Ghost of Advent blog posts past

Many years ago, on December 25th, 2015, I wrote a blog post.

I had a plan. For sure, we would have Scheduled Send by next Christmas.

On Christmas Day 2016, we didn’t have Scheduled Send yet, but there was plenty more to be excited about.

In 2022, we blogged about Scheduled Send! It was done, and done the right way.

My initial hack back in 2015 had been a proof of concept. The version of the feature that we finally shipped is a solid piece of engineering. In fact, it had already been running for quite a while! If you’ve ever hit Undo Send (it saves me all the time!!), then you were already using Scheduled Send without knowing it. Under the hood, what’s actually happening is that your send is scheduled for 20 seconds into the future. When you hit “undo”, our interface cancels the send, moves the message back to the Drafts folder, and re-opens the compose window.

This is so much better than many other clients’ versions of Undo Send, which spools the message locally for the undo period - meaning that if you close your lid or put your phone into flight mode after sending, the message won’t actually be sent until you reconnect! Oops.

So, I felt bad about delaying the feature, but I’m really proud of what we’ve built. With our Snooze and Scheduled Send features, plus the ability to use the VIP contacts feature to limit notifications, the Fastmail interface makes it easy to not only respect your own time but to work on your schedule while still respecting the quiet time of the people you’re communicating with.

What’s Next?

There can’t really be an end-of-advent post without some kind of looking forward…even though I’m a suit now (I only actually wear a suit for quarterly all-hands meetings; the rest of the time, you’ll see me rocking a Fastmail branded t-shirt, with a jacket if I’m being fancy).

In 2024, I’m excited about multi-currency billing, standard JMAP Contacts and Calendars, and APIs to let you use Fastmail exactly how you want to.

I have always loved doing Open Standards work. We’ve been progressing the JMAP standards for Contacts and Calendars at IETF, and as we switch our systems over to the final form of the specifications, we’ll open those up for anyone to build clients for! I’m really keen to see new products that are enabled by this work.

Another thing that you have already been using, though you may not have noticed, is the start of offline support. Fastmail is built on browser technologies, and browsers are getting more powerful tooling to allow sites to operate entirely offline, using locally stored data. This year, we started caching more data locally, meaning Fastmail loads even faster when you return to a machine you’ve used before! No promises that 2024 will be the year (I’ve learned my lesson), but we’ll keep improving.

I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable end of December, whatever you celebrate.  Thanks for reading our Advent series, and I’ll see you in 2024!

Cheers,

Bron Gondwana