Under the deal, FastMail says it plans to continue to operate Pobox – which provides email forwarding,filtering and domain services – and email service provider (ESP) Listbox, as normal, "with no significant changes planned for the immediate future".
The IC Group is based in the US state of Philadelphia and FastMail says the acquisition will help the company increase its product offerings to the already competitive email hosting market.
FastMail Director, Rob Mueller, says the the acquisition will also continue to drive new research and development in the areas of email hosting and associated services.
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“The Pobox and Listbox products will be a natural fit into our existing products and services. And while we have no plans to change these product offerings at the moment, they will continue to help us to deliver even more to our customers in the future.”
Mueller says the new businesses will also benefit from FastMail’s existing server infrastructure, which he says is recognised for its "impressive reliability and security".
According to Mueller, FastMail now boasts over 100,000 business and personal email users around the world.
FastMail, still a wholly privately owned business, was founded in 1999 by Australian data scientist, entrepreneur and former management consultant Jeremy Howard.
FastMail was sold to Opera in 2010 but three years later, in 2013, staff of the email company bought it back from Opera, returning the business to independent ownership.
Howard, who started the business from scratch from his Melbourne base, is now CEO of Enlitic, an advanced machine learning company at Singularity University in California.
He is also a past president of Kaggle - a community and competition platform of over 200,000 data scientists - and founder of Optimal Decisions, a firm that develops advanced analytics and software for the insurance industry.
