[HN Gopher] Fastmail was down
___________________________________________________________________
Fastmail was down
Author : open-paren
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-01-21 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastmailstatus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastmailstatus.com)
| eevahr wrote:
| Seems 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 wrote:
| I'm in the western US. I noticed it for a few minutes and assumed
| it was my internet connection. Love these guys.
| tompic823 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| What did their support say when you wrote them and asked for a
| post-mortem details?
| tompic823 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| Fastmail'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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| That'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/) and give as many details
| as you can about what you're doing when it happens!
| pavlov wrote:
| Thanks! 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.
| jtth wrote:
| This does not happen to me and I have used Fastmail with Safari
| for seven years. Could be an interaction with an add-on? You
| also might try beta.fastmail.com.
| pavlov wrote:
| No add-ons, just out of the box Safari 14 on Big Sur.
|
| Out of curiosity I once did a process sample with Activity
| Monitor from the crashed tab. Looked like WebKit was stuck in
| a text layout loop.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| I could just go back to using IMAP (which I did for 20+
| years), but for me the whole point of switching to Fastmail
| was to have a good webmail that's not tied to Google.
|
| I'm sure they'll fix the Safari bug eventually, I'm not
| worried about that. It's just an illuminating example of how
| difficult it is to create high-performance web apps that
| actually work in more than one browser.
| csomar wrote:
| Could it be a Safari issue, though? I'm using Fastmail with
| Firefox and it's quite snappy. No CPU issues.
| hs86 wrote:
| Just 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.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Text 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.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Aren'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 wrote:
| I 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/
| diarrhea wrote:
| This 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.
| imwally wrote:
| I'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.
| andrewnicolalde wrote:
| Curious, 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 wrote:
| I've had emails throughout the day, eastern time: 3am, 5am,
| 6am, 8am, 9:30am, 11am, 11:30am, 12:50pm, 3:15pm
| neither_color wrote:
| Love fastmail. 500 aliases means a unique email login for every
| single online account. Hope they fix this soon.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| You 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
| foofoo4u wrote:
| On top of this, I purchased a `.email` domain. Something
| about `anything@yourdomain.email` feels clean.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| That does seem clean, but I would worry about normal people
| being confused by it. Having (business's name)@myname.com
| already gets a lot of questions / confirmations / confused
| responses.
| csomar wrote:
| Even better if you use their Web interface, you'll reply with
| the same email alias that received the email.
| alessioalex wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Killer feature indeed. I just wish the same thing existed for
| phone numbers.
| leepowers wrote:
| Noticed no problems today, west coast, I have their web mail
| interface always running in an open tab
| _joel wrote:
| All working fine here
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Haven't noticed yet. I want to say most Fastmail incidents come
| and go without me noticing, apart from their tweets about them.
| burnthrow wrote:
| My 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.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Been 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| In 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-r...
| gnud wrote:
| I'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.
| odensc wrote:
| All good here too. Regional?
| [deleted]
| armitage wrote:
| I 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.)
| kgog wrote:
| Beyond E2EE and being Swiss-based, how is FM different from
| ProtonMail?
| jtth wrote:
| We should distinguish between fastmail being down and access to
| it being down.
| atmosx wrote:
| Hugops to the team firefighting.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Operation Cuddles was a success
| muhammadusman wrote:
| Just wrote some emails, checked things, completely fine for me.
| It might be affecting people in other areas.
| [deleted]
| alberth wrote:
| I love how Fastmail challenges the status quo (for the better)
| down to the smallest of details like them NOT using
| http://statuspage.io for there status page but instead use an
| opensource offering called 'towncrier'.
|
| This company is a breath of fresh air.
| jamescun wrote:
| Haven'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 wrote:
| Saw a brief 503 once. Was back after 5 minutes.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Fastmail 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!
| nailer wrote:
| Same here. Used Fastmail at my old company for years and wish
| my new company moved onto it. Google Mail is so damn slow.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Indeed, people have drama'd a lot about Australia's
| surveillance laws, but they have little applicability to
| Fastmail. Additionally, if you are worried about
| government surveillance, your safest bet is just to be
| storing your data under _someone else 's_ government.
|
| If you live in the US, it's very easy for the US to get
| your data, and more irritating for the US to ask
| Australia for your data.
| wolco5 wrote:
| Australia is part of the 5 eyes alliance which
| automatically shares data between the US/Canada/UK/New
| Zealand which means it is a safe bet that the US can get
| this data as easily as it would be on it's own soil.
|
| As an American storing data in Australia creates another
| problem. The US can't spy in the US on it's own citizens
| but another country can at the request of the US
| government and will report everything back to the US.
|
| I would pick Russia or China first...
|
| Or just use protonmail which is designed to offer some
| protection.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Apologies for incorrect political parlance! Yes, I meant
| a change of government. You're probably right but one can
| hope and dream ;-)
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't understand why they stay in Oz. What's the point?
| Being a SaaS provider they should be able to set up camp in
| Switzerland and be done with the privacy concerns.
| csomar wrote:
| Their servers seems to be hosted in the USA though. That
| means they should be subject to US laws?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > they are based in Australia which doesn't have freedom of
| speech
|
| Which countries do have freedom of speech?
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| In the US, companies have the freedom to take away an
| individuals freedom of speech.
| 3princip wrote:
| Agree. After using gmail for many years it seemed like an
| unnecessary expense to pay for email.
|
| Finally jumped to Fastmail 6 months ago and all I can say is I
| should have done it sooner. Weaning off the big boys and
| returning to being the customer, not the product, as they say.
| Feels good.
| beardbound wrote:
| I also am a very happy customer. I moved as much off of Google
| as possible last year and even moved my mother to a fastmail
| domain that I manage as well. She quite likes it. The calendar
| works great with everything and I like that they use one use
| app passwords and profiles for devices. It makes device
| management very straightforward.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I love Fastmail. Well worth the money.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| I'm also very happy with the product - I'll add that their iOS
| integration for email/calendar/contacts works as almost a
| seamless replacement for syncing to an iCloud account, which I
| found really delightful.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Thanks, that's exactly what I've been looking for. Is that
| only the $5/month Standard plan or will the $3/month basic
| plan allow you to add it to iOS Calendar?
| stonesweep wrote:
| The $3 plan doesn't include hosting your own domain, you'll
| want to go with the $5 plan so you can get
| you@yourdomain.com up and running. (edit: grammar)
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Doesn't that come off really pretentious when you give
| out your email? I don't think I really want that feature.
| wolco5 wrote:
| not if you buy the right name.
|
| pasc@notpretenious.com
|
| or
|
| pasc@ihelpoldpeoplecrossthestreet.com
| thedanbob wrote:
| I've been using my custom domain email for years and no
| one really cares, except maybe for a few techy friends
| who have the same. Very rarely I've run into badly
| written email validators that only accept well-known
| email domains.
| stonesweep wrote:
| It could if you let it! So don't let it. :) I spent a lot
| of time finding my domain and eventually found one that
| makes people chuckle when they read it, it's lightly
| funny and innocuous. I work in the tech industry, many
| (many) people have their own domains - it's not as
| uncommon as you'd think depending on which circles of
| friends. It's very common to see a domain based on their
| last (family) name and several family members share it, I
| see that a lot and have seen it for 2 decades.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Pretty sure you do but that extra $2 buys you a lot more if
| you can stretch the budget - 30GB storage over 2GB and
| custom domains. Annual billing is cheaper I think and you
| can get 10% off first year with a referral link (DM me if
| you want)
| leokennis wrote:
| Also a very happy customer. Their mail product is top notch,
| but so is their calendar. And everything (mail, calendar,
| notes, storage, contacts) is fast and accessible using standard
| protocols.
|
| Only thing I still miss is a web interface for managing
| tasks/to-do's.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| The notes product could do with a bit of love I think.
|
| A todo feature is an interesting idea.
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| Can I have domain aliases with fastmail? I saw I can have email
| aliases but can I specifically have a second domain aliased to
| a primary domain?
|
| EDIT: They do.
| https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored
| thedanbob wrote:
| Yes, on a per-address basis. I have several email addresses
| aliased to my main account on a different domain.
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| Nice. Thinking about it more, I think I could live without
| it but I have it with Gmail at the moment. I like the per-
| address basis though, in Gmail I add the domain alias then
| when I add an email alias that alias applies to all the
| domains.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Is this what you have in mind? See the section on mirrored
| domains.
|
| https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored
| tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote:
| Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking. I think I like the
| way fastmail does it more than gmail too.
| stonesweep wrote:
| Yes - only one domain is the primary/default, you go into
| their Aliases section and have to set up a foo@domain1.com to
| foo@domain2.com mapping (if you use the add domain wizard it
| makes it for you). You still need to set up your DNS records
| for the second domain like the first.
|
| (I bought two domains and did exactly what you're asking -
| after using the first for a day or so, having decided I liked
| the other one better I reached in and simply flipped the
| dropdown and chose the second one to by the default, clicked
| OK and it all just worked nicely)
|
| When I look at my set message headers, it would appear that
| your primary @fastmail.com (or whichever of their domains you
| choose) is your actual primary, and that even your first
| domain is just an alias to the actual user account domain.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Not sure if this answers your question specifically. But yes,
| they do allow for domain aliases. I specifically use their
| wild card alias. For example, let's say I own the domain
| `mydomain.com`. Fastmail allows me to have
| `contact@mydomain.com`, `apple@mydomain.com`,
| `linkedin@mydomain.com`, etc. on the fly.
| amelius wrote:
| I was just looking at their "about us" page, and it seems their
| technical staff consists of only 3 people, which I think is
| quite impressive.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that can't be all of them. The founder (or
| maybe CTO, can't remember) often pops up on Hacker News.
|
| It would be good if they would blog about more about the
| company itself actually. I don't remember them publishing
| much about that.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Yeah, the technical team is quite a few more than that!
| We're roughly 1/3 support, 1/2 technical (split between
| ops, backend and frontend) and 1/6 for the rest - which
| makes us very light on marketing and sales compared to most
| companies!
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Oh wow thanks for replying. How many people in the
| company in total, if you're able to say?
|
| Thanks again for a fantastic product and service! I
| really think you should blog a bit more about the company
| and culture, that would probably be all the marketing
| you'd need :-)
| brongondwana wrote:
| Currently just under 50 total.
| hertzrat wrote:
| Agreed. Also, I emailed them to clarify their privacy policy
| and a real human wrote me back to reassure me about the few
| clauses I was unclear on. We live in an age human support is
| not that common so this felt great
| stonesweep wrote:
| Regarding privacy - they don't really market this feature much,
| but Fastmail is one of the only email providers which lets me
| set up per-app per-service passwords _and_ include ACL
| restrictions where possible. And you can set multiple per-app
| passwords for the same service with different ACLs - one can be
| R /O to your IMAP while another has R/W access for example.
|
| I tested a lot of providers, many of them do not have per-app
| passwords at all, and the ones that do tend to only allow one
| per service endpoint. (note: I didn't get a chance to test
| Zoho, it has them listed as available but I decided against the
| service for other reasons)
| analyte123 wrote:
| I wish I had bought my own domain when I signed up for Fastmail
| so I could switch more easily. Their web UI usually takes 3+
| seconds to load for me on a gigabit connection which is about
| the same as Gmail, search also takes 2+ seconds which is
| definitely worse than Gmail. And they haven't upped their
| storage limit in 6+ years during which the cost of hard drives
| has fallen 50% or more.
|
| edit: Bulk moving or deleting items in the web interface can
| take 20+ seconds! It's not that fast, honestly. But maybe there
| isn't anything better.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| I honestly don't load it that often - it just sits there in a
| open tab all day. Viewing, moving, composing messages (esp
| with keyboard shortcuts) is literally instant for me. I have
| never noticed it being anything other than fast. Same for
| their iOS app (which I think is largely a web view).
|
| How many things are you moving for it to take that long?!
|
| I accidentally marked everything in a folder as unread
| recently and that did take a while, but I did get a very
| helpful progress bar while it chugged away.
| finlake wrote:
| Although Fastmail in general is offering an excellent service,
| their support can be too slow in an emergency.
|
| I had my Fastmail account incorrectly flagged by their scripts,
| account fully disabled, bouncing all my emails. It took 5 days
| for their support to investigate, admit their mistake,
| reinstate my account and issue an apology (in the form of 1year
| subscription). Still, 5 days of emails lost.
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Ouch, that's tough :(
|
| Were you on your own domain? In that situation I guess you
| could have changed DNS and piped it to Gmail temporarily.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Count me as another happy Fastmail customer reporting their
| satisfaction!
|
| I switched off of Gmail to Hey last year when the hype train
| was at full steam. Hey was... okay, but missing so many
| features that Gmail had. Most importantly to me was literally
| any calendar integration, and custom domain support.
|
| Instead of going back to Gmail I found Fastmail after doing
| some research. It's just exactly what I want, a fast web based
| client that has the right features. And nothing else. Bravo to
| the company that makes it :)!
| thismodernlife wrote:
| Yeah if you want any sort of power features then Fastmail
| will win over HEY every time.
| walkingolof wrote:
| I second this, highly recommended!
| rychco wrote:
| This is affecting me (East US)
| roryrjb wrote:
| Will 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/
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(page generated 2021-01-21 23:02 UTC)