4 ms·
Fastmail was pretty good while I was a customer, but this sort of thing is partially why I switched to Google Workspace. Google might be terrible for privacy bu
by ejj28 5y ago
Fastmail was pretty good while I was a customer, but this sort of thing is partially why I switched to Google Workspace. Google might be terrible for privacy but at least I can trust them to not get hacked or knocked offline. If they ever decide to randomly lock my account or anything I can always just point my domain back at Fastmail. Good luck to them and hopefully they'll be back online soon!
- sydthrowaway 5y agowhy is google immune to an attack?
- ejj28 5y agoThey're a much larger company with massive infrastructure that dwarfs Fastmail's? The traffic Fastmail is accustomed to dealing with is likely nowhere near the amount of the traffic that Google deals with.
- jeffbee 5y agoYep, Google has the edge and frontend resources to absorb very large attacks, and DoSSec-SRE prowling around and adjusting the defenses around the clock. One of the reasons that cloud computing feels like feudalism is if you don't have the protection of an Amazon or a Google, you're pretty much screwed. Are your systems able to survive a billion packet-per-second botnet attack? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/identifying-and-protecting-against-the-largest-ddos-attacks https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ide...
- amelius 5y agoCurious. Did the larger feudal lords attack the smaller ones in the old days?
- throwaway81523 5y agoThe monarch's job was basically to prevent this.
- jjeaff 5y agoHad this happened before while you were a customer? I believe it was just a year or two ago that Gmail suffered an extended outage and was even bouncing emails for a while.
- ejj28 5y agoI've always used Gmail for my main email accounts and can't recall ever experiencing an outage, although it's possible I just never noticed.
- astral303 5y agoSad but true. But what is it your privacy worth? You can always keep an emergency fallback Gmail account.
- astral303 5y agoMuch more likely to succumb to random whims of google than to experience this
- ejj28 5y agoWhich is why I use a custom domain with a paid Google Workspace subscription, if Google ever decides to lock my account, I can just change my DNS and go back to Fastmail.
- ejj28 5y agoAt this point I've sort of just accepted that in this day and age, surveillance is inevitable and past a certain point, trying to maintain my privacy comes at a huge cost in terms of convenience that I'm not willing to pay. I certainly value my privacy but at the end of the day it's a balance for me. I'd rather put the effort into making sure I'm not so tied to a specific platform that getting cut off would be devastating, which is why I've been working on moving stuff over from old Gmail accounts to my Google Workspace account with my custom domain.
- beart 5y agoI don't believe google is immune to outages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Outages
- ejj28 5y agoFair enough. A big part I didn't mention was the desire to deprecate my old @gmail.com addresses while still having access to Google services, and as much as some of the redesigns have bothered me, I still prefer Gmail's Web UI over other providers.
- colechristensen 5y agoIs it really that consequential if your email isn’t available for a little while?
- xyzelement 5y agoDepends on what you use it for?
- colechristensen 5y agoAnd what could you be using it for where a rare bit of unavailability would be unacceptable?
- xyzelement 5y agoYou can't imagine any cases where someone relies on timely email delivery and availability? I am giving a presentation in a few mins and Bob was supposed to email me the updated price sheet? I am running a facilities desk and my team gets assignments via email from the ticketing system? I forgot the name of my hotel in Prague, but it's OK I'll show my taxi driver the email confirmation. Like I said, you literally can't imagine a case where someone relies on their email to either be notified of something urgent, look up something urgent, or simply as part of their "what do I do next" workflow? I think all the examples above have workarounds (ie, dependency on email is avoidable) but that's a different question.
- colechristensen 5y agoI indeed can imagine being inconvenienced by email not working. I can’t imagine thinking an hour of downtime a year that might cause one of those inconveniences being something that is an unacceptable risk.
- xyzelement 5y agoI don't know how to help you see it but I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...) I ran you through a bunch of cases where you need information from your email urgently and there are painful consequences when you don't get it. Do you see how each one of these cases involves a painful loss of money/productivity/time? Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk? Are you able to understand that the problem isn't "an hour of downtime a year" but the risk of that hour happening at a time that absolutely fucks you over? It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" It doesn't sound important except if that hour happens to be when you are getting your wife to the hospital to give birth, or when you're on your way to the airport for a flight you need to make, or if you're driving through the desert and breaking down for an hour is terrifying.