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Fastmail was down
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoHaven't noticed yet. I want to say most Fastmail incidents come and go without me noticing, apart from their tweets about them.
- odensc 6y agoAll good here too. Regional?
- burnthrow 6y agoMy experience was that Fastmail has regular hiccups, they just don't make the news. I left for Google Apps years ago mostly for that reason.
- gnud 6y agoI've used them as my mail provider for three years or so without noticing any. So if they have regular hiccups, most of them can't be that serious.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoBeen a customer for over a decade. Can count the number of outages I've actually noticed on one hand, and they've all been very minor. I'm surprised that anyone who thought Fastmail was a good choice would even consider Google as an alternative.
- burnthrow 6y agoI chose Fastmail for business, as an upgrade over self-hosting, because it seemed to be a solid provider, not because "Google, ew!" Turns out, Google's the more solid provider (three years as an FM customer before reaching that conclusion).
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoIn it's entire history, I'm not sure Fastmail has ever had an issue the scale or level of complete failure of https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/gmail-is-a-little-broken-right-now-one-day-after-a-massive-outage-errors/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/gmail-is-a-little-broken-r...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
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- atmosx 6y agoHugops to the team firefighting.
- doublerabbit 6y agoOperation Cuddles was a success
- muhammadusman 6y agoJust wrote some emails, checked things, completely fine for me. It might be affecting people in other areas.
- jamescun 6y agoHaven't noticed any issues (London), but I do appreciate the attention FastMail give to their uptime and outages, given they handle something as critical as email.
- dividuum 6y agoSaw a brief 503 once. Was back after 5 minutes.
- rychco 6y agoThis is affecting me (East US)
- eevahr 6y agoSeems to be resolved, noticed it 15 min ago for a couple of minutes. My first incident with fastmail and am very pleased with the fast and easy to find updates from the team.
- tspike 6y agoI'm in the western US. I noticed it for a few minutes and assumed it was my internet connection. Love these guys.
- hs86 6y agoJust this week, I uninstalled all my desktop mail clients: no more Thunderbird, MailMate, or eM Client. Fastmail's web app feels faster, uses fewer resources, and has the same UI on all of my computers. Instead of redirecting all other accounts into Fastmail, it has a simple UI to setup fetching-from and sending-as from other mail providers, and with using my own domain, it does not feel like a lock-in.
- vorpalhex 6y agoAren't you concerned about getting locked out of an email account and not having a local backup? Or even Fastmail having a serious issue and losing data?
- nvllsvm 6y agoI did something similar and opted to solely use Fastmail's web client. For backup, I regularly run isync on my home server: https://isync.sourceforge.io/ https://isync.sourceforge.io/
- imwally 6y agoI'm a Fastmail user and I've been pretty happy with my mutt + mbsync / msmtp setup on macOS. It's nice to have a local copy of your mail at all times.
- diarrhea 6y agoThis just isn't feasible for me from a usability perspective. Private email is with Fastmail, but work email is something else entirely. Both have good webmails, but vastly different UX. By using Thunderbird I can get the same UI/UX for all the different email providers. If I only had Fastmail, I'd also be OK with just using their webmail, it's excellent.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoText data compresses well. Mail archive can be extremely useful. Didn't you consider some archiving options? Putting all bets on webmail seems a bit risky to me.
- andrewnicolalde 6y agoCurious, I thought I'd noticed issues this morning at around 6 AM CST, I wonder if it has something to do with that. Hopefully this doesn't result in any dropped emails that arrive at Fastmail during this outage.. edit: Looks like no mail has been lost.
- mercurywells 6y agoI've had emails throughout the day, eastern time: 3am, 5am, 6am, 8am, 9:30am, 11am, 11:30am, 12:50pm, 3:15pm
- neither_color 6y agoLove fastmail. 500 aliases means a unique email login for every single online account. Hope they fix this soon.
- Tarq0n 6y agoKiller feature indeed. I just wish the same thing existed for phone numbers.
- the_pwner224 6y agoYou can set up a wildcard/catchall alias instead of having to manually create an actual alias for each service. Someone can send email to anything@yourdomain.com and it will go to your inbox. You can also send with a wildcard - the big desktop email clients, as well as the FastMail web interface, as well as FairEmail on Android all let you type something for the part before the @, so you can send from anything@yourdomain.com. https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html
- csomar 6y agoEven better if you use their Web interface, you'll reply with the same email alias that received the email.
- alessioalex 6y agoYou can even do more than that. I have different categories per services: paid services go to @paid.mydomain.tld, social logins go to @social.mydomain.tld etc. So that means something like paypal@paid.mydomain.tld or twitter@social.mydomain.tld. Edit: using Route53 for DNS subdomain wildcard.
- kevinkeller 6y ago> paid services go to @paid.mydomain.tld, social logins go to @social.mydomain.tld etc Any specific reason to do this over the usual way (paypal@mydomain.tld, twitter@mydomain.tld)? How are you benefitting from the extra hierarchy?
- leepowers 6y agoNoticed no problems today, west coast, I have their web mail interface always running in an open tab
- _joel 6y agoAll working fine here
- armitage 6y agoI left Fastmail for Gmail a couple of years ago because their spam filters weren't very good. I like Gmail's inbox filtering as well (priority, marketing, social, etc.)
- thismodernlife 6y agoFastmail is an excellent company with an amazing product. The web UI really is insanely fast. And with keyboard shortcuts you can be super productive. They’re also pushing new standards (JMAP) and seem committed to privacy and best practice etc. Really one of my favourite tech companies. Not an employee just a happy customer!
- walkingolof 6y agoI second this, highly recommended!
- laurent92 6y agoI confirm, excellent email provider. I won’t comment on privacy since they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech and has blanket surveillance laws. But at least it’s not Gmail, so it is safer to conduct business where Google could be competitor.
- thismodernlife 6y agoYes the Australia thing is unfortunate for them but I imagine this may change over time with a new administration. I’m not too bothered by it, it’s email and I’m more concerned about high quality product, availability, stability and them not selling my data or using it for ads. If I wanted to send something truly private by email I’d just use GPG :-)
- skissane 6y ago> Yes the Australia thing is unfortunate for them but I imagine this may change over time with a new administration. What do you mean by "new administration"? Do you mean if Australia has a change of government? (The term "administration" is used in presidential systems like the US, not parliamentary systems like Australia.) Both major parties in Australia are big fans of surveillance so I don't think a change of government would make any significant difference to Australia's surveillance laws. The police and intelligence agencies start up a chorus of "we need this to stop terrorists and pedophiles" and both sides of politics reply "of course! of course! whatever you need!" I don't think the legal situation for Fastmail in Australia is hugely different from that in other countries – look at national security letters in the US, bulk collection warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, etc. Yes, the Australian government can demand information but the same is true in many other countries. The most disturbingly unique thing about Australian laws is the government could – at least in theory – order a company to circumvent encryption or insert spyware into their product's code. Given Fastmail has all the data in cleartext, and it is server-based, I don't think Fastmail has to worry about such orders from the Australian government, they aren't relevant to Fastmail's product. But if Australian law does become a big issue for their business, they could always relocate elsewhere.
- tompic823 6y agoI'm a happy Fastmail customer, but the number of outages recently has been a little concerning. There has been at least one outage per month for the past several months. And what's worse is that I've never seen a postmortem published. It's hard to maintain confidence in a service that isn't being transparent about why they keep having outages, or what they're doing to prevent future outages.
- floatingatoll 6y agoWhat did their support say when you wrote them and asked for a post-mortem details?
- tompic823 6y agoI haven't gone as far as emailing support, but my single tweet asking if there would be a postmortem after a previous incident did not receive a reply. My other tweets to them, such as inquiring about a recent increase in spam, received replies. I've admittedly put in very little effort to obtain postmortems from Fastmail. But I also posit that I shouldn't have to. Postmortems should be made readily accessible, just as the outage was. I reserve my detective skills for figuring out my own service's outages.
- floatingatoll 6y agoI don't use Twitter and I don't read their blog, so if I wanted to see their post-mortems, I would have just asked their paid support no matter whether they've made one readily accessible or not. It seems like your primary goal is to call them out, rather than to get an explanation, and so I don't really have any advice to offer in that regard.
- zenexer 6y agoPost mortems should be published and easily accessible via status pages.[0] Otherwise, what’s the point? The parent wasn’t asking for advice; they were complaining that no post mortem was published via the expected channels. I agree with the parent: they shouldn’t have to contact support to get that information. If I’m paying for a service, generally, I want transparency without needing to hunt down info. These priorities and expectations aren’t universal, but they’re common enough and perfectly reasonable. [0]: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/ https://www.fastmailstatus.com/
- pavlov 6y agoFastmail's web UI has a really annoying bug on macOS Safari where it locks up the browser tab burning 100% CPU, and the only way out is to close the tab. Happens to me roughly every two days. I wish I had some steps to reproduce it, but it just comes up randomly when clicking on messages. I like the web UI, but if a desktop mail client crashed this often, I'd have deleted it long ago and switched to a different program. With webmail I don't have that choice.
- telesilla 6y ago>Happens to me roughly every two days If I were their dev I'd suggest first, use another browser for your sanity and second, get in touch with the support team to see if you can help improve it!
- brongondwana 6y agoThat's precisely what I was about to suggest. Here's what one of our devs just said on seeing this comment: > "This is the first I’m hearing about this — would it be worth it to respond and ask the user to reach out to support?" So yeah - please do contact our support team (support@fastmail.com or you can use the web form at https://www.fastmail.com/support/ https://www.fastmail.com/support/) and give as many details as you can about what you're doing when it happens!
- pavlov 6y agoThanks! Next time it happens, I'll save an Activity Monitor process sample (pretty much the only way to get any insight into a locked-up Safari tab) and send it to your support.
- pmoriarty 6y ago"With webmail I don't have that choice." Through a web browser is not the only way Fastmail offers to use its services. It also supports IMAP, so you could use any IMAP-supporting mail client (which is probably all of them). Also, while you're waiting for them to fix this Safari bug you could try using a different browser.
- kgog 6y agoBeyond E2EE and being Swiss-based, how is FM different from ProtonMail?
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- alberth 6y agoI love how Fastmail challenges the status quo (for the better) down to the smallest of details like them NOT using http://statuspage.io http://statuspage.io for there status page but instead use an opensource offering called 'towncrier'. This company is a breath of fresh air.
- roryrjb 6y agoWill take this opportunity to mention Migadu[0]. Their pricing is simply based on email volume, at all pricing levels you get a ton of features. The web interface is really good if you like that sort of thing, the support is responsive and helpful. They're also based out of Switzerland as well in case that's significant to you. Highly recommended. 0. https://www.migadu.com/ https://www.migadu.com/
- jtth 6y agoWe should distinguish between fastmail being down and access to it being down.
- lk0nga 6y agoMost people would expect an open postmortem on Twitter or at the news blog of the service, as this is normally what is done. Going through level 1 support or through any of the support channels is too much of a burden for customers, due to likelihood of this resulting on an unknown, not so fast, number of communication hops. Being a company with focus on privacy, is normal to expect them to be quick to give explanations and open by making it easy to get to postmortems