Fastmail user since forever, I've waited until I hope I'm not upsetting general discussion, risking this plea in case of potential remedy.

I managed to convert my free for life account to a paid account when I was hoping to merge a paid admin account with my free one. AFAIK My original email account wasn't subject to required login activity but the merged account was. What I had wanted to do at the time, was to be using my lifetime account for primary receipt of multiple domain administrator user email accounts, as I had relied heavily on fastmail for the effective archive.

In short, I was separated from my twelve years plus old email account, by a change in my account that I had no ability to undo, events overtaking my life very soon after the merge.

Lifetime accounts such as I had can be a lifeline.

Continued use of my archive enabled me to save several domains otherwise I would have lost due to the interrupted existence I had. I was able to mostly wind down my business semi gracefully, as a result.

Can Fastmail once again offer lifetime accounts, without any minimum requirements of use intervals?

I am not begging for a reinstatement here but asking if there is a fair price I can pay for this once off, and exhorting the creation of a account type that gives incredible peace of mind to serious users.

Consider my elderly mother, whose health declined in days rendering her helpless, but it took a year and two months to obtain the necessary court authority over her affairs.

A court will not make any order giving access to email accounts in a hurry. The account will be treated as being a real part of the person's identity. At least in the UK.

Recent email standards that prevent sending spoof return envelope addresses reinforce the same effect of having the equivalent of identity.

Arguably anyone who used any consistent signature in body in text, was identifying the same origination with their identity.

Only a week ago in the high court, my McKenzie Friend (now non practising retired barrister I've known from his uni jazz band days) held at offer of test, ie implicitly asked the judge if the court accepted his email printouts and the auto reply as a legitimate correspondence with the other entity, and the vestigial gestures of approval said to me the court was absolutely not separating the autoresponder from the defendant.

Service upon a known or advertised email address is definitely now service in the UK, save for where the nature of a order, such as a Penal notice requires personal service or personal attestation of the correct procedure attempted.

THIS EXCLUDES so many accounts in the event of a range of life events, from incapacity due to illness or - this sank a great friend on his second time bootstrap (he made it on the third) the breakdown of a co-founder, the real possibility in England for a statutory period of declared incapacity far exceeding the eventual needs (insurance coverage, spousal and corporate, often tips this decision from one to six months), indictment or visa irregularities.

The last two seem ominous but I'll be quick: the Family Division of the high court handles all manner of cases from the deterrent of stalkers to divorce. This court is provided for by no kind of legal aid. None. Zero. And the law is fiendish and the talent scarce. And the case load so high that combined with lay appellants, the temper of judges despairing of any positive result, can be brutal to unprepared litigants. To this firmament we can add a body of criminal penalties for breach of sanctions, that the judiciary at large appears to think unbalanced. Because if you're not able to comply with the court's ruling, the court forever under pressure of time and resources, the combination of both zero public funding and criminal penalty can be extreme. Far too often, spouses are prohibited from entering large geographic areas impossible to avoid, even including workplaces. This is a easy arrest for a young officer with almost guaranteed guilty plea, but a guilty plea by no means makes certain that the paperwork will not take six months to get before court. Individuals bailed find it hard to get orders varied that they have breached. Incorrectly so, but it can be understood that some people will try to make changes only for mitigation of a breach. If you're remanded to custody however, I can tell you of a local magistrate notorious for indiscriminately refusing bail who only just retired (anyone who has a name on their tongue, please get in touch, see profile) the situation is terrifying the fact you have any savings so soon history, it can't get your phone call faster than anyone else and 10 mins weekly may be the max talk from some overcrowded jail's.

Okay so a seemingly minor infraction can send you down the rabbit hole and leave you with little recourse in the UK.

The immigration mishap that hit a friend is unusual and a bit extreme too: the visa of a fund trustee expired before a replacement could be issued and the system was not moving. The trustee repaired to family in France. But the foundation documents required quorum in England and Wales with arguably application to appointment of a proxy. This was a place of business test for the domicile of the fund. What happened was a temporary resolution of the board, but it was dependent on approval of the Revenue because this absent trustee had executive function over a significant area of activity. This led to the ugly situation where the email address of the trustee had to be presumed continuing for receipt of business files, but was the autoresponder from the trustee or the board or the fund? The email had to be routed to outside legal and manually attended. Because only one technicality meant that a autoresponder from that account could misrepresent or just confuse. Legal help had to get the mailbox mirrored under a different contract even, because of the requirement to leave the trustees mail intact. The board had to act, but the necessary independence of this trustee was paramount, equally enabling his executive decisions would compromise the independence of the other trustees.

Now, I don't pretend that such a organisation will rely on any free or fremium type service.

But I know many directors and trustees who maintain IMAP mirror accounts, outside the organisation servers. This is not in any way unlawful, in itself. (Specific aspects may be very problematic, however I don't know anyone who has set up such a archive who is not either a attorney or had taken advice. I heard about one non executive director who was given written authorization to connect via IMAP for the purpose, who was so concerned about the integrity and security of his replication that he deposited into escrow with his family attorney the only hardware stored key. The rather nasty attack on him from a fat cat board he'd voted against, was to construe his own security care as a act of bad faith to not trust the company security officer with the key. He actually had to argue that this escrow was only a extension of his discretion and authority which being compellable subject to any power over him was not at all incompatible with any contract or agreement that he was to abide.

I humbly submit therefore, that the argument does strongly and positively support sale of one time payment lifetime account for email.

If you still offered the chance of applying for white label reseller business, I would know what I am going to do for my remaining career.

As it happens, I am going to soon decide on whether to commit the funds to a long trial of a email service in my own architectural design for the similar user demands.

But I know you along with all HN would laugh at the description of my intended initial trial. It is a enterprise salesman's dream. Knowing that game I'm not the Immediate victim, but I know the minute I announce anything, my lost email archive long held in the utmost care of your company, shall be instantly forwarded to my disgrace: I used to weekly remind everyone I spoke to the first and only outage of Fastmail was not email infrastructure but a RAID6 rebuild delay, without any eventual loss. For a decade I strived to convert my every correspondent upon the frequent and regular outages that are now more forgotten than the future warning they might be if ever there is less money in the competition's email divisions.

(I can't forget that rebuild, the same week I was happily on the phone with a Dell technician, just to cover my rear while replacing a drive in a workstation array. The information we neither possessed was the particular PERC model installed on my own main box, wasn't LSI but Adaptec. This array held at close hand every document that had any relation to my customers, along with the manual index and notes of two decades of research. I have not checked this one with Snopes but I became like Boeing and it's stricken 747, that they allegedly rebuilt rather than lose their perfect flight service record. The incremental backup from the same early morning wasn't my idea of continuity. SUN were just shipping the first real production ZFS filers, but where would my original NTFS metadata go? Or the FS streams my own indexer wrote keys to? Or the access log.

Fastmail would transform my interactions with customers, if they adopted your email service. It kept me in business many years. I would love to be just even a tiny bit of encouragement for any future approach to the market I know that desperately needs to hear the very particular and not always happy context selling points you have accumulated over any competition.