4 ms·

I find FastMail painfully slow. Particularly the mobile app. Long threads with tables and images will crash the app and make Undo unusable on desktop

by fovc 8y ago

chrismorgan 8y ago
I work on the FastMail frontend. I’d be interested to have more details, because we pride ourselves on living up to our name (fast!), and providing a robust service. If you have something you can share which concretely performs badly or exhibits such bugs as you describe, please send a test case to support@fastmail.com, asking for the ticket to be passed to me, Chris Morgan. If it’s particular emails that you want me to be able to check, put them in a folder named “forwebmaster” (so named at present for strange historical reasons) and mention that you’ve done so, otherwise I won’t be able to see them. Observations I can make: • For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow, but once it’s running there should be no performance issues. The app should never crash; what you describe sounds like it could be running out of memory, which would surprise me, because FastMail’s memory usage is habitually excellent (on Firefox on desktop, I tend to find a long-running FastMail session to use about 11MB only). • If you have very large emails, the current interface renders them completely, which can be slow; in our upcoming JMAP-based interface, which we’ll be transitioning everyone over to in the near future, we truncate at 100KB by default, which I’ve definitely observed having a positive effect on performance on certain types of inordinately large (like 6MB cron job logs) or unreasonably-written emails (HTML for email is awful; if anyone ever asks you to craft an HTML email, run away). • I know of no bugs in undo handling. If you know otherwise, please advise so that we can investigate and fix it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Sorry for hijacking the thread, but since we've got you here: I'm a happy FastMail user with two separate accounts (one personal and one for business). With the latter, I run into a following issue: there's no proper way to specify a tax ID number, in order to get an invoice that's valid in my country. I run that by your support last month, they generated me a new invoice manually (this one had boxes instead of non-ASCII characters, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but it seems I'll have to resubmit a ticket each month to get the invoice. Is there something both me & the support team is missing? Is there a chance for a "tax ID" field in billing info UI?
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    Sorry I neglected to answer this earlier. We have a task in our internal tracker about this, for VAT at least.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Thanks for the reply. I need the same number for VAT and income tax, so solving the former would help me with the latter as well.
- DrWumbo 8y ago
  Happy Fastmail user here. Thank you for providing a quality service!
- colanderman 8y ago
  > For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow PLEASE fix this! "Startup" is basically "any time I click an e-mail notification". Having to wait 5-10 seconds to see the end of a one-sentence e-mail is incredibly frustrating! Every time I recommend FastMail to a friend I have to qualify it with a "but" because of this. That said, I love the responsiveness of the web app. I wish all websites were that responsive. It is the reason I'm a customer of probably 5 years now. Keep up the good work!
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    I experience this pain also—I use comparatively cheap phones, currently a Samsung Galaxy J1 2016, and so the FastMail app is seldom running when I open it. Opening an email from a notification takes me 9–13 seconds in Australia, depending on various conditions. Partly in consequence but partly also due to my personality, I only use the app on my phone for the notifications (for which no startup is needed) or when I need access to my emails and am away from my laptop. When we start using service workers, we’ll be able to load without any network round-trips, a quick measurement of which suggests about four seconds saved for me in Australia (high latency, remember—for people in the US, the saving will be closer to a second and a half), so the nine seconds is hopefully then down to about five, five that we can subsequently work on optimising more aggressively, once the biggest obstruction (the network) is removed. But all of this will take time to make happen. In the mean time, thanks for recommending FastMail to people with the caveat: I agree wholeheartedly with you on it!

I find FastMail painfully slow. Particularly the mobile app. Long threads with tables and images will crash the app and make Undo unusable on desktop

by fovc 8y ago

I find FastMail painfully slow. Particularly the mobile app. Long threads with tables and images will crash the app and make Undo unusable on desktop

chrismorgan 8y ago

I work on the FastMail frontend. I’d be interested to have more details, because we pride ourselves on living up to our name (fast!), and providing a robust service. If you have something you can share which concretely performs badly or exhibits such bugs as you describe, please send a test case to support@fastmail.com, asking for the ticket to be passed to me, Chris Morgan. If it’s particular emails that you want me to be able to check, put them in a folder named “forwebmaster” (so named at present for strange historical reasons) and mention that you’ve done so, otherwise I won’t be able to see them. Observations I can make: • For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow, but once it’s running there should be no performance issues. The app should never crash; what you describe sounds like it could be running out of memory, which would surprise me, because FastMail’s memory usage is habitually excellent (on Firefox on desktop, I tend to find a long-running FastMail session to use about 11MB only). • If you have very large emails, the current interface renders them completely, which can be slow; in our upcoming JMAP-based interface, which we’ll be transitioning everyone over to in the near future, we truncate at 100KB by default, which I’ve definitely observed having a positive effect on performance on certain types of inordinately large (like 6MB cron job logs) or unreasonably-written emails (HTML for email is awful; if anyone ever asks you to craft an HTML email, run away). • I know of no bugs in undo handling. If you know otherwise, please advise so that we can investigate and fix it.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Sorry for hijacking the thread, but since we've got you here: I'm a happy FastMail user with two separate accounts (one personal and one for business). With the latter, I run into a following issue: there's no proper way to specify a tax ID number, in order to get an invoice that's valid in my country. I run that by your support last month, they generated me a new invoice manually (this one had boxes instead of non-ASCII characters, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but it seems I'll have to resubmit a ticket each month to get the invoice. Is there something both me & the support team is missing? Is there a chance for a "tax ID" field in billing info UI?
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  Sorry I neglected to answer this earlier. We have a task in our internal tracker about this, for VAT at least.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I need the same number for VAT and income tax, so solving the former would help me with the latter as well.
DrWumbo 8y ago
Happy Fastmail user here. Thank you for providing a quality service!
colanderman 8y ago
> For the mobile app especially, startup can be slow PLEASE fix this! "Startup" is basically "any time I click an e-mail notification". Having to wait 5-10 seconds to see the end of a one-sentence e-mail is incredibly frustrating! Every time I recommend FastMail to a friend I have to qualify it with a "but" because of this. That said, I love the responsiveness of the web app. I wish all websites were that responsive. It is the reason I'm a customer of probably 5 years now. Keep up the good work!
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  I experience this pain also—I use comparatively cheap phones, currently a Samsung Galaxy J1 2016, and so the FastMail app is seldom running when I open it. Opening an email from a notification takes me 9–13 seconds in Australia, depending on various conditions. Partly in consequence but partly also due to my personality, I only use the app on my phone for the notifications (for which no startup is needed) or when I need access to my emails and am away from my laptop. When we start using service workers, we’ll be able to load without any network round-trips, a quick measurement of which suggests about four seconds saved for me in Australia (high latency, remember—for people in the US, the saving will be closer to a second and a half), so the nine seconds is hopefully then down to about five, five that we can subsequently work on optimising more aggressively, once the biggest obstruction (the network) is removed. But all of this will take time to make happen. In the mean time, thanks for recommending FastMail to people with the caveat: I agree wholeheartedly with you on it!