Topicbox – FastMail’s new product for teams

https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/09/12/announcing-topicbox-our-new-product-for-teams/

113 73 9 years ago

blog.fastmail.com

nanoniano3• 9 years ago

What they have to launch is a cheaper service. Their prices are laughable, although I can understand that, given they have no competition.

lettergram2• 9 years ago

IMO it's not unreasonable. <$400 / month for 200 employees seems fair, especially given their standard email service is $3 / month / user.

It's also for Enterprise, which typically has a higher price tag.

nanoniano3• 9 years ago

I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)

brongondwana9• 9 years ago

We're not interested in a race to the bottom. We provide a high quality service and we charge enough to provide that service. We're clear about our values:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/

and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.

nanoniano3• 9 years ago

I disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.

sitepodmatt5• 9 years ago

Are you localized in regional datacenters yet such as SGP? Not so much a problem on the web combined with a CDN, but old school IMAP can be quite chatty, combined with high RTT latency, it becomes quite noticeable.

sitepodmatt5• 9 years ago

Is there followup post-mortems to incidents like this which is over a month ago?

[Fastmail] Services have been restored. The problem was a a network peering issue, leading to our services being unavailable to parts of the internet. We're working with our network provider to understand what happened and what improvements we can make in the future. Thank you for your patience.

An 1hr15mins of connectivity issues is quite significant imo.

Wary after the Imgix several hours of 500/504 disaster and still no technical post-mortem..

interfixus• 9 years ago

Fastmail has plenty of competition. Some of it with markedly lower prices, but one of it with a comparable quality and smoothness of operation.

Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.

geomark• 9 years ago

How is fastmail's spam filtering? I've been using Zoho mail for a while and like it except their spam filtering is quite poor.

crispinb• 9 years ago

Spot on. There is some very odd psychology at work with people's attitude towards software licensing/service prices. It's clear that many people are actively angry when something is more expensive than some ideal arbitrarily low price (unrelated to the costs of providing the service) they have in mind.

I don't even use Fastmail any longer, great though it is, because I have had to cut my costs absolutely to the bone in recent years. But I'm truly glad such an excellent service exists for if/when I'm again ready to pay for it, and that the engineers involved can get paid for doing a good job.

mxuribe• 9 years ago

I'm always a big fan of org. wikis...but the challenge is some users slack off on creating/posting content...but this topicbox seems like users can simply draft/send an email, and bam its content for a sort of "wiki". This is a great idea, even if only for the low curve of easily "creating" organizational content! Kudos to fastmail!

systems3• 9 years ago

i find topicbox to sound more like a supercharged mailing-list

personally i think mailing-list is the most important communication tool for team work, and i think more organization need to use them

sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...

brongondwana9• 9 years ago

This is exactly why we build topicbox! We like mailing lists, and we want an archive which is useful.

ams61105• 9 years ago

Well I was going to say I don't really see how this is much different from e.g. Google Groups. Groups messages go into an archive that is searchable/readable by new members. But just having a message archive isn't really that helpful unless it can be organized further, and that's where it breaks down -- the job of organizing the group archive has all the same problems of keeping the team wiki up to date: its easy to get behind, and the content grows stale or hard to use.

Kadin2• 9 years ago

sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...

Not that I am campaigning against Topicbox, but I think it's worth making clear that just because your email is hosted on Exchange, doesn't mean your mailing list solution needs to be.

You can run, and I have in fact run, mailinglists on top of Mailman / Debian / Postfix / Nginx, in a heterogenous environment where the mailservers were Exchange (and some shitty hosted Exchange run by morons to boot). You can do it without even reconfiguring Exchange if you are willing to put all the lists in a subdomain with its own MX record.

No reason why a hosted solution couldn't work this way as well. If you don't want to have your mailinglists in a subdomain, then you would need mailserver configuration to set up the aliases correctly, and that creates a certain amount of maintenance hassle every time you create a new list, but I've never been convinced that's a worthwhile tradeoff to make. Making mailinglists instantly discernible from humans' addresses isn't necessarily bad.

cpr• 9 years ago

Would there be any way to turn this into a Zendesk-like solution, using threads for each support inquiry, and assignments of some sort?

We're happy Fastmail email users, and can almost live with email for support, and barely use any Zendesk features other than assignments, internal notes, and various views. But those three simple ZD features we do use are critical.

brongondwana9• 9 years ago

I pinged the product lead (and told her to get a hacker news account of her own!)

Answer: we've definitely talked about how it would be great as a lightweight client management system for a freelancer or consulting firm. We're definitely looking ahead to possible integrations, too!

---

From myself - we talk a lot about "teams" with Topicbox, but it's really any group of poeple who share a common interest or responsibility. One market we've identified is homeowners' associations or "body corporates" as they're often called here in Australia. They have membership turnover as people buy and sell, and they have long running projects with a need to keep history. Finally, they consist of people who use different mail services, because unlike a business where everyone is on the same solution, a set of homeowners share nothing other than the locality in which they live. So a heterogeneous system like Topicbox with archivable topics and searchable history is ideal.

wyc• 9 years ago

I can't wait to see products like these spawn brand new professions like Email Summarizers to get the gist out of long threads, Department Librarians to organize and catalog discussions and events, and Communications Coordinators to train teams on more effective patterns of e-communication.

PMs unwittingly take all these roles today, but these tools will surely unlock further specialization.

mkempe• 9 years ago

Many moons ago I worked at a consultancy that was struggling with knowledge sharing across continents and hundreds of projects. I suggested three paths: a company-wide search engine that would return results across all project files (Google used to sell such a solution, in a box); a part-time librarian role in each project team to make sure project documents were correctly named, the latest version was stored on the central file server, and they knew how to reach out to other project librarians; and finally a one-day after-action review workshop for every single project team as part of project closure. Plus a few additional activities for project teams and suggestions for long-term project staffing systems.

Some of it was done, very satisfyingly; some of it we didn't get around to trying. Then the dotcom meltdown happened.

EGreg• 9 years ago

Aren't many businesses going to be leery of sending their group emails to yet another external domain to be archived? Where are the turnkey open source email servers after 40 years? It seems no one solved SPAM in a way that's compatible with sending out your own, but for receiving and internal stuff like this?

azinman22• 9 years ago

This just a mailing list, right? What am I missing?

grok2• 9 years ago

Seems like mailing list with a nicer UI that allows for searching etc.....

Kadin2• 9 years ago

I think it has a nice UI, and presumably it's also a hosted solution.

But fundamentally it seems to have many of the same features that Mailman et al have had for decades.

Good on them if they can make mailinglist archives great again, though. I think they're an underappreciated resource, and maybe a slick interface and some rebranding is just what they need.

azinman22• 9 years ago

The naming and the copy about team communication made me think it’s more than it is. Not suggesting it has low utility, although I wish it did more than add search to a hosted mailing list... google groups has search (in an old interface). Seems like there’s a lot of opportunity to fix emails weaknesses here if the product is truly focused on topics and teams.

j605• 9 years ago

Their FAQ even mentions migrating from listserv as an option by talking with their team.

_RPM• 9 years ago

FastMail really needs a UX team and graphic designer.

ngrilly• 9 years ago

Could this be considered an alternative to Discourse?

Topicbox – FastMail’s new product for teams

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