To retrieve your username or password, click the 'Lost password/account' link on the login screen at http://www.fastmail.fm. This will enable you to send your password and username to your backup email address.

If you don't remember your backup email address, please use the Support screen to submit a support request. You'll need to include evidence that you are the owner of the account. As many details as possible from the following list will help with this:

If "Secure Login" or "Go to secure login screen" does not work, it may be that your browser does not support secure communications. You can login using regular "Login", however, without a secure connection, your communications with FastMail.FM are not encrypted. Alternatively, use a browser that works with secure connections, such as the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

To understand what the limitations of secure communications with FastMail.FM are, click here.

If your account is suspended, or temporarily unavailable, you will get a message at the top of the screen describing what is happening. If your account is temporarily unavailable, please wait for up to 2 hours before contacting the support team. If your account has been suspended, please fill out our support form for more information.

If you get a message saying 'FastMail.FM- An error has occurred' when you try to log in, this indicates an internal FastMail.FM error. This is most likely because there is a problem with your underlying IMAP account. Click on the 'Account problems' link on the login screen at http://www.fastmail.fm. This will perform a series of tests on your account, including some common 'sanity' checks, as well as fixing any folder access problems.

Please be patient, it may take several minutes to get a response. After the tests are complete, try logging in again. If you still have problems, continue troubleshooting.

For other problems, click on the 'Account problems' link on the login screen at http://www.fastmail.fm (if you have not already done so). This will perform a series of tests on your account, including some common 'sanity' checks, as well as fixing any folder access problems.

Please be patient, it may take up to several minutes to get a response. After the tests are complete, try logging in again. If you still have problems, fill in our support form and the FastMail.FM support team will look into it for you.

If you get a message saying 'The page cannot be displayed' when you try to login, you may be having network connectivity problems.

FastMail.FM has a self monitoring system on every server that tests every service every 2 minutes. We check every externally accessible port (eg SMTP, IMAP, POP, HTTP, etc both regular & SSL) to see that it's accepting connections, and responds to expected commands. If any tests fail, the system will page a developer to look into the problem ASAP.

Firstly, bookmark status.fastmail.fm. This is an externally hosted blog site that we post all server status updates to as soon as possible.

If there's nothing posted on the status blog, then in many cases, rather than the actual server being down, there may simply be some internet congestion between you and FastMail.FM, or your ISP may be having temporary routing or proxy server problems.

A first step would be to check our externally hosted uptime service at http://www.pingdom.com/reports/x8mbe1jgimkn/. Pingdom is an independently run service that monitors the uptime of other online services from dozens of locations around the world and allows you to publish those results, which is what the above link is for.

If the pingdom page is showing that all services are up, then it probably means there's a specific problem with your ISPs internet connectivity.

A first try to work around the program would be to try our alternate server in Singapore at http://sg.www.fastmail.fm. This server has been particularly useful for people in Asia/Middle East regions when they have had trouble accessing the main server as a way of routing around intermittent network problems. Note that you may receive SSL certificate errors when using this server. If you do receive an error message, just check that the SSL certificate is for www.fastmail.fm and accept it.

If the Singapore server does not fix the problem, you need to find out where the routing problem is occuring. To do this, the simple approach for Windows users is to use FastMail.FM's diagnostic tool FastTest. We suggest that you download FastTest now. To use FastTest, simply double-click it after downloading, and follow the instructions. The output may not mean much to you, but if you send it to us using the FastMail.FM support system it will help us a lot!

If you can't use FastTest (it doesn't work on your system for some reason, or you do not use Windows), you can try the manual approach. Open an MS-DOS prompt (in Windows, by clicking Start->Programs->Accessories->MS-DOS Prompt or Command Prompt) or an XTerm (in Linux/Unix) or a Terminal (in Mac OS X) and type:

At the point where congestion occurs, you will see one or more '*'s. It is out of our control unless this point is the very last hop, to FastMail.FM. If the traceroute does not show all '*'s in the last line, also try the following commands from the command prompt:

If you are emailing the support team about a problem with connectivity, be sure to include the full results of all of these commands. To copy the output under Windows, drag your mouse over the output while holding down the button, and then press the Enter key to copy it. In an email, press Ctrl-V to paste it. Also, be sure to tell us if you are emailing us about a problem, whether you are behind a firewall, whether you are at work, whether you are using a modem or cable modem or ADSL, and any other information about your setup.