Fastmail is a popular email service provider, but they are one of the few large email providers that recycle your email address.

What does recycling an email address mean?

With most email providers, once you delete an email address, delete your account, or stop using a paid email service your email address will become inactive and is not able to be used by anyone else.

With Fastmail they recycle your email address. What this means is that if you are using an @fastmail.com email address and you decide you stop paying for and using the Fastmail service, or your simply delete an email account you are using, after a while Fastmail will allow someone else to use that email address.

For example, if you were using youremail@fastmail.com and you delete that email or stop paying for the service, someone else can come along and register youremail@fastmail.com

Why is this a problem?

There is a reason why most email providers nowadays do not do this, and that reason is security.

If you are using youremail@fastmail.com and you delete this account or stop paying for the service someone can come along and register that same email. This means that from that point onward any emails that are sent to youremail@fastmail.com will be delivered to the new owner of that email.

This is a huge security risk as it means that if someone tries to email you at youremail@fastmail.com (because you haven't told them not to email that address anymore), the new owner will receive that email.

If you used youremail@fastmail.com for any online services and you have forgotten to change the email tied to those accounts, this user can simply reset your password and gain access to your account.

Likewise if any companies or services have your email online as a point of contact, such as your meidcal provider, school, etc. and they try to email you, the new owner of youremail@fastmail.com will receive the emails not you.

Now, a way around this is to use a custom domain for your email, but that's an extra cost that you shouldn't be forced to take on. Fastmail is a premium email service that you are paying for, they are not cheap, you shouldnt have to pay even more money just for email security.

What can Fastmail do to fix this?

Simply put, they can just stop recycling email addresses, pretty simple.

They currently don't recycle their masked email offering so they can stop recycling @fastmail.com email accounts as well.