FastMail.FM supports the internet standard XMPP/Jabber protocol to allow chatting/instant messaging between FastMail.FM users, and any other XMPP/Jabber servers and services (eg gmail).

To use the chat service, you'll have to install an XMPP/Jabber client on your local machine and set it up to access the FastMail.FM servers. There's many free XMPP/Jabber clients available, a fairly complete list is available at the XMPP website. Commonly used ones are:

Once you install a chat client, you need to set it up to access the FastMail.FM server. This is slightly different for each client. The core details are available in the "Instant Messaging" section of our servers and ports page. There's also some reasonably good instructions for different clients on our wiki.

XMPP supports the concept of a chat roster. That is a list of people you have authorised to be able to chat with you, and these contacts are usually listed by your chat client when you connect.

These contacts can be separated into different groups. This is controlled by default by the client, and any changes made in one client are synchronised to other clients when they connect.

If you have a family or business account, then by default each person in the family/business will be able to see every other person in the family/business as part of their chat roster, without having to explicitly authorise them.

Most clients will keep a log of chats for you. However that means if you want to check a log, you'll have to be on the same machine and client the chat actually occured on.

FastMail.FM has the ability to log chats as emails to your account. You can control this on the Options -> Chat Settings screen. If you enable logging, we'll automatically create a "Chats" folder in your account, and file any chat logs into that folder. This makes it easy to see and search them anywhere.