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Yes. Any payments made to FastMail.FM occur through our credit card merchant "Worldpay" to our service provider company "The Messaging Engine Partnership" and will appear on your credit card statement as: "WP-Email service".
The easiest way is to ask a friend to add funds to their account, and then send you a gift certificate. To send a gift certificate, use the 'Purchase Gift Certificate' link on the Preferences screen. If you can't find someone to do this then read on for other options, which are more expensive and less convenient, but work fine if you don't have other options...
Firstly you will need to sign up as a guest so that you get allocated a username. If you want a shorter name than a Guest account allows, sign up for the longer name and then you'll be able to change once your payment goes through. Once you're signed up, send us a payment as described using PayPal, of direct debit. There is a handling fee for both of these payment methods, $2 for PayPal and $4 for direct debit, which covers the administration overhead.
Without a credit card we cannot automatically draw funds on your subscription renewal date, so you will have to ensure that you keep enough funds in your FastMail.FM "account pool" for your service level. For instance, if you want to subscribe to the Full service at $19.95 per year, you could send us a single payment of $60 which will be credited to your FastMail.FM account, and then automatically drawn from each year to cover 3 years of service. Because manual payment methods attract an extra fee (listed below) it is more economical to pay for a few years up front.
You can use your bank account to pay directly by becoming a member of PayPal and sending money to "webmaster@fastmail.fm" using PayPal's money sending feature. A US$2 handling fee will be charged, and the remainder will be credited to your FastMail.FM account pool. Once the funds are in your account pool, you may use them to purchase an upgrade. Please wait 48 hours for your payment to be processed. Ensure that you type your FastMail.FM username in the payment description field, so that we know which account to credit.
We have an Australian bank account. In Australia, most banks allow you to use Internet banking to transfer money directly to another Australian account.
If you wish to use funds transfer from anywhere other than Australia, you can ask your bank to send us a 'Telegraphic Transfer'. This is a form of money transfer supported by all banks internationally, although it can be costly (around $5-$10). Ask your bank to include your user name in the narrative of the transaction so we know who you're paying for!
Our bank takes AU$ 6(approximately US$ 4.5) from any TT. TT's however can have fees taken out of them multiple times. e.g. if you don't remember to ask otherwise the originating bank may take their fee out of the amount, rather than taking extra. If there is one or more intermediary banks involved it may also charge a fee. Sometimes they are quite high (may go upto around $30), so you should enquire with your bank before you send the TT, and include sufficient funds to cover these fees.
If you are paying in a currency other than US Dollars, use a standard currency conversion service like http://www.xe.com/ucc/ to know the equivalent amount you have to pay in your local currency.
A US$4 handling fee and the remainder will be credited to your FastMail.FM account pool. If you are paying in a currency other than US Dollar, you will also have to add 5% of the transaction amount as extra to cover currency fluctuations and the buy-sell spread. Once the funds are in your account pool, you may use them to purchase an upgrade. The account details are:
Bank: National Australia Bank
Address: 231 Bay St, Port Melbourne, Vic 3207, Australia
SWIFT code: NATAAU3303M
BSB (or Sort code/routing #): 083784
Account Number: 82-251-5409
Name: FastMail.FM Pty Ltd
Company address: Level 20, 8 Exhibition St, Melbourne, Vic 3000, Australia
Be sure to contact us using the FastMail.FM support system when you have transferred funds, telling us the amount and your username. Also, include your full account name in the narrative so that we know which payment is yours.
Due to the way telegraphic transfers occur through our bank, it may take up to 3 weeks for us to be be notified of any transfers. So once you have done the transfer and notified us through the above link to the support system, please be patient, we will let you know when we have confirmation that the money has arrived and been added to your account pool.
Unfortunately due to the extremely high cost of banking foreign cheques, we no longer support payment by cheque or money order. Please use a credit card, paypal or direct debit and described above.
FastMail.FM charges for two main things. Subscription level and excess resource usage.
FastMail.FM has a number of service levels. Each level has access to different features, and different limits on monthly bandwidth, disk quota, etc. See our pricing table for comprehensive details include the cost of each level.
You can upgrade your account using a credit card by going to the 'Options' screen and selecting 'Upgrade'. See here for details on alternative payment methods.
You have a 'FastMail.FM account pool'. All extras will be taken from this pool eg. excess bandwidth, SMS messages, alias costs, extra storage space, etc.
This pool will obviously start off as empty for everyone. If you need to pay for some extras, we get you to authorise a credit card or paypal charge of $10-$50 and put that in your pool. Then as you need the extras, you'll pay with money from your pool.
For instance, if you decide you need an extra 100MB of storage, you can pay US$24.95 from this pool to buy the extra 100MB. If you need more bandwidth than your monthly allowance, you'll be able to buy bandwidth from your pool. The cost of bandwidth depends on your service level. See also this link for details on bandwidth usage.
The reason we're going to do it this way is that it would be completely uneconomic for us to do the micro-charging each month of excess bandwidth, aliases, etc. We need to do a minimum of $10 not to get eaten alive by transfer charges.
We've had a few people questioning the 40 MB monthly limit for guests, saying that it isn't enough. A typical text-only email is something like 10KB in size. With 40MB, you could send/receive 10,000 text-only emails before you use up your quota! See these links for details on what constitutes bandwidth usage and how to reduce it.
If you spend the one off $14.95, you get 'member' level access which includes 80 Mb of bandwidth per month. If you go over that, you can buy extra bandwidth at $14/GB. Assuming that you only rarely go over, and when you do it's not by 100's of Mb, you'll be able to put $5 in a holding pool, and if you go over we just subtract from that pool. All up, you've spent less than $20 one time. For that, you get 16 Mb disk quota, IMAP access, a fast web-interface, and 80 Mb bandwidth in one month. And if you go over 80 Mb, you'll have up to 1GB/(14/5) = 357 Mb of excess bandwidth paid for. That should last several years! Pretty good for just $20 once off if you ask me!
Currently the Member fee is a setup fee, with no annual fee, while the Full/Enhanced fees are yearly amounts.
What happens if you signup for a Member account, and then upgrade to Full/Enhanced though? Well there's two options we could have gone with. 1) The Member setup fee is contributed towards the Full/Enhanced yearly amount. 2) The Member setup fee is left as is, but if you don't renew at Full/Enhanced level, you fall back to Member level instead of guest.
The first option doesn't really make sense, since really you could upgrade to Member, stay there for 3 years, then upgrade to Full. If your Member setup fee was contributed to your Full account, then basically you then had 3 years of Member level access for free! So instead we went with the second option.
To summarise this means:
Note: For people who signed up before Dec 20, 2002, things were different
Before this date, when you signed up a Full/Enhanced account, you would pay the Member setup fee plus the yearly Full/Enhanced fee. The reason for this was because if you didn't renew your Full/Enhanced account, you'd automatically fall back to Member level as you'd paid the Member setup fee.
However we found that most people thought this was confusing, so we dropped the setup fee for Full/Enhanced. However now if people don't renew their Full/Enhanced account, they'll fall back to Guest level.
At this stage at least each level covers its costs (except for guests!) so even if we're not profit-maximising by pricing on value, we are keeping cash-flow in the black by pricing on cost.
Over the next year we'll be adding more and more features, and will tend to provide these to 'full' and 'enhanced' users rather than 'members'. Our view of membership is that it should be a competent email account, if nothing particularly flashy. Subscribers (full/enhanced) however get value-added services. As we add more complete address books with synchronization support, calendars/alarms, file sharing, and so forth we plan to only offer these to subscribers.