Fastmail is an independent company, filled with passionate people working together on products we love. As we continue to develop and grow, we wanted to share the core values that we feel truly represent our beliefs and philosophy. These help guide us as we fulfil our mission of building the worldʼs best independent email service.

1. You are our customer, not our product

We proudly charge money in exchange for a great service. As such, we only serve you, our customer. We have no split loyalties, no mining of your personal data, no sharing it with third parties, and no ads, ever.

We provide support directly to our users, and do our best to help resolve any service issues you might have. Our roadmap is aimed at making Fastmail better for you, not an advertiser or anyone else. Itʼs a simple, direct business relationship, which in todayʼs internet, we believe is quite refreshing.

2. Your data belongs to you

We support open, standard protocols, and drive the development of new and better ones rather than closed, proprietary mechanisms. Your mail, calendars and contacts are stored in open formats and can be downloaded or backed up using any number of standard tools that speak standard protocols. We have fast servers that donʼt limit your freedom to migrate elsewhere, should you ever decide Fastmail is not for you. The incentive is always on us to keep being the best so we keep your business!

3. We are good stewards of your data

We take the responsibility we have for your data very seriously. We go to great lengths to ensure it is always available to you, and never lost, damaged or corrupted. We focus on usable security measures that meaningfully protect your data from falling into the wrong hands, and have a comprehensive backup strategy to save the day should you accidentally delete the wrong thing.

4. We are a good internet citizen

As an open, interoperable communication standard, email is unique and vitally important to a healthy open internet, rather than a series of walled gardens. Openness, however, leads to a greater risk of abuse. We have a responsibility to protect our users from spam, and to stop our service from being used to abuse others. These are continually evolving challenges that we build ever more new capabilities for.

We are responsible members of many open source communities. We use, have created, sponsor and contribute back to a number of projects, including the Cyrus email server, Squire rich text editor and many, many, many CPAN modules.

This article orginally appeared as the thirteenth post in the 2016 Fastmail Advent Calendar.

Edited May 2020: Our name is now Fastmail.