[nmjenkins]

We have always hosted email (to use your own domain you will need an Enhanced or Premier personal account, or any of the Family/Business accounts). We support XMPP fairly completely I believe; you can certainly set a status! Chat history is saved by default and delivered as emails to a Chats folder in your account (so nicely searchable by our swish new email search infrastructure).

You need to pick a FastMail username to use to log in, even if you want to host your own domain. You never have to use this email address if you don't want to.

Family and business accounts are designed for hosting multiple separate accounts (with full separate logins) under the same (normally custom) domain, all on a single bill. There are features for administrating the different accounts and a shared address book. A personal (e.g. Enhanced) account is a single set of mailboxes/login, however can be used with multiple email addresses/domains.

Hope that answers your questions.