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Fastmail was down

fastmailstatus.com

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Re: Fastmail was down

#111

Post by robjan »

lillecarl wrote: post #71
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 :-)

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.

The data centre is located in New York but the staff are in Aus. I guess it's hard to move all of the staff to another country, many of whom are probably quite attached to Aus.

Re: Fastmail was down

#112

Post by efiecho »

neither_color wrote: post #16

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

I'm very interested about the aliases, but I'm not sure that I understand it correctly. I have a example00@fastmail.com address, does this mean that I can also register example01@fastmail.com and example02@fastmail.com as an alias on my account, and it will seem like I have three accounts and recipients will never known about example00@fastmail.com if I send from one of the two aliases? Do I then also "own" example01@fastmail.com and example02@fastmail.com in the same way I "own" example00@fastmail.com while a customer?. If understood correctly, I could register an alias for mailing lists, and disable it if too much spam is received without ruining my main address.

Re: Fastmail was down

#113

Post by foofoo4u »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #96
foofoo4u wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of this, I purchased a `.email` domain. Something about `anything@yourdomain.email` feels clean.

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.

Yes, doing that certainly does raise a lot of questions from people. They often pause and ask for clarification. Also, I've come to learn that some company's email validators do not accept `.email`. Thankfully this is a rare occurrence. And when it does happen, I've always been successful in bypassing it. I'm too attracted to the appeal of `.email`, so I happily put up with it.

Re: Fastmail was down

#114

Post by throwaheyy »

tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote: post #81
chrisseaton wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech Which countries do have freedom of speech?

In the US, companies have the freedom to take away an individuals freedom of speech.

What? That makes no sense.

Twitter can’t stop Trump from publishing his own website, nor shouting in a public square, nor just talking in front of the live camera he literally had in his own home but seemed unable to use.

Re: Fastmail was down

#115

Post by lk0nga »

Most people would expect an open postmortem on Twitter or at the news blog of the service, as this is normally what is done. Going through level 1 support or through any of the support channels is too much of a burden for customers, due to likelihood of this resulting on an unknown, not so fast, number of communication hops. Being a company with focus on privacy, is normal to expect them to be quick to give explanations and open by making it easy to get to postmortems

Re: Fastmail was down

#116

Post by lillecarl »

robjan wrote: post #111
lillecarl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The data centre is located in New York but the staff are in Aus. I guess it's hard to move all of the staff to another country, many of whom are probably quite attached to Aus.

Oh sorry for my ambiguity. I meant something like:

1. Get capacity in Switzerland

2. Move data there (big project ofc)

3. Start swizz business

4. Move customer billing to swizz company

5. Make Australian company bill swizz company enough to pay the wages and offices

6. You're now technically not part of spyware haven anymore. (employees could still be pressed for backdoors I guess, but it'd look a lot better on paper)

Loads of VPN companies do this kind of move, though they rent colo all over the place usually.

I did that backpacker year in Australia, believe me I understandthat people don't want to move. It's as close to paradise as I I can imagine a place on earth could be.

I realise its not as simple as projected here, but it must've crossed their minds, as a fastmail customer myself I would like to read about the thought process on the topic.

Re: Fastmail was down

#117

Post by neither_color »

efiecho wrote: post #112
neither_color wrote: post #16

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

I'm very interested about the aliases, but I'm not sure that I understand it correctly. I have a example00@fastmail.com address, does this mean that I can also register example01@fastmail.com and example02@fastmail.com as an alias on my account, and it will seem like I have three accounts and recipients will never known about example00@fastmail.com if I send from one of the two aliases? Do I then also "own" example01…

Yes, exactly. As long as the name is available. They all forward to the same inbox and if you use the web interface then fastmail knows to reply from the same alias as well.

Re: Fastmail was down

#118

Post by zenexer »

floatingatoll wrote: post #99
tompic823 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Post mortems should be published and easily accessible via status pages.[0] Otherwise, what’s the point? The parent wasn’t asking for advice; they were complaining that no post mortem was published via the expected channels. I agree with the parent: they shouldn’t have to contact support to get that information. If I’m paying for a service, generally, I want transparency without needing to hunt down info.

These priorities and expectations aren’t universal, but they’re common enough and perfectly reasonable.

[0]: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

Re: Fastmail was down

#119

Post by zenexer »

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?

If it’s not public—if a customer needs to go out of their way ask—then it largely defeats the transparency that I personally value. I suspect I’m not alone in this sentiment.

Also, since the parent didn’t mention writing to support, your response comes across as condescending and passive-aggressive. I’m not sure it was intended that way, but it reads as though you fully expected that the parent never wrote to support in the first place. If that tone was intentional, HN really isn’t the place for that sort of attitude. Simply suggest that they write to support—no need to be condescending about it.

Re: Fastmail was down

#120

Post by tmpxgdqrcKFuG »

throwaheyy wrote: post #114
tmpxgdqrcKFuG wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, companies have the freedom to take away an individuals freedom of speech.

What? That makes no sense. Twitter can’t stop Trump from publishing his own website, nor shouting in a public square, nor just talking in front of the live camera he literally had in his own home but seemed unable to use.

They can stop Trump from posting on Twitter but I was also being facetious.
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