Man. I remember the October Surprise, I guess it was, gosh, October 31, 2012. It was the WORST HALLOWEEN EVER for me! I was losing email left and right. I couldn't even log in successfully. I had a custom theme for the old interface that wasn't migrated over successfully and my entire interface was unresponsive.

Support? What support?! I tried every means necessary, including writing opeds in the email forums, and nothing, absolutely nothing. My account had just renewed a family account (3 premium accounts) on Oct 12, and t hey refused to give me a refund. I had been with them since 2006, a real long-time customer. I had personally referred hundreds of people to them over the years. I couldn't even get people in Opera to help me out.

I found PolarisMail and the owner actually supported me in getting all of my mail over via IMAP. I loved his support so much that I told him all about the FastMail saga, and even though I had already paid in full, I asked him to tweak his payment plans to be more in line with FastMail and even consider adding a promo targeting Fastmail users. I was really excited when he had it up very shortly thereafter!

I've been using PolarisMail every day since, and it is frickin rock-solid! It is so much faster than the two last incarnations of Fastmail were, and I really dig it. The owner is a great guy, too, really fast with support and even gave me his Skype number, so he's pretty much always on call if I have a true emergency, which are few and far between.

In exactly 2 years, I haven't noticed much more than 30 minutes of downtime, which is so much more than I can say for either Fastmail or even Gmail. I would seriously give them a chance!