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Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

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Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#101
post #68

>We have made the decision to block signups for all IP addresses we identify as coming from within Russia. We have also removed our app from the Apple and Google app stores for customers in Russia. WTF? Why would you ever do that? You said you have no legal presence in Russia, why f*ck over the users? Instead of ignoring hostile stupidity you're helping it, this is mind boggling. Sorry, I can't "feel good" about your…

To me it's more disappointing that they actually considered meeting the demands of the regulatory body. I'd have simply blocked Russia after the loss in court. Also, why should Fastmail expose itself any further, in any way as a target of Russia's corrupt dictatorship? It does suck for those Russians impacted. They should turn their ire toward the real problem though: their government.

I thought this too. On the other hand, it does make sense to them to publicly claim that the reason they moved out was for technical rather than political reasons. It might not make themselves a highly attractive target for a retaliatory DDoS attack.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#102
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't. Can you explain it to me?

First of all, you're a service operator, political activity of your customers is not your business. Secondly, lobbying doesn't exist in countries with no political representation. The only political activity available in such countries are activism (not of the bureaucratic type) and sabotage, all severely punishable.

> First of all, you're a service operator, political activity of your customers is not your business.

Yes, but they're not asking about it. They're just saying "we can't provide this service for this reason; if you want to use this, we need help with this law". I don't see anything unreasonable there. Of course, one could go the Google way and say "No service for you, no reason why, your questions will be ignored", but I think this is quite an unreasonable demand. It's not like someone is forced to lobby for you, they just say why and what to change.

> Secondly, lobbying doesn't exist in countries with no political representation. The only political activity available in such countries are activism (not of the bureaucratic type) and sabotage, all severely punishable.

Lobbying was meant in the farthest sense in my original comment. Still, I don't see why they should not name a reason and/or course of action despite this. "We can't service you, come cry with us in the corner" is really not something to put on your website.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't. Can you explain it to me?

First of all, you're a service operator, political activity of your customers is not your business. Secondly, lobbying doesn't exist in countries with no political representation. The only political activity available in such countries are activism (not of the bureaucratic type) and sabotage, all severely punishable.

We don't have political representation, but very much have lobbying. Sabotage of telegram is not punishable at all. This is straight nonsense.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#104

>We have made the decision to block signups for all IP addresses we identify as coming from within Russia. We have also removed our app from the Apple and Google app stores for customers in Russia. WTF? Why would you ever do that? You said you have no legal presence in Russia, why f*ck over the users? Instead of ignoring hostile stupidity you're helping it, this is mind boggling. Sorry, I can't "feel good" about your…

To prevent new users from potentially losing access to the service later on. Why would you sell a mission critical service to a customer you know you cannot support?

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#105
post #53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, GDPR went way beyond that, demanding that every website in the world comply with their laws, regardless of whether or not you had customers in the EU, unless you count somebody reading your personal blog as a “customer.”

Wrong. GDPR asks that every website comply with their laws for anything that relates to EU . An italian citizen has to agree about it even if they live in Nepal. But a nepalese website doesn't have to care about GDPR as long as they don't have a presence in the EU. The fact that websites put a cookie wall for everyone is the strategy of said websites to make everyone think they are victims of GDPR, but that is not tr…

Nearly everyone gets GDPR territorial scope wrong and whose data it applies to wrong.

Where GDPR applies is covered in Article 3, "Territorial scope". In what follows I'm going to use the term "processor" to refer to those processing or holding data or controlling those who process or hold data. GDPR makes the distinction but in most places the same rules apply to both.

1. GDPR applies if the processor is "in the Union", regardless of whether or not the processing takes place in the Union.

2. GDPR applies regardless of the location of the processor if they are processing the data of people are are in the Union if the processing is related to:

(a) the offering of goods or services (paid or free) to people in the Union, or

(b) the monitoring of their behavior as far as their behavior takes place within the Union.

Some things to note that are often overlooked.

1. It says "in the Union", not "citizen", not just in Article 3 but everywhere in GDPR. An Italian citizen living in Nepal is equivalent to a Nepalese citizen living in Nepal. (And it goes the other way around, too...a Nepalese citizen living in Italy would be equivalent to an Italian citizen living in Italy as far as GDPR goes).

2. If people in the Union come to your website and you either offer them goods and services or you monitor behavior of theirs that takes place in the Union, then the EU considers GDPR to apply.

Whether or not you have to care about that is complicated, because even if the EU does not have the power to directly enforce it against you, they may have indirect power. For example, a place I worked collected tax on online sales of digital goods in Europe, even though there was no way the EU could make us do so, because our payment processor required us to collect taxes of the jurisdiction the customer was in.

One of the recitals says that when it comes to offering goods and services, what matters is whether you envisage offering them. The fact that people in the EU can reach a Nepalese website would not be sufficient on its own--what the EU would look at is whether the site did things like localize to EU languages (that aren't common in Nepal), accepted EU currencies, advertised in the EU, and things like that.

If you aren't intending to offer goods and services in the EU, and aren't doing things EU specific to make it easier and more likely that people in the EU will use your goods and services, then you probably don't have to worry about the 2(a) "offering goods and services" basis for GDPR territorial scope.

It's the 2(b) one that is the big worry, monitoring behavior that takes place in the Union. As written that is pretty open ended. It is not at all obvious what kind of behavior is behavior that takes place in the Union. There's nothing in the relevant recital about "envisages" with that one, so it appears that if you are doing something that counts as tracking behavior that takes place wherever the visitor is from, then GDPR is something you have to worry about if people in the EU can visit your site.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you're a service operator, political activity of your customers is not your business. Secondly, lobbying doesn't exist in countries with no political representation. The only political activity available in such countries are activism (not of the bureaucratic type) and sabotage, all severely punishable.

> First of all, you're a service operator, political activity of your customers is not your business. Yes, but they're not asking about it. They're just saying "we can't provide this service for this reason; if you want to use this, we need help with this law". I don't see anything unreasonable there. Of course, one could go the Google way and say "No service for you, no reason why, your questions will be ignored", b…

> if you want to use this, we need help with this law

It's reasonable to say this, but not reasonable to expect this to happen. Knowing this won't happen but still asking for this just paints you clueless.

> We can't service you

They can, they just decided not to.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#107

>We have made the decision to block signups for all IP addresses we identify as coming from within Russia. We have also removed our app from the Apple and Google app stores for customers in Russia. WTF? Why would you ever do that? You said you have no legal presence in Russia, why f*ck over the users? Instead of ignoring hostile stupidity you're helping it, this is mind boggling. Sorry, I can't "feel good" about your…

According to their blog post, "If we didn't comply, they stated they had the right to block our website (and possibly all data transmission) between us and anyone within Russian borders."

They were were going to be blocked anyway. So the two options were "Russian users are blocked, and the Russian government considers us law-breakers," or "Russian users are blocked, and the Russian government does not consider us law-breakers."

Even if there are no direct consequences that the Russian government can enforce on Fastmail, I can't imagine why they would want to choose option 1. Why do you think they should? What good would it do for anyone?

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you sync back your local copy of the IMAP database? I had the problem of a misconfiguration in my email rules deleting everything older than 28 days. Not a _big_ problem due to backups, but I didn’t manage to restore those as any local restore got deleted as soon as the sync with the IMAP server started

Maybe it helps to copy the messages into a new IMAP folder before resyncing.

I have these problemes too. In my case there is no unique identifer if you abort a restore and move the files again in the "folder", which leads to duplicated emails.

Re: Fastmail accounts blocked in Russia, here's what we know

#110
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a paid account with Fastmail for probably going on 8 years I’d say. It’s been a fantastically reliable service and the odd (perhaps 3 or 4 times) I’ve needed to reach out to support it’s always prompt and a real conversation.

I'm also a happy Fastmail customer. They actually offer customer support (at least they did a couple of years ago when I needed it). I had an issue with Fastmail where I accidentally deleted a bunch of emails, and with help from their support I was able to restore them from their backup quickly. Contrast that to Gmail, where thousands of messages suddenly disappeared from the inbox, and the only support option was a…

I've had the same good experience as you. As another datapoint, they really do live up to their name. Everytime I test sending myself emails, I almost always get the email to my fastmail address 30-90 seconds faster then Gmail. Also gmail tends to disapear messages if they're not from a super uber reputable email provider, which sucks sometimes. Fastmail will always deliver my emails if I am playing with a local postfix server or something like that.
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