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Fastmail is having problems again
- _nickwhite 5y agoI’ve been on Fastmail for about 4 months now. This is the first service interruption I’ve seen & didn’t even notice it. I’ve used a lot of other providers, but from what I’ve experienced over these past months, Fastmail is one of the best. Their IOS app is great as well. Any provider is susceptible to outages due to volumetric attacks.
- berkut 5y agoIMO their iOS app would be great if it had offline support - it doesn't...
- toast0 5y agoTheir Android app also doesn't have offline support, which makes me sad. Email is a great fit for offline first, and it's always frustrating to see a notification and tap it to get a loading screen.
- zbrozek 5y agoThis is the #1 reason why I'm going to switch away from Fastmail when my current billing cycle ends. The #2 reason is that they're Australian. Otherwise I've been super happy with them.
- jetpackjoe 5y agoWhat are you switching to?
- zbrozek 5y agoNot sure yet. ProtonMail doesn't work offline either and is apparently not straightforward to use with other clients. I wish it were sensible to host your own email, but I've heard that's a horrible misadventure.
- mattl 5y agoAren’t their servers all in the US?
- TheSmiddy 5y agoDoesn't matter. Under Australian law they can still be compelled to install backdoors.
- toast0 5y agoI wouldn't switch mail providers over this... There are other email clients out there (although, it's sort of nice to use a first party one), and IMAP (or JMAP) should work fine for offline.
- zbrozek 5y agoI would probably not switch if it were only issue #1 or issue #2, but with both it has me shopping. I might fail to find a better alternative, of course, but I haven't given up yet. A different client is definitely the fallback, though I haven't found a great one of those either. Granted it's been ~6 years since I last searched. Open to suggestions!
- diggernet 5y agoI like K-9. https://k9mail.app/ https://k9mail.app/
- crossroadsguy 5y agoDo they have this feature that if you have catch-all enabled and you had just used a random email on some website random-email-addr-smjgg@your-domain.tld and you receive email sent to that address and when you reply it automatically starts the reply from random-email-addr-smjgg@ and not from some preset-alias@? Because on Mail.app (iOS/Mac) if you want to reply from that random-email-addr-smjgg@ you have to first add that in "Email Address" for that account in Settings. I am trying to find an app that does it (my mail provider is not fastmail, it's mailbox).
- Sylamore 5y agoThis is the primary reason I use the fastmail app instead of mail.app, because it uses the incoming email address as the reply address.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoI don't think this feature is present in any third party mail app (and frankly mailbox is not going to release an app with this feature) and honestly that would be weird to manage as in how do you know gmail.com is not the user's own domain but some-other.tld is. But Fastmail does know this as their app is not a common third party app. Lack of this feature makes full use of catch-all very unintuitive.
- voltaireodactyl 5y agoOn mac, that feature is actually available in MailMate, which remains the best in class email client I’m aware of. It’s the only one with that feature though.
- hiram112 5y agoThis features (to reply using the alias the email was sent to) was available on AquaMail Android (not free) years ago, though you had to configure it which was painful if you changed phones a lot.
- Sylamore 5y ago
- ryantgtg 5y agoYa know, I never thought of it before now, but you’re right. I just want to read an email that I’ve already received!
- ProAm 5y agoTheir customer service is amazing as well. Ive been a user for 3-4 years now and when I first started I contacted them about several issues which were all purely me being a noob, and not only did I hear back from a human being, it was quick and the answers were immediately helpful. I cant speak highly enough of Fastmail as a user
- vpilcx 5y agoFor me, I had a bad experience that soured me on them. I signed up for service and forgot to change over my credit card or something and the service lapsed. So a few months later, I signed back up for another six months of service and it said I had only 3 months of service. So I double check and I did sign up for the six months of service. So I contact customer service and they say that they were giving me service when I wasn't signed up so they're going to charge me for that even though I wasn't even using it then. So I ended up only getting half of the service that I paid for in the end and they were just like tough luck when I contacted them.
- ProAm 5y agoIm not sure what you expected to happen there? You still had service (meaning they didnt just cut off your communications in case it was important) and when you came back they charge you for it. I think it depends on how you view that. One one hand they didn't just turn everything off the minute you didnt pay, on the other hand they wanted you to pay for what you were still using..
- everybodyknows 5y ago>(20 hours ago) ... We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider
- riffic 5y agohappens to everyone sooner or later.
- 5- 5y agocoincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation? it has consistently been fastmail in the past, and i have had a great time with them over the last three years, but it's always nice to know what else is out there. for better or worse i've also come to use fastmail for dns management (tolerable) and even for http hosting (awful, but occasionally convenient).
- diebeforei485 5y agoI still recommend Fastmail if you're using it to replace your primary email. If you just need to receive and send occasional email at your domain however, iCloud+ may be sufficient and you may already be paying for it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- crocodiletears 5y agoFastmail's been great for me, I love it. Unless I can find a similar premium domestic (US) offering that's near feature parity, and not a trillion dollar megacorp, I couldn't imagine leaving them.
- Skunkleton 5y agoFastmail has been my choice for some time now.
- ryantgtg 5y agoMe too. I came from posteo. The fastmail app is pretty great. This is the first downtime I’ve noticed in the last four years.
- atonse 5y agoNowadays it feels like the kind of thing CloudFlare would launch as it’s right up their alley. And seems appropriate if FastMail is having DDoS issues.
- jacques_chester 5y agoWell at least they're popular enough to be targeted for ransoms or by nation states who want to shut down dissidents.
- contingencies 5y ago+1 insightful, the running theory apparently is it's people crusading against Trump because he's using Fastmail for MX on his Truth social network. $ dig truthsocial.com MX truthsocial.com. 3600 IN MX 10 in1-smtp.messagingengine.com. truthsocial.com. 3600 IN MX 20 in2-smtp.messagingengine.com. People: your collateral damage is quite high, can you cut it out please.
- luxurytent 5y agoHugops
- nerdwaller 5y agoCan anyone educate me why companies choose to buy secondary domains for their status pages? I find it confusing and would trust `status.company.tld` immediately rather than having to think about it and verify - which you can’t really do when the issue comes up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mwint 5y agoAllows for completely separate stacks running the status page, including DNS and registrar. In theory, you could run your status page using zero infrastructure common with your main domain.
- nerdwaller 5y agoThat makes sense. Thank you!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zinekeller 5y agoSomeone have commented that (for brevity and to ensure anonymity, the wording have been changed): Your answer makes no sense, DNS are decentralised! Someone have forgotten Facebook's outage.
- pilsetnieks 5y agoIt wasn't DNS in principle that caused the outage. If I recall correctly, it was their DNS servers that did that in a convoluted kind of way but not because of DNS as such. Due to some connection error or another the servers that also run DNS ordered the routers to withdraw the BGP routes to all Facebook properties which in turn killed access to said DNS servers.
- 5y ago
- tcbawo 5y agoIs there any email service that can be used in concert with a password keeper like 1Pass or LastPass to generate unique email addresses in addition to unique passwords per site? I think this might be a nice way of improving privacy and safeguarding email from spam, or at least help identifying the source of leaks.
- jackvalentine 5y agoI feel a bit silly saying this but did you know fastmail do that?
- scblock 5y agoFastmail recently announced a collaboration with 1Password: https://www.fastmail.com/1password/ https://www.fastmail.com/1password/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mwint 5y agoI own my own domain, and thus have the luxury of using *@domain.com as my email. So when I give an email to SketchySite.com, it’s sketchysite@domain.com. Really easy, and costs me very little to do (CloudFlare is my registrar; Fastmail my email host). Highly recommend you buy a domain for email. Looks professional, too.
- taftster 5y agoPlus you're not locked into one email provider, instead of dying addresses on hotmail, yahoo, aol and gmail.
- gzer0 5y agoUnfortunately if you do not fully own your own ICANN registrar, for example, like Facebook [1], then your domain remains open to the weakest link: humans and social engineering [2]. An Njal.la hosted domain was successfully transferred to Namecheap (through no fault of Njal.la). Obviously, this is very rare and extremley targeted. [1] https://registrarsec.com/ https://registrarsec.com/ [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8833/dark-fail-fake-court-order-dark-web-markets https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8833/dark-fail-fake-court-...
- pyfan878 5y agoFirst time I'm hearing about Fastmail :D
- christophilus 5y agoJust wanted to say— in case any Fastmail employees read this thread— that I love Fastmail. Keep up the good work. That is all.
- sen 5y agoAbsolutely. I’ve been a happy customer as my primary email service (for my entire family, via a custom family domain) since 2012 and while there have been outages in that time I’ve honestly never “noticed” one until I see it posted somewhere like here. I love Fastmail and hope they continue doing what they’re doing for a long time to come.
- Amfy 5y agoanyone thinks this is related to truthsocial using them as their MX?
- crocodiletears 5y agoI hadn't realized that this was the case, but if so it would absolutely track.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lazyeye 5y agoIdeally this wouldnt need to happen. In a perfect world we should just be able to shut down ideas we dont like without resorting to this kind of behaviour.
- muttantt 5y ago100% this
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway81523 5y agoFyi (in case fastmail is reading this), fastmail is down (smtp and web site) right now, though status page says issue is resolved. I can handle the interruption but it would be nice if monitoring picked up stuff like this and updated the status page automatically. That might be a decent cloudflare workers app...
- contingencies 5y agoWorking here but was down an hour yesterday. I immediately knew as all of my employees raised it as a workflow issue within minutes.
- Amfy 5y agoIt's not. Unfortunately. Might be up for seconds and then down again for minutes. Very annoying. I am not going to complain though. They've offered stable service for years.
- contingencies 5y agoYeah seeing it here too now. Damn.
- LinuxBender 5y agoimap has been working all day for me. I don't send a lot of emails though so no idea how stable smtpd is.
- lobocinza 5y agoMore than 24 hours waiting to send a message with a simple attachment.
- exolymph 5y agoI've been using Fastmail for years now and love it. I understand that no SaaS can have 100% perfect uptime always, and this is the first Fastmail outage that I can recall experiencing. So, just in case anyone is worried seeing this, I'm a happy paying customer and Fastmail has a lot of goodwill built up with me. That said, it does sound the status page could use an update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28964509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28964509
- BitAstronaut 5y agoI second this. Very happy customer of three years. These last two outages are the only two I've noticed since.
- dasecure 5y agoFastMail used to be awesome till two years ago when the downfall started. First it was the makeover and then things stopped working. At this point from a privacy perspective they are terrible. Not only because of Taliban style Aussie privacy laws but their system too is anti-privacy. FM system automatically creates contact lists from all emails, automatically backs up deleted emails, drafts etc. You have no control on this and is ideal for govt data mining and social graph generation. Sure they say it is for your benefit but then allow me to turn it off. Given people regularly get home police visits in Australia for Facebook posts and overall police state climate does not help. So time to stay clear of FM. They want you to pay money so their govt can trawl through your email and possibly impersonate you if need arises. No thanks, I can get that at Google. Tutanota and Mailbox.org have superior offering with encryption at rest. Tuta has clients for all platforms with client device based crypto.
- t8e56vd4ih 5y agomailbox has no working mfa implementation. and that's already all there is to say about it.
- StopHammoTime 5y agoLooks like a criminal operation is behind this. https://therecord.media/ddos-attacks-hit-multiple-email-providers/ https://therecord.media/ddos-attacks-hit-multiple-email-prov...
- mokla 5y agoWhy aren't they multi-homed?
- deeblering4 5y agoAgain? When was the last problem?
- concinds 5y agoIt's happening again. Webmail works but I'm not receiving emails.