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Fastmail was down

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Re: Fastmail was down

#71

Post by lillecarl »

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 :-)

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#72

Post by tompic823 »

floatingatoll wrote: post #63
tompic823 wrote: post #28

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.

What did their support say when you wrote them and asked for a post-mortem details?

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#73

Post by PascLeRasc »

stonesweep wrote: post #50
PascLeRasc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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)

Doesn’t that come off really pretentious when you give out your email? I don’t think I really want that feature.

Re: Fastmail was down

#74

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#75

Post by tmpxgdqrcKFuG »

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!

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

Re: Fastmail was down

#76

Post by saralily »

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…

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#78

Post by finlake »

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!

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#79

Post by pavlov »

saralily wrote: post #76
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…

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.

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.

Re: Fastmail was down

#80

Post by thedanbob »

tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote: post #75
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!

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

Yes, on a per-address basis. I have several email addresses aliased to my main account on a different domain.
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