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FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
- zacwest 11y agoI haven't been happier paying for an internet service in a long time. FastMail keeps releasing more and more useful features. I can't wait for CardDAV syncing. Even after so many years, Gmail still doesn't support push notifications in the Mail app, but FastMail threaded the needle to do it. Such a wonderful change; works great in my short testing. (I had to toggle the account on/off a few times to force it, but their blog post promises it propagates out automatically, too.)
- brongondwana 11y agoWe're hoping it automatically starts working for everyone - it did with our couple of test accounts and test devices, but we don't have everything from the test lab with us - we did this all very hush-hush while we're in the Bay Area. We didn't even tell the gang back in Melbourne that we were working on it until about 15 minutes before rollout.
- robn_fastmail 11y agoSo far the majority of devices haven't had a problem. We've got one confirmed case of it not working automatically on iOS 9 beta, and a couple of other reports that we haven't been able to identify yet. We'll keep testing.
- danieldk 11y agoI fully agree with your sentiment. One correction though, if you have a Google apps account, you can also use push mail, since it supports ActiveSync: https://support.google.com/a/answer/135937?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/135937?hl=en So, when comparing paid and paid accounts, there is not a difference here. (Of course, the GMail app gives push for all GMail accounts.)
- nextos 11y agoHow standards compliant is Fastmail? Gmail is sadly a trainwreck. Their IMAP implementation has tons of quirks. Furthermore, GTalk is getting phased out in favour of proprietary Google Hangouts. GTalk was always quirky as well, and fails to support many XEPs (XMPP extensions).
- tankenmate 11y agoFastMail's mail infrastructure is largely built on top of Cyrus IMAP (which tracks reasonably closely to RFCs). FastMail and Kolab (along with many others) also have numerous developers who contribute to Cyrus IMAP.
- nextos 11y agoSounds great, thanks.
- josteink 11y ago> I can't wait for CardDAV syncing. It has been available in beta for qiuite some time really.[1] You can start using it now if you like. No need to wait. I'm a fastmail subscriber and this is my only way of syncing contacts on my Android-devices right now. [1] http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/22/carddav-beta-release/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/22/carddav-beta-release/
- robn_fastmail 11y ago> I can't wait for CardDAV syncing. Its actually enabled for all accounts and fully supported. We just haven't advertised it widely yet because its a big, complex feature and we've got enough people travelling at the moment that we didn't want everyone to start using it all at the same time! Documentation is at: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/applist.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/applist.html You can see that it is leasted on our pricing pages: https://www.fastmail.com/signup/ https://www.fastmail.com/signup/ We'll announce it officially in the next 2-3 weeks.
- UVB-76 11y agoThis was the only thing stopping me moving over to FastMail, so delighted to hear this!
- steve19 11y agoMaybe one day we will get half decent two factor authentication. You can create an alternative login and put 2 factor on that, but not the master login. In theory you should never have to use the master login, and they have written pages of text justifying not having two factor on the master login, but thats not how it works in real life [0] In real life, they require you to submit your master password to get any support. [1] .... so there I am overseas needing support and having to submit my master password over a dubious hotel connection. They have promised real 2FA for years and years. One of these days I will ditch them for a provider who can bother supporting real 2FA. [0] https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/2fa.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/2fa.html [1] https://www.fastmail.com/html/?MSignal=Support-** https://www.fastmail.com/html/?MSignal=Support-**
- x0x0 11y agoFastmail are also greedy: they monetize 2fa via sms to the tune of $0.12 (!!!) per text, and for the cherry on top, they expire your credits after a year. It's just skeevy cheap. I'm a disappointed subscriber.
- brongondwana 11y agoI can promise you that we make no money on those SMSes, we just haven't updated the pricing since it really cost that much - and we're actually paying a minimum per-month rate that means it's costing us more than that for how rarely it's used.
- x0x0 11y agotwilio simply doesn't charge that much plus expiring the credits after a year (or I'd just buy $50 worth so they'd never run out at an inopportune time) is, again, just chintzy
- rgbrenner 11y agoSince you work there.. why did you guys choose that approach for 2fa? Reading what's written on the help page about the master password, it sounds like you want the master password to serve as a recovery code. So why not just have recovery codes instead? Also, since you would generate the recovery codes, there wouldn't be a need to explain why the master password should be long & random; and it would reduce the risk of customers using an easy master password (either from failing to change it, or failing to use sufficient length/randomness). [Many services w/ 2fa support recovery codes.. here's github for example: https://help.github.com/articles/downloading-your-two-factor-authentication-recovery-codes/ https://help.github.com/articles/downloading-your-two-factor...]
- eridius 11y agoThis is fantastic news! I can finally turn off push notifications for the FastMail iOS app and just use Mail.app (I had the iOS app installed primarily just for push notifications, although I'll keep it around for the rare case when I want to use its email management features). And FWIW, I just tested (on my iOS 9 device) and it worked great.
- koudi 11y agoI thought push is a standardized imap extension and any capable client can use it, if the server is configured properly. Does push on iOS require apple to somehow allow you to use it with your provider, or why is it such a big deal?
- StavrosK 11y agoSounds like it uses APNS, rather than IMAP push. For the latter, you need a daemon listening, which you can't do on iOS. Plenty of Android apps have IMAP push, for example.
- koudi 11y agoThe article says "We’ve enabled Push IMAP" and their instructions tell you how to setup imap email account. But yes, using APNS for notifications probably makes sense (bandwidth, less connections, battery, ...).
- robn_fastmail 11y agoIMAP "push" usually means the IDLE extension, where a client holds a connection open and waits for the server to report that something has happened. This works ok, but isn't great on mobile because holding a TCP connection open is usually difficult on flaky networks and consumes battery. iOS Mail doesn't implement it, instead doing a poll every 15 minutes. However it also implements a separate push system which allows true push if the server supports it. The details on how to support this aren't public information. We talked to Apple, and they were kind enough to give us access to this system. We implemented it on our side, and now when an email arrives at FastMail we can immediately signal to Mail.app that there's new mail available.
- vbezhenar 11y agoSo there's absolutely no way to enable that on custom little VPS? You have to make an agreement with Apple for that?
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- msh 11y agoHeadline is faulty. Lots of third party mail providers support push in mail.app, they just need to use active sync. I have been using mailbox.org Hvis supports active sync.
- Osmium 11y agoYay! I am so happy to hear this. Congratulations and thank you to the Fastmail team and people at Apple who made this happen. This has been my only gripe as a Fastmail customer and the only reason I haven't been using Fastmail as my main email account yet. Very cool :)
- x0x0 11y agofyi: if you're a gmail user, you're likely to be disappointed with fastmail unless you are -- as I am -- using it specifically to avoid using a google product. I wish their web UI were as good as gmail's but it really isn't. I still agree with these notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664594 I also think -- and I've tried almost all of them except outlook -- that it's the best non-gmail webmail available today. But that's a big caveat since gmail is free except for your privacy.
- Osmium 11y agoI am a Gmail user. I personally find the Fastmail interface a lot more performant; it's very responsive for me in a way that Gmail just isn't, though I'm not a Gmail 'power' user, so my experiences might be different (and I don't have 10,000s of emails in Fastmail yet). However, I can say I've found Google's Inbox product really useful a number of times recently (automatically classifying emails as travel, purchases, etc.) and I'll definitely miss that.
- gioele 11y ago> Congratulations and thank you to the Fastmail team and people at Apple who made this happen. No, sincerely no, no congratulations. My congratulations will go to those who fight to have that new kind of notifications standardised in a RFC or to those that will reverse engineer the protocol. I am sorry, but my congratulations cannot go to those who are willing to accept _and are proud_ of being part of a closed network. This is another step in screwing even more small business and private people that want to run their own internet services. Do you like these new notifications? Abandon your independence and join our infrastructure, what do you have to lose?
- guan 11y agoI noticed that it doesn’t issue push notifications for emails that enter the inbox as read. I do that for a bunch of notifications and mailing list traffic, and with the FastMail iOS app, it was annoying that those would generate a push notification too.
- JamesBaxter 11y agoHasn't started working for me yet. Might try removing the fastmail account and adding it again so I can get the push option. Really happy this has been implemented.
- davorb 11y agoCongratulations, but I still won't be putting my data in the US.
- EarthLaunch 11y agoThank you, I wouldn't want to be subsidizing tech in Sweden.
- tankenmate 11y agoFastMail is an Australian company; whether that changes your feeling is another matter.
- msh 11y agoBut their servers are in the U.S.
- robn_fastmail 11y agoWe've written about this before: http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...
- kwijibob 11y agoI'm an Android not an iOS user, so maybe I don't get the significance of push notifications. Isn't this simply the kind of annoying notification that productivity experts tell us to turn off? I certainly have configured all devices (phone, tablets, pc) to not ding or give notification when new mail arrives.
- panic 11y agoIn theory this should improve battery life. Instead of waking up the CPU/radios to ask whether there's new mail every few minutes, the phone lets the server push the mail to it.
- blueflow 11y agoWelcome to 2015, where Push Notifications are a feature and not default anymore.
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