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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

#121

Post by patrakov »

vbezhenar wrote: post #57
mensetmanusman wrote: post #4

I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. I have been looking for an alternative to Gmail, does anyone have recommendations? Fastmail? Proton mail? What put me over the edge is my young friend had a heart attack, went to the hospital and (during recovery) logged int…

> I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. As long as server name sent in cleartext in SNI, blocking any website is trivial. Telegram uses a different approach with multitude of proxy servers and dynamic proxy changes via Apple/Google push messages. It's not applic…

> If/when encrypted SNI is widely implemented, it might work.

No. China is already blocking all connections with encrypted SNI. If such services become popular or make the encrypted SNI mandatory, then the choice will be to either install a government MITM certificate or not use the internet at all.

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

#122

Post by czottmann »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #4

I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. I have been looking for an alternative to Gmail, does anyone have recommendations? Fastmail? Proton mail? What put me over the edge is my young friend had a heart attack, went to the hospital and (during recovery) logged int…

There's German mail provider Mailbox. https://mailbox.org/en/ They tick a lot of good boxes for me.

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

#123

Post by vbezhenar »

threatofrain wrote: post #98
vbezhenar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram started to collaborate with Russia and they let it live.

Where did you obtain confidence for this story?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...

Roskomnadzor said it had acted because the app’s Russian founder, Pavel Durov, was prepared to cooperate in combating terrorism and extremism on the platform.

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

#124

Post by duxup »

patrakov wrote: post #117
duxup wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand Fastmail wanting to be in compliance with the law... or just not do business there. Making a whole effort of operating in Russia, being blocked, and trying to work around that seems like a potentially endless effort. Meanwhile you're offering a service to your customers that would be pretty spotty considering all the hassle going on.

It is not about compliance (existing accounts are kept, and decision to prevent signups is made purely on the basis of the IP address and not e.g. the country that issued the credit card). It is about avoiding the promised blocking of outgoing mail from Western users of FastMail to Russian users of any other mail provider.

Well compliance and "avoiding the promised blocking" are same at this point.

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #4

I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. I have been looking for an alternative to Gmail, does anyone have recommendations? Fastmail? Proton mail? What put me over the edge is my young friend had a heart attack, went to the hospital and (during recovery) logged int…

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by gpm »

horlux wrote: post #20
mensetmanusman wrote: post #4

I wonder if the fastmail protocol could be hidden in AWS-like data streams to take an approach like telegram. If they try to block it, they shut down their entire digital business infrastructure. I have been looking for an alternative to Gmail, does anyone have recommendations? Fastmail? Proton mail? What put me over the edge is my young friend had a heart attack, went to the hospital and (during recovery) logged int…

migadu is a really option

Second this

Assuming "really [good] option"

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

#127

Post by gpm »

clucas wrote: post #107
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #60

>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…

They might also be aiming to preserve their ability to send mail to russian mail servers, and to serve existing russian users, and to let new russian users sign up by signing up with a IP address outside of russia.

I.e. a choice between "russia is ineffectively blocked by us" vs "russia is effectively blocked by the russian government".

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

#128

Post by spinax »

deeblering4 wrote: post #79

I highly recommend scheduling a regular mbsync job to keep a local copy of your emails in sync with the imap server. With this it's easy to pick up and move to a different provider or recover from outages, account closure, etc. If you couple this with your own domain your email will be very portable.

I pay for a second inexpensive mailbox at Mailfence and sync the contents of the Fastmail account to a subfolder of the Mailfence account. There is rate-limiting involved, so my config is dialed down on "pipelinedepth" to ensure I don't hit that problem (you can easily overrun the Mailfence side pushing too much too fast). The cron runs via a unique user account on a cloud server every 4 hours using unique passwords (see below).

cron runner's ~/.mbsyncrc

    # Source
    IMAPAccount imap-src-account
    Host imap.fastmail.com
    Port 993
    User 
    PassCmd "cat /.secure/psrc"
    SSLType IMAPS
    SystemCertificates yes
    PipeLineDepth 1
    
    # Dest
    IMAPAccount imap-dest-account
    Host imap.mailfence.com
    Port 993
    User 
    PassCmd "cat /.secure/pdst"
    SSLType IMAPS
    SystemCertificates yes
    PipeLineDepth 1
    
    # Source map
    IMAPStore imap-src
    Account imap-src-account
    
    # Dest map
    IMAPStore imap-dest
    Account imap-dest-account
    
    # Transfer options
    Channel mailsync
    Master :imap-src:
    Slave :imap-dest:SubFolder/
    Sync Pull
    Create Slave
    Remove Slave
    Patterns *
    CopyArrivalDate yes
Note: use the Fastmail option to set up a READ ONLY IMAP user password! (it's a really cool feature of Fastmail that many others do not support) Mailfence also has per-service passwords, set one up for IMAP as well. Do not use your main login passwords if you can avoid it - $0.02.

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

#129

Post by deeblering4 »

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #82
deeblering4 wrote: post #79

I highly recommend scheduling a regular mbsync job to keep a local copy of your emails in sync with the imap server. With this it's easy to pick up and move to a different provider or recover from outages, account closure, etc. If you couple this with your own domain your email will be very portable.

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

mbsync supports syncing in both directions. In my case I have an hourly cron that syncs imap -> local.

And then if something goes wrong I make a copy of my backup, and invert the configuration to sync local -> imap.

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

#130

Post by stevehawk »

farisjarrah wrote: post #110
yarcob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 post…

i have a gmail account that duplicates/forwards to my fastmail and somehow fastmail shows the forwarded email waaaaaay before gmail even tells me i got the original. i giggle every time.
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