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Fastmail was down

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Re: Fastmail was down

#51

Post by skissane »

thismodernlife wrote: post #31
laurent92 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 :-)

> 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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#52

Post by pavlov »

pmoriarty wrote: post #42
pavlov wrote: post #30

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 progr…

"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.

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#53

Post by thismodernlife »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #45
ashtonbaker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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)

Re: Fastmail was down

#54

Post by the_pwner224 »

neither_color wrote: post #16

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

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

Re: Fastmail was down

#55

Post by thismodernlife »

skissane wrote: post #51
thismodernlife wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

> 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 gov…

Apologies for incorrect political parlance! Yes, I meant a change of government. You’re probably right but one can hope and dream ;-)

Re: Fastmail was down

#56

Post by brongondwana »

telesilla wrote: post #34
pavlov wrote: post #30

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 progr…

>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!

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!

Re: Fastmail was down

#57

Post by brongondwana »

thismodernlife wrote: post #41
amelius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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!

Re: Fastmail was down

#58

Post by stonesweep »

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!

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)

Re: Fastmail was down

#59

Post by analyte123 »

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 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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#60

Post by chrisseaton »

laurent92 wrote: post #27
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.

> they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech

Which countries do have freedom of speech?

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