Opera acquires Aussie IMAP email provider FastMail.fm

Stan Beer
Friday, 30 April 2010 22:47

IT Industry - Deals

Norwegian web browser player Opera Software has acquired Australian Web-based and IMAP e-mail provider FastMail.fm. According to Opera, the acquisition will enable the company to expand its current messaging product portfolio and deliver cross-platform messaging to a wide range of devices, including computers, mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles.

The brainchild of Melbourne-based dot com wunderkind Jeremy Howard, Fastmail was one of the first email products on the market in the early 2000s that enabled users to integrate their familiar desktop email clients, such as Outlook Express, with web-based email made popular by Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Howard, who at the age of 19 was earning in excess of $200,000 at the Australian offices of McKinsey and Co while still a student, developed Fastmail because he identified the need for users to take their email on the road using familiar POP like email clients.

In his early years, Howard ran the Fastmail email business from a rented apartment in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Port Melbourne, while simultaneously running another software business he developed involved with the insurance industry.

For a $40 per year subscription, Fastmail users could get a limited data allocation and an account that enabled them to use a web-based client which could be synchronised with their desktop client of choice.

At the time, Howard told this writer that he was making a lot more money from his insurance software than Fastmail but there was little doubt that Howard seemed more at ease with the shorts and flip flop lifestyle of a dot com entrepreneur than that of suit and tie attired insurance software business tycoon.

The advent of Gmail, with massive free data allocations of 1GB and more, limited the growth of Fastmail but it still maintained a loyal band of users around the world.