This post addresses a question that we are occasionally asked regarding billing and custom domains, where people would like to have separate billing for accounts within a single custom domain.
Here’s an example scenario: I, Bron-the-person, have an awesome domain (let’s say gondwana.name
), and my friends all want to have accounts on the domain as well. I would rather they each paid FastMail directly, rather than me paying a giant bill and then having to chase them all up for their share. Maybe it’s just my family, maybe it’s a whole club of people; the underlying scenario is the same.
FastMail has billing infrastructure in place to bill users individually, so therefore it wouldn’t be hard for us to support this model, right? Everybody would be happy – maybe a few users would close their gondwana.name
accounts, maybe a few more would join. Maybe gondwana.name
could even be available for any FastMail customers to sign up with, since it’s such a cool name.
It seemed like a good idea once upon a time.
Unfortunately, FastMail wouldn’t own gondwana.name
, and if I, Bron-the-person, decided that I wanted to move my domain to a different provider, I could just point the nameservers or MX records elsewhere. All the other users with addresses or aliases in gondwana.name
would lose the ability to receive email to that domain, and there’s nothing FastMail could do about it.
At the core there are two different things being owned. One is the mailbox, say [email protected]
. FastMail owns the server where the disk is stored, and creates all the database entries and server file locations for a mailbox with that address. The other is the domain gondwana.name
, which is necessary to route emails to that mailbox. Unless they are both owned and controlled by the same entity, FastMail is placed in an impossible position, selling an account name in a namespace we don’t control.
So we offer two choices:
Upgrade your privacy and productivity and join the best in email.
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Fastmail customer, Xavier, gets the most out of his email account by using Fastmail Identities, Aliases, and Masked Email!