Fastmail was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Fastmail was down

#21

Post by imwally » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

hs86 wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#22

Post by nvllsvm » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #19

hs86 wrote: post #13

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.

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?

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/

Re: Fastmail was down

#23

Post by Tarq0n » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

neither_color wrote: post #16

Love fastmail. 500 aliases means a unique email login for every single online account. Hope they fix this soon.

Killer feature indeed. I just wish the same thing existed for phone numbers.

Re: Fastmail was down

#24

Post by gnud » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

burnthrow wrote: post #14

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

Haven't noticed yet. I want to say most Fastmail incidents come and go without me noticing, apart from their tweets about them.

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.

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#25

Post by thismodernlife » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

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!

Re: Fastmail was down

#26

Post by _lbaq » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

thismodernlife wrote: post #25

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!

I second this, highly recommended!

Re: Fastmail was down

#27

Post by laurent92 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

thismodernlife wrote: post #25

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!

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#28

Post by tompic823 » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#29

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

hs86 wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#30

Post by pavlov » Thu, Jan 21, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

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.