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Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know
- TX0098812 5y agoThe open internet was a nice idea, but people with power tend to find a reason to use it.
- ansgri 5y agoI wonder if it will affect the mail exchange, or only client access?
- yarcob 5y agoAccording to the article, it sounds like Fastspring themselves blocked customers with Russian IP addresses from signing up, and removed their app from Russian app stores. I'd hope that even if the Russian authorities would block Fastmail, that they would only block their web servers and maybe their IMAP servers, but not their SMTP servers. The latter would impact a lot more people in Russia.
- strogonoff 5y agoAnecdotally, Fastmail seemed to already be blocking Russian sign-ups 4 years ago. I know at least one non-user who couldn’t sign up around that time because of this issue. Either IP or (more likely) billing address was the issue, if I recall correctly. Alternatively, their sign-up form was broken for all users at that time, but I hope they’ve better SREs than that.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. I have been looking for an alternative to Gmail, does anyone have recommendations? Fastmail? Proton mail? What put me over the edge is my young friend had a heart attack, went to the hospital and (during recovery) logged into his Gmail account using a laptop there; this triggered some security thing that permanently locked him out of his account.
- ojame 5y agoI’ve had a paid account with Fastmail for probably going on 8 years I’d say. It’s been a fantastically reliable service and the odd (perhaps 3 or 4 times) I’ve needed to reach out to support it’s always prompt and a real conversation.
- yarcob 5y agoI'm also a happy Fastmail customer. They actually offer customer support (at least they did a couple of years ago when I needed it). I had an issue with Fastmail where I accidentally deleted a bunch of emails, and with help from their support I was able to restore them from their backup quickly. Contrast that to Gmail, where thousands of messages suddenly disappeared from the inbox, and the only support option was a forum with dozens of other users asking for solutions to the same problem.
- O_H_E 5y ago> from _their_ backup quickly. Wow, that is something
- denismi 5y agoDeleted emails are kept for one week so that accidentally-deleted items can be restored: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/restoredeleted.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/restoredeleted.html
- kmonsen 5y agoGmail is required by law to really delete things the user deletes. There are guarantees around how quickly it will be done.
- joecool1029 5y ago> Gmail is required by law to really delete things the user deletes. This is not universally the case and the opposite is actually stated in their privacy policy and data retention agreements as it relates to financial transaction information (which likely needs to be retained for tax purposes). While Google likely pays it safe and complies mostly with CCPA/GDPR 'rights to be forgotten' for the rest of the US, and a good chunk of the world there's no legal requirement outside of the contractual agreements provided in paid Workspaces on when they need to purge this data. Current privacy policy: https://www.gstatic.com/policies/privacy/pdf/20210204/3jla0xz1/google_privacy_policy_en_us.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/policies/privacy/pdf/20210204/3jla0x... Data retention policy: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention
- ilammy 5y agoWait a minute. Why would Fastmail preemptively block Russian IPs if they don't have any legally vulnerable presence in Russia? Just to deny Roskomnadzor the joy? There is Russian proverb that aptly describes such behavior: "назло маме отморожу уши" (cut off your nose to spite your face). > What you can do if you're affected > - Talk to Roskomsvoboda: a digital rights advocacy organization. I like when private companies tell their customers what politics they should engage in.
- kojoru 5y ago> block signups for all IP addresses we identify as coming from within Russia I think they hope that this way they will not be blocked and thus the existing customers can keep connecting indefinitely.
- saba2008 5y ago>Just to deny Roskomnadzor the joy? No, to minimize damage by calming down proverbial monkey with a grenade. Webmail, imap & registration blocking is trivial to avoid. MX servers ending up in some blocklist might cause much more problems.
- ilammy 5y agoUnderstandable from this point of view -- with Internet being a shared resource -- but a strange concession nevertheless. Every participant of the Internet would end up blocking Russia to reduce the chance of some Russian official doing something stupid, hoping that they see website/email/torrents inaccessible and go bother someone else. Oh well, that's what politics and power games are all about.
- hvis 5y ago> I like when private companies tell their customers what politics they should engage in. They didn't tell you you should do it. Just that there aren't many other options.
- Sebb767 5y ago> I like when private companies tell their customers what politics they should engage in. Well, if they can't provide a service or are having problems doing so for legal reason, it's only sensible to ask their customers to lobby for a better legal framework if they wish to receive that service. It's a problem (IMO) if what they ask for is unrelated to their business, but quite a few people would disagree with that, as well; especially if they fight for something they deem necessary.
- abcd_f 5y agoWhere did all the brouhaha with Russia banning Telegram end? From what I understand it seems to be operational and rather popular there. Did the state give up or did Telegram end up “cooperating” with them?
- meibo 5y agoBlocking Telegram turned out to be technically unfeasible since they fought it by routing data through western cloud providers, which the Russian state was unable to block sensibly(you may remember stories from back then). In the end they "stopped trying" and actually embraced using Telegram as a propaganda tool nowadays.
- pentagone 5y agoThey played cat and mouse for a while. https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9653-russia_vs_telegram_technical_notes_on_the_battle https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9653-russia_vs_telegram_technica...
- vbezhenar 5y agoTelegram started to collaborate with Russia and they let it live.
- nszceta 5y agoUntrue
- threatofrain 5y agoWhere did you obtain confidence for this story?
- vbezhenar 5y agohttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSKBN23P2FT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK... Roskomnadzor said it had acted because the app’s Russian founder, Pavel Durov, was prepared to cooperate in combating terrorism and extremism on the platform.
- evmt 5y agoIn Russia using a VPN has been a necessity for a while already. I think most people here who even know about Fastmail use one already.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago>We have made the decision to block signups for all IP addresses we identify as coming from within Russia. We have also removed our app from the Apple and Google app stores for customers in Russia. WTF? Why would you ever do that? You said you have no legal presence in Russia, why f*ck over the users? Instead of ignoring hostile stupidity you're helping it, this is mind boggling. Sorry, I can't "feel good" about your services anymore.
- sidlls 5y agoTo me it's more disappointing that they actually considered meeting the demands of the regulatory body. I'd have simply blocked Russia after the loss in court. Also, why should Fastmail expose itself any further, in any way as a target of Russia's corrupt dictatorship? It does suck for those Russians impacted. They should turn their ire toward the real problem though: their government.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago> why should Fastmail expose itself any further Expose to what exactly? Sanctions, neural-gas attacks or nuclear weapons? Does Russia have any legal or technical levers which could potentially harm Fastmail business?
- UseStrict 5y agoI mean, I legitimately wouldn't be surprised if they took political prisoners if Fastmail showed up to court to fight, or hammer out an agreement. Let alone what they would end up having to submit to while operating within the country. Russia is known to be pretty hostile towards the west.
- mjthompson 5y agoI thought this too. On the other hand, it does make sense to them to publicly claim that the reason they moved out was for technical rather than political reasons. It might not make themselves a highly attractive target for a retaliatory DDoS attack.
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- mulander 5y agoThe article touches on new signups being blocked, what happens to the current paying users in the region? Are they also blocked? How is fastmail helping them move/supporting them in this situation? I am a fastmail customer in a different region (Poland). I am however looking closely at this as who knows, maybe I will be on the receiving end in the future?
- OJFord 5y agoSounds like that could just get them in more trouble? Such customers are probably on their own - but the article does spell out what they've done, so hints at the solution: VPN to outside Russia in order to sort out moving. (Or stay with Fastmail and accept that you need the VPN to use email, I suppose.) The CEO does often comment on Fastmail submissions here (brongondwana) but I suppose maybe not in this (lawyers involved) case.
- mulander 5y agoWell, I would expect them to address this issue specifically as that is one of the selling points of fastmail. You can get banned on Google for nothing and not being able to reach a person with your data held hostage. Now, this is a comparable situation where data is held hostage unless the customers in Russia have a way to access and retrieve whatever is stored on their accounts. On top of that there is a question of billing and refunds in the case of long-term plans being paid up front (eg. one year subscription).
- brongondwana 5y agoAlso Australian night time involved. Contrary to rumours, I'm not a vampire and do need to sleep sometimes.
- grumple 5y agoFrom the article: > As of the time of publication, there are no changes to other accounts, and email flow in and out of Russia has not been blocked, but we will continue to monitor the situation.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoLeaving aside the rights and wrongs of the Russian government, I think that their general goal is sensible and we'll see more and more of this from all countries. By their general goal I mean "the Russian media regulation body, the Roskomnadzor, demanded that Fastmail comply with Russian data laws. This is because Russia has a national goal of controlling the flow of information within their borders." (from the blog). A company may not have any presence in a country but if they have customers there it's not unreasonable for that country to expect that its data laws should apply to the company's relation with those customers (and as it happens that's what the GDPR stipulate as well)
- jtbayly 5y agoActually, GDPR went way beyond that, demanding that every website in the world comply with their laws, regardless of whether or not you had customers in the EU, unless you count somebody reading your personal blog as a “customer.”
- rakoo 5y agoWrong. GDPR asks that every website comply with their laws for anything that relates to EU. An italian citizen has to agree about it even if they live in Nepal. But a nepalese website doesn't have to care about GDPR as long as they don't have a presence in the EU. The fact that websites put a cookie wall for everyone is the strategy of said websites to make everyone think they are victims of GDPR, but that is not true. If you don't want to put a cookie wall, the easiest option for everyone is to not gather personal data.
- notslow 5y agoFastmail +1 . I have had an active Fastmail account for at least 20 years. It provides the perfect amount of features for me, without the creepiness.
- 93po 5y agoI wish their notes and calendar were better. I emailed them asking if they were ever going to improve notes, they said no. I've been a customer for 5+ years despite the bad notes
- dislore 5y agoFor what it's worth, you can use a dedicated note taking app like Joplin[1] and connect it to Fastmail storage via Webdav [2]. [1] https://joplinapp.org/ https://joplinapp.org/ [2] https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/davnftp.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/davnftp.html
- deeblering4 5y agoI highly recommend scheduling a regular mbsync job to keep a local copy of your emails in sync with the imap server. With this it's easy to pick up and move to a different provider or recover from outages, account closure, etc. If you couple this with your own domain your email will be very portable.
- hnaccount_rng 5y agoHow do you sync back your local copy of the IMAP database? I had the problem of a misconfiguration in my email rules deleting everything older than 28 days. Not a _big_ problem due to backups, but I didn’t manage to restore those as any local restore got deleted as soon as the sync with the IMAP server started
- fauigerzigerk 5y agoMaybe it helps to copy the messages into a new IMAP folder before resyncing.
- kenniskrag 5y agoI have these problemes too. In my case there is no unique identifer if you abort a restore and move the files again in the "folder", which leads to duplicated emails.
- deeblering4 5y agombsync supports syncing in both directions. In my case I have an hourly cron that syncs imap -> local. And then if something goes wrong I make a copy of my backup, and invert the configuration to sync local -> imap.
- spinax 5y agoI pay for a second inexpensive mailbox at Mailfence and sync the contents of the Fastmail account to a subfolder of the Mailfence account. There is rate-limiting involved, so my config is dialed down on "pipelinedepth" to ensure I don't hit that problem (you can easily overrun the Mailfence side pushing too much too fast). The cron runs via a unique user account on a cloud server every 4 hours using unique passwords (see below). cron runner's ~/.mbsyncrc # Source IMAPAccount imap-src-account Host imap.fastmail.com Port 993 User <user@domain.com> PassCmd "cat <redacted>/.secure/psrc" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 # Dest IMAPAccount imap-dest-account Host imap.mailfence.com Port 993 User <username> PassCmd "cat <redacted>/.secure/pdst" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 # Source map IMAPStore imap-src Account imap-src-account # Dest map IMAPStore imap-dest Account imap-dest-account # Transfer options Channel mailsync Master :imap-src: Slave :imap-dest:SubFolder/ Sync Pull Create Slave Remove Slave Patterns * CopyArrivalDate yes Note: use the Fastmail option to set up a READ ONLY IMAP user password! (it's a really cool feature of Fastmail that many others do not support) Mailfence also has per-service passwords, set one up for IMAP as well. Do not use your main login passwords if you can avoid it - $0.02.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stickfigure 5y agoWhy are they doing the government's work for them, and blocking Russia? Let the Russian government do the blocking. It's not your job to enforce authoritarianism, and no country west of Belarus is going to extradite you for providing email.
- daxelrod 5y agoPresumably, they and their lawyers believe they are subject to Russian jurisdiction. Why else would they have challenged an order from the Russian government in Russian court?
- mnw21cam 5y agoStopping people signing up in the first place means that in a few months' time when the government actually starts blocking, they don't get a load of angry customers demanding their money back.
- patrakov 5y ago> Why are they doing the government's work for them, and blocking Russia? In order to avoid outgoing mail to Russian mail providers from being blocked. I.e., if the government blocks them, then BOTH Russian and Western users suffer (Russians because they can't access the service without technical tricks, and both because they can't send mail to Russian users of other mail providers). If they block Russian user signups themselves or can otherwise kinda-sorta-legitimately claim that they don't have Russian users, then only Russian users who don't have a VPN suffer from being unable to access the service.
- saul_goodman 5y agoI can't say enough good things about Fastmail, been a customer for many years now.
- hamilyon2 5y agoRoskomnadzor themselves is not likely to block smtp or even imap traffic to fastmail in Russia.
- JAlexoid 5y agoMostly because they're incompetent, not because they actually wanted those services to go under the radar.
- elchupanebre 5y agoI wonder why Fastmail decided to bend the knee and proactively block Russian IPs. The only thing those &^#%$-!@ could do is just that what FM did: block Russian IPs. Why make life easier for the dictators? What does FM gain by complying with their demands?