8 ms·

Why CardDAV took so long

176 points by masnick 11y ago

brongondwana 11y ago
I didn't even get into the remaining compatible with the existing contacts system. CalDAV was green field, but CardDAV had to integrate with the web, with spam scanning (whitelist/score bonus for known users), with mailing list address book groups, ...
- tombrossman 11y ago
  The only feature I miss with your CardDAV implementation is contact photos. Everything else works very well so I leave email and calendaring to FastMail but I'm back to self-hosted contacts for now. Really hope this can be added soon.
  - robn_fastmail 11y ago
    They do work, but only if you upload them via CardDAV - we don't have any UI for them in the web client yet.
    - tombrossman 11y ago
      Interesting, I'll have to try again. When I first used the beta I imported a VCF exported from ownCloud (which I think stored the images as data URIs). I'll try to figure out how to upload them via CardDAV now, thanks.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    To add something to what @robn already said - with Google Apps the resolution you get on contacts syncing is 96x96 pixels. Not sure what resolution FastMail supports, but seems to be OK on my 1440x2560 phone.
hedgehog 11y ago
Miserable, this kind of stuff is why I don't run my own mail server any more. Happy Fastmail customer since 2006.
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Make that two of us!
- djsumdog 11y ago
  I might go that route myself. I've been running my own email server since 2012 and I'm just tired of having my stuff constantly flagged as spam
  - merb 11y ago
    use rdns, spf and dkms, luke.
    - regecks 11y ago
      ... and sign up and monitor every FBL you can get your hands on, have outgoing spam filtering gateways, procedures to rotate subnets in case Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail receive a single complaint about any message relayed by your MTA and take their sweet time "conditionally mitigating" you. Pray daily that none of your users get their email creds stolen on a coffee shop wi-fi. It's a very lame part-time job.
      - merb 11y ago
        you won't got onto a FBL if you are the only sender.
- oever 11y ago
  It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server. This is bad for freedom on the internet. http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html
treve 11y ago
Well done guys!
sz4kerto 11y ago
"Only this one user had problem. But he had pretty bad problems, and I wanted to fix this properly." That's why I'm a Fastmail customer.
- Khao 11y ago
  I submitted a bug report once and it was fixed the next day, I was invited to try it out on their beta version of the website and it was rolled out on all the servers a couple days later. These guys are truly providing a fantastic service.
  - feld 11y ago
    Similar experience. Fix with inability to respond to some crazy github-generated email addresses rolled out publicly in less than 48 hours. It helps that I was able to tell them "I am pretty sure it's your regex on valid email addresses because I can reproduce it with other emails like $this" I also recall they fixed an issue where "--" at the top of an email I was replying to was making the whole thing look like a signature and when I tried to send it was warning me about an empty message.
tiffanyh 11y ago
I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ... It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts. What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts. Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps? Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Fastmail is email and calendaring not for cloud based based document editing / file storage.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    It's clear from tiffanyh's comment that the question is about the mail/calendar/address book part. Though, I cannot give an answer to that question. From my experience with a personal account, I can say that Fastmail permits much more customization.
    - eggnet 11y ago
      They aren't independent questions. Why would you get cloud based document editing and storage from microsoft or google, and then not use the freely included and well integrated calendaring and email that either provide.
      - mrmondo 11y ago
        Trust me - Microsoft's email and calendaring is anything but well integrated, it's a flaky, unreliable mess.
        worldadventurer 11y ago
        Can you please expound on how it's flaky and unreliable? I'm a user and am wondering what I'm missing. :)
zenpusher 11y ago
I've had some deliverability issues with Fastmail, and the search feature is horrible. Other than that, I've been a satisfied customer for over a year now.
- masnick 11y ago
  I've actually found the search in the web interface to be very fast and pretty good in terms of finding what I'm looking for with >70k messages. When I switched from Gmail a few years ago (https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/ https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/), one of the most striking changes was how fast FastMail's interface was compared to Gmail. FastMail did a huge update to their search code just as I switched, and I haven't looked back.
johntash 11y ago
Can you use multiple domains with fastmail? And do they allow wildcard addresses/forwarders? It's probably on the website, but I haven't found it yet.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 11y ago
  Yes and yes. I'm using those features since I migrated my mail there from personally hosting an all forwarding config.
  - johntash 11y ago
    Cool, thank you for the response! I'll probably give it a shot for my non-gmail.com emails and see how it goes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
darrmit 11y ago
Fastmail is fantastic and their policies and pricing are fantastic as well. Really happy with them, and moreso after this story and the recent DDoS troubles they went through.
eridius 11y ago
> In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically added email addresses. I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Today I checked and there's 3 more unwanted contacts. It actually feels very broken to me that FastMail is automatically adding things to my address book without asking me, and without any obvious way to turn it off. I don't mind it recording this stuff in a separate addressbook to use for spam filtering and for auto-filling during message composing, but it should not be part of my normal addressbook and should not be coming down over CardDAV for my user addressbook. The reason this is a problem is because I use my FastMail CardDAV addressbook as a shared addressbook for me and my wife (she doesn't use FastMail herself but I do), since we use iCloud for our normal address books but iCloud doesn't have a way to share addressbooks. It occurs to me now that since I'm actually using a Family account (for a single user, so I can have a custom domain without having the more expensive plan), I have a Shared address book available and I should just switch over to that (since I assume nothing ever auto-adds there). But it was still a rude surprise to find a bunch of unknown contacts appearing in my Contacts app on iOS.
- nmjenkins 11y ago
  You can turn this off in Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-save contacts.
  - eridius 11y ago
    Good to know, thanks. I'm still looking forward to being able to have auto-saved contacts in a separate addressbook though, as I do like being able to autocomplete addresses when composing messages even if I don't want that address in my contacts list.
josteink 11y ago
> Even if we reported a bug to Apple right now, it would still take months at a minimum before a fix is in the field and on all devices. So we need to get this working for everyone so we can move CardDAV out of beta. Basically make a hacky workaround, and leave the situation as is for everyone else. This is not meant directly as criticism, but one thing I really appreciate about the OpenBSD team is how they refuse to "fix" things by creating bad code as a workaround to other broken code. They always submit patches upstream, and everyone gets to benefit. If more people had that attitude towards code quality, we might not be in such a buggy universe as we are now.

176 points by masnick 11y ago

I didn't even get into the remaining compatible with the existing contacts system. CalDAV was green field, but CardDAV had to integrate with the web, with spam scanning (whitelist/score bonus for known users), with mailing list address book groups, ...

tombrossman 11y ago
The only feature I miss with your CardDAV implementation is contact photos. Everything else works very well so I leave email and calendaring to FastMail but I'm back to self-hosted contacts for now. Really hope this can be added soon.
- robn_fastmail 11y ago
  They do work, but only if you upload them via CardDAV - we don't have any UI for them in the web client yet.
  - tombrossman 11y ago
    Interesting, I'll have to try again. When I first used the beta I imported a VCF exported from ownCloud (which I think stored the images as data URIs). I'll try to figure out how to upload them via CardDAV now, thanks.
- bad_user 11y ago
  To add something to what @robn already said - with Google Apps the resolution you get on contacts syncing is 96x96 pixels. Not sure what resolution FastMail supports, but seems to be OK on my 1440x2560 phone.

hedgehog 11y ago

Miserable, this kind of stuff is why I don't run my own mail server any more. Happy Fastmail customer since 2006.

mrmondo 11y ago
Make that two of us!
djsumdog 11y ago
I might go that route myself. I've been running my own email server since 2012 and I'm just tired of having my stuff constantly flagged as spam
- merb 11y ago
  use rdns, spf and dkms, luke.
  - regecks 11y ago
    ... and sign up and monitor every FBL you can get your hands on, have outgoing spam filtering gateways, procedures to rotate subnets in case Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail receive a single complaint about any message relayed by your MTA and take their sweet time "conditionally mitigating" you. Pray daily that none of your users get their email creds stolen on a coffee shop wi-fi. It's a very lame part-time job.
    - merb 11y ago
      you won't got onto a FBL if you are the only sender.
oever 11y ago
It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server. This is bad for freedom on the internet. http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html

treve 11y ago

Well done guys!

sz4kerto 11y ago

"Only this one user had problem. But he had pretty bad problems, and I wanted to fix this properly." That's why I'm a Fastmail customer.

Khao 11y ago
I submitted a bug report once and it was fixed the next day, I was invited to try it out on their beta version of the website and it was rolled out on all the servers a couple days later. These guys are truly providing a fantastic service.
- feld 11y ago
  Similar experience. Fix with inability to respond to some crazy github-generated email addresses rolled out publicly in less than 48 hours. It helps that I was able to tell them "I am pretty sure it's your regex on valid email addresses because I can reproduce it with other emails like $this" I also recall they fixed an issue where "--" at the top of an email I was replying to was making the whole thing look like a signature and when I tried to send it was warning me about an empty message.

tiffanyh 11y ago

I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ... It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts. What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts. Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps? Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000

mrmondo 11y ago
Fastmail is email and calendaring not for cloud based based document editing / file storage.
- danieldk 11y ago
  It's clear from tiffanyh's comment that the question is about the mail/calendar/address book part. Though, I cannot give an answer to that question. From my experience with a personal account, I can say that Fastmail permits much more customization.
  - eggnet 11y ago
    They aren't independent questions. Why would you get cloud based document editing and storage from microsoft or google, and then not use the freely included and well integrated calendaring and email that either provide.
    - mrmondo 11y ago
      Trust me - Microsoft's email and calendaring is anything but well integrated, it's a flaky, unreliable mess.
      - worldadventurer 11y ago
        Can you please expound on how it's flaky and unreliable? I'm a user and am wondering what I'm missing. :)

zenpusher 11y ago

I've had some deliverability issues with Fastmail, and the search feature is horrible. Other than that, I've been a satisfied customer for over a year now.

masnick 11y ago
I've actually found the search in the web interface to be very fast and pretty good in terms of finding what I'm looking for with >70k messages. When I switched from Gmail a few years ago (https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/ https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/), one of the most striking changes was how fast FastMail's interface was compared to Gmail. FastMail did a huge update to their search code just as I switched, and I haven't looked back.

johntash 11y ago

Can you use multiple domains with fastmail? And do they allow wildcard addresses/forwarders? It's probably on the website, but I haven't found it yet.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toast0 11y ago
Yes and yes. I'm using those features since I migrated my mail there from personally hosting an all forwarding config.
- johntash 11y ago
  Cool, thank you for the response! I'll probably give it a shot for my non-gmail.com emails and see how it goes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

darrmit 11y ago

Fastmail is fantastic and their policies and pricing are fantastic as well. Really happy with them, and moreso after this story and the recent DDoS troubles they went through.

eridius 11y ago

> In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically added email addresses. I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Today I checked and there's 3 more unwanted contacts. It actually feels very broken to me that FastMail is automatically adding things to my address book without asking me, and without any obvious way to turn it off. I don't mind it recording this stuff in a separate addressbook to use for spam filtering and for auto-filling during message composing, but it should not be part of my normal addressbook and should not be coming down over CardDAV for my user addressbook. The reason this is a problem is because I use my FastMail CardDAV addressbook as a shared addressbook for me and my wife (she doesn't use FastMail herself but I do), since we use iCloud for our normal address books but iCloud doesn't have a way to share addressbooks. It occurs to me now that since I'm actually using a Family account (for a single user, so I can have a custom domain without having the more expensive plan), I have a Shared address book available and I should just switch over to that (since I assume nothing ever auto-adds there). But it was still a rude surprise to find a bunch of unknown contacts appearing in my Contacts app on iOS.

nmjenkins 11y ago
You can turn this off in Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-save contacts.
- eridius 11y ago
  Good to know, thanks. I'm still looking forward to being able to have auto-saved contacts in a separate addressbook though, as I do like being able to autocomplete addresses when composing messages even if I don't want that address in my contacts list.

josteink 11y ago

> Even if we reported a bug to Apple right now, it would still take months at a minimum before a fix is in the field and on all devices. So we need to get this working for everyone so we can move CardDAV out of beta. Basically make a hacky workaround, and leave the situation as is for everyone else. This is not meant directly as criticism, but one thing I really appreciate about the OpenBSD team is how they refuse to "fix" things by creating bad code as a workaround to other broken code. They always submit patches upstream, and everyone gets to benefit. If more people had that attitude towards code quality, we might not be in such a buggy universe as we are now.