He opens his inbox up on the screen, and gets someone to send him an email. A nice animation slides the new message into view on the screen. At the same time, his phone plays a sound. He uses his watch to delete the email, and it disappears from the screen too. It’s a huge “wow” moment, made possible by our push notification system. Today we’ll talk about exactly how we let you know when something interesting happens in your mailbox.

Cyrus has two mechanisms for telling the world that something has changed, idled and…

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