DAV, or WebDAV to give its full name, is a tool for remotely managing files over the internet. FTP is an earlier and less fully featured tool for the same thing, but more programs support it. You can read more about WebDAV at http://www.webdav.org/ .
Login:
You need to log in with your full FastMail.FM username, i.e username@your.domain. You must use the username you used to sign up your account, not any aliases or virtual aliases. Because some software has difficulty with the @ symbol you can actually use any of:
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username@your.domain
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username#your.domain
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username/your.domain
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username=your.domain
This must be your primary username and not an alias.
DAV:
Connect to http://dav.messagingengine.com/ or https://dav.messagingengine.com/ using your DAV client. You can also use your web browser directly if you're just planning to download files and don't need all the advanced DAV features (e. g., uploading files, copying files, etc.)
When you connect to dav.messagingengine.com, you see all folders available to you, including shared folders from other users, and also special temporary filesfolders. Because of that, to see your actual files, you have to navigate into the "username.domain.tld" folder, and then the "files" folder within that. To avoid having to navigate into these folders everytime, you can use the special hostname myfiles.messagingengine.com instead of dav.messagingengine.com instead. Basically this works exactly the same as dav.messagingengine.com, but is rooted directly at the top of your files directory.
DAV Clients:
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Recent Windows OSes have a couple of built-in clients - you can go straight to https://dav.messagingengine.com/ from within Word, or map it as a network place or even as a drive with 'net use:' - but all these methods have bugs, especially in Windows XP. Follow these instructions for XP or these for Vista to try anyway.
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Novell Netdrive is a good free client for Windows. There isn't a direct download available from Novell, but you can find it on the net easily enough.
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Webdrive is also good, but not free.
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MacOS has a built-in client which works quite well. From the Finder, use the 'Connect to Server...' option under the 'Go' menu.
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On Linux you can use Konqueror if you have KDE - just go to webdavs://dav.messagingengine.com/.
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For the more technically inclined, DAV Explorer is a very powerful Java client.
FTP:
Connect to ftp.messagingengine.com with your username and password (note that only 'Full' and 'Enhanced' accounts have FTP access). Your {My Files} directory will be in /username.your.domain/files/.
FTP Clients:
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Most web browers can access FTP in read-only mode by just using ftp://ftp.messagingengine.com .
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Vista users can follow these instructions .
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CuteFTP and WS-FTP seem popular for Windows. You can download free versions of both.
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Any Linux system will have heaps of ftp clients available: "gftp" seems good if you want a graphical interface, and "ncftp" is insanely powerful as a command line tool.
We've had a couple of users doing reasonable things which just happen to hit pathological cases in our filesystem implementation. To stop this happening, we've had to restrict the FTP server to one connection per user. Hopefully we can remove this limitation again soon, but for now it's needed to ensure that service keeps working smoothly for everyone else.