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

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171–180 of 181 posts

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

#171

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…

+1 for Fastmail. I've been happy for several years. I wrote about my experience switching off of Gmail with some tips here if it's helpful: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/

Nice blog post. I made a similar switch, but in the back of my mind I worry that I’ve introduced a new risk factor, since it’s much more likely for my custom domain to get hijacked than gmail.com.

See for example this story of someone’s Twitter account getting stolen via a social engineering attack on their registrar: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...

A Google search suggests that setting up a registry lock could be an additional layer of defense against these types of attacks.

Have you done anything to guard against this type of attack?

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

#172
post #156
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone reading mbsync(1) and getting confused now: they have renamed Master-Slave into Far-Near in the latest versions.

Which one is which? Is Master = Far and Slave = Near? I'd lean towards the opposite but I can't tell for certain.

It looks like they did this in 1.4.0 released in February 2021, the online man page on the project website has not been updated for this new code. If you read the man page source [1], the word replacement seems to be that Far==Master and Near==Slave - the surrounding text is identical.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/isync/ci/master/tree/src/mbs...

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for Fastmail. I've been happy for several years. I wrote about my experience switching off of Gmail with some tips here if it's helpful: https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/

Nice blog post. I made a similar switch, but in the back of my mind I worry that I’ve introduced a new risk factor, since it’s much more likely for my custom domain to get hijacked than gmail.com. See for example this story of someone’s Twitter account getting stolen via a social engineering attack on their registrar: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki... A Google search suggests that settin…

Thanks! And no, I have to say I hadn't really considered that angle. In the example that you linked, they didn't steal the domain, they just changed the MX records, so transfer lock wouldn't help.

That being said, my account with my registrar is 2FA-enabled and I do have transfer lock turned on. I hope that someone wouldn't be able to social engineer their way into my Hover account, but who knows.

Maybe I just mention this in a footnote.

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

#174
I wonder why Fastmail decided to bend the knee and proactively block Russian IPs. The only thing those &^#%$-!@ could do is just that what FM did: block Russian IPs. Why make life easier for the dictators? What does FM gain by complying with their demands?

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

#175
post #128

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…

I also use fastmail and I copied your config, with the only difference I'm saving in a local folder.

I'm getting this error for each email: IMAP error: unable to parse INTERNALDATE format

Do you also get that? Is this a problem?

I use this Docker image: https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-mbsync

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

#176
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also use fastmail and I copied your config, with the only difference I'm saving in a local folder. I'm getting this error for each email: IMAP error: unable to parse INTERNALDATE format Do you also get that? Is this a problem? I use this Docker image: https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-mbsync

I am using Debian isync-1.3.0-2 and it's working - that Dockerfile shows it's using 1.3.3 and I spot a possible fix in 1.3.4 which could be related (or not, who knows). Your running mysync version might be different depending on the last time you rebuilt that running docker instance, the Dockerfile doesn't seem to pin it to a specific release version.

The Dockerfile is using Alpine Linux and the repos that it points to have already updated to isync-1.4.2 two days ago[2] - in general, I will make a guess your version of mbsync/isync has a bug? You're sort of using some random version, basically.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/isync/ci/c8b73acad2a3c698d82...

[2] https://nl.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community/x86_64/

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

#177
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Russian phrase has a different literal meaning though. ‘I’m going to freeze my eats to spite my mum’ which refers to mothers insisting their kids wear warm hats in winter.

Ears* For anyone thinking what is eats in Russian.

Thanks, 'r' → 't' is a very easy to make typo :)

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

#178

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'll put in a recommendation for MXroute (mxroute.com). They're geared towards slightly more technical users, ime, but there's practically no limits (apart from rate of outgoing mail). Unlimited domains, unlimited aliases, unlimited accounts, even. The entire service uses DirectAdmin as a management UI so it's pretty easy to use. They've even got plans geared towards resellers. The owner/sysad is an ex-Digital Ocean…

I did not know mxroute.com and went to their web site to get some information.

I must say that I would not have lasted there a long tim eif it was not for the HN recommendation. I did not find any place where they actually explain what is the "unlimited part" (= can I really, for 45 USD, register my three domains, and a number of email accounts on each of the domains?).

I wanted to ask the question on their chat - cannot login, a customer account is required.

I wanted to ask a question on the community forum, cannot login,probably limited to users as well.

I will end up sending an email to the contact address but this was not a great experience.

To be clear - I have no idea about the service itself, it sees to be very good from the technical descriptions (at least they understand email delivery).

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll put in a recommendation for MXroute (mxroute.com). They're geared towards slightly more technical users, ime, but there's practically no limits (apart from rate of outgoing mail). Unlimited domains, unlimited aliases, unlimited accounts, even. The entire service uses DirectAdmin as a management UI so it's pretty easy to use. They've even got plans geared towards resellers. The owner/sysad is an ex-Digital Ocean…

I did not know mxroute.com and went to their web site to get some information. I must say that I would not have lasted there a long tim eif it was not for the HN recommendation. I did not find any place where they actually explain what is the "unlimited part" (= can I really, for 45 USD, register my three domains, and a number of email accounts on each of the domains?). I wanted to ask the question on their chat - ca…

Apologies for the bad first impression. This is somewhat intentional. MXroute was originally created for sysadmins who don't need bells and whistles, and just need their email to get to its destination without fussing with IP reputation and things like that.

You know the old saying "If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans." Well, we became very popular with end users that weren't sysadmins at all. Still convinced that we could offer high deliverability at low cost while slowly improving UX to fit a new type of customer, we entered a bit of a dark age where support tickets were going unanswered for months. Because our pricing was meant to be extremely competitive and completely ditch the whole "per user" pricing that plagues the market space, and we were becoming more popular with end users, we were overrun with basic support questions and pre-sales inquires.

The first thing we did was cut out pre-sales inquiries. With enough sales occurring organically without advertising, and with pre-sales inquires having a high correlation with cancellation requests (because our UX wasn't designed for the end user who happened to be the most likely to have a huge list of questions before purchase), we decided that we weren't going to let our overhead (and as a result, our prices for existing customers) suffer at the hands of something that wasn't generating revenue.

The second thing we did was to cut back on direct support and focus on publicly available information for troubleshooting. Ideally, we'd funnel customers or prospective customers into our community forum and community chat, where they could ask questions and help each other with answers, and build up a list of questions/answers that were given in the language of the customers, to help reduce repetitive support requests. Because we found that 15 customers might ask the same question in 15 different ways, by having a community resource where the questions and answers fit those different scenarios, we could do more there than we could by automating responses to keywords.

Leveraging these community resources assisted us in building customer facing documentation and automation rules for our direct line of support, which in turn allowed us to begin leaning back into more directly available support with automation and documentation to fall back on.

Now, we're back offering more direct support after having weathered the storm caused by the unintended shift in our customer base. This is of course assisted by our documentation, and articles are regularly added to address common questions. We're routinely adding automation to auto reply to repetitive questions, and taking those repetitive questions to form better onboarding processes that intend to prevent them.

Time and time again I saw that companies were getting lost in the overhead required for providing support. You'd see in my employment history that I've been on the front lines of that with support at HostGator and DigitalOcean. I always had a vision of how to scale support in a way that would not require the seemingly inevitable steps of outsourcing, followed by selling the company. But only on MXroute did I have the direct opportunity to implement my vision. It hasn't been a flawless process, but I do think that the present result is some of my best work. Of course, as with anything, opinions may vary.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know mxroute.com and went to their web site to get some information. I must say that I would not have lasted there a long tim eif it was not for the HN recommendation. I did not find any place where they actually explain what is the "unlimited part" (= can I really, for 45 USD, register my three domains, and a number of email accounts on each of the domains?). I wanted to ask the question on their chat - ca…

Apologies for the bad first impression. This is somewhat intentional. MXroute was originally created for sysadmins who don't need bells and whistles, and just need their email to get to its destination without fussing with IP reputation and things like that. You know the old saying "If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans." Well, we became very popular with end users that weren't sysadmins at all. Still convinc…

Thank you for your reply.

I completely understand the support part - I have been in IT for 25+ years so this word hits close home.

I would also be interested in a service for technically apt users, but what I was trying to say is that having some basic information upfront, understandable by someone who know how to configure mail, would have been enough.

Something like "you pay XX€, you set the MX on your DNS to point to us (maximum XX domains), for each domain your have YY standalone accounts, and each can have ZZ aliases. You can have aliases cross-domains (or not)".

The kind of basic information that would immediately show what your service is, especially when there were so many people recommending it.

I am also all for the community approach, it is just that there is no (obvious at least) way to create an account (I was even ready to use LinkedIn for that but it was rejected).

To be completely honest, I did not go though all the docs before my first comment. I did it now and still could not find the information above :) (but maybe I did not look at the right page)

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