Fastmail: The Privacy-First Email Solution | Speedify LIVE

On the 164th episode of Speedify LIVE we welcome back a Fastmail, this time represented by its CTO Ricardo Signes to talk about all things Privacy.

We chat about what makes Fastmail special, how they do quality assurance, what recent improvements they’ve made and what’s coming next.

Here are our 5 takeaways from our chat with Fastmail CTO, Ricardo Signes:

1. According to Ricardo, what makes Fastmail special is that they lean into what makes email special: it’s an open standard that everyone can participate in and work on. They build features for their users, but design them in a way that they can be used by the rest of the world too, making sure that others can implement the open standards and use them without having to use Fastmail. 
2. When it comes to Quality Assurance, Fastmail does a number of things to ensure quality of service: employees generally use the “next version” with all the experimental features so they could manually find bugs, while they also have numerous automated tests in place, as well as a Bug Bounty Program for users to report bugs and get paid for it! 
3. There have been many improvements to Fastmail’s services recently: they just started selling domains again; new changes have been introduced to calendars and invitations; they launched a new website, and they have stopped storing customer data on spinning disks. 
4. Fastmail has a partnership with 1password where they’ve built a new feature called masked email: this allows users to create a new, never-before-used email address when signing up for different services so it’s harder to trace back to their personal data, but they would still receive the messages sent to the masked email at the main email. With the ability to turn it off, of course.
5. Being a Privacy-first email solution, Ricardo and Fastmail value their users’ privacy! They believe that everyone should be able to choose what information to provide to what service when online, which is something they talk about on their podcast, Digital Citizen a lot.