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Fastmail was down

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Re: Fastmail was down

#101

Post by finlake »

thismodernlife wrote: post #89
finlake wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Partially, yes.

Oh, and one other thing- they disabled my account silently, no notification, no email, call, sms, anything. Found out only when one of my friends called to ask why my address was bouncing emails. As my account was disabled, I could not even easily submit a support ticket as a customer (which requires to be logged in), had to use some contact form on their website.

Re: Fastmail was down

#102

Post by climb_stealth »

tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote: post #87
climb_stealth wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this what you have in mind? See the section on mirrored domains. https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored

Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking. I think I like the way fastmail does it more than gmail too.

For what it's worth I have found Fastmail's documentation to be really good. Whenever I had to look up things like configuring email clients or their spam rules I have been pleasantly surprised.

Re: Fastmail was down

#103

Post by amaccuish »

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.

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

By that definition, which countries have freedom of speech? And why must America be the definition of freedom of speech?

Re: Fastmail was down

#104

Post by grsmvg »

finlake wrote: post #78
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.

I had the same, also took 5 days for me because of the timezones. I was a customer for barely 2 days when I was locked out.

I triggered their spam algorithm by using the ‘redirect’ button in Apple mail to send an invoice to my administration tool, which keeps the original sender in the ‘from’ field.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt for now, since their offering is really good.

Re: Fastmail was down

#105

Post by jryb »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #73
stonesweep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that says more about the domain you own than anything else. My last name is fortunately rare enough that my email is firstname@lastname.com, and the only comments i’ve gotten are from nontechnical people who didn’t know that was possible and are impressed. I suspect technical people understand how easy it is and just think “must be nice having the .com of your last name still be available for less than tens of thousands of dollars”

Re: Fastmail was down

#106

Post by benhurmarcel »

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!

Does anyone know if the file storage can be used to sync files? Some kind of improvised Dropbox. Say a script on my computer would sync a few GB over webdav, in order to access them on my phone.

Re: Fastmail was down

#107

Post by ocdtrekkie »

wolco5 wrote: post #97
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This kinda depends whose radar you are trying to stay off of...

If you are planning to be a terrorist, having data in a Five Eyes country is a bad thing, because the CIA can probably get it easily. However, for your garden variety crime, no, the local police department can't easily get the CIA to get information from Australia for them.

So depending on your threat model, this may or may not be a big deal.

Re: Fastmail was down

#108

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #93
burnthrow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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...

[deleted]

Re: Fastmail was down

#109

Post by brongondwana »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #73
stonesweep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It also means that you can move to another provider without having to change your address. I generally recommend having your own domain. It means you can get you own name (and partners/kids can get their own name too) as the local part, otherwise you're fighting for a good localpart name against every other Fastmail customer!

Re: Fastmail was down

#110

Post by aheckler »

kevinkeller wrote: post #91
alessioalex wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

I imagine it's for easier management of rules used to file email from certain accounts into folders.
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