Congratulations, but I still won't be putting my data in the US.
FastMail is an Australian company; whether that changes your feeling is another matter.
FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#42Welcome to 2015, where Push Notifications are a feature and not default anymore.
IMAP doesn't have "push". This is something Apple built to stop wasting your battery by trying to use the terrible IMAP IDLE
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#43I noticed that it doesn’t issue push notifications for emails that enter the inbox as read. I do that for a bunch of notifications and mailing list traffic, and with the FastMail iOS app, it was annoying that those would generate a push notification too.
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#44Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Congratulations and thank you to the Fastmail team and people at Apple who made this happen. No, sincerely no, no congratulations. My congratulations will go to those who fight to have that new kind of notifications standardised in a RFC or to those that will reverse engineer the protocol. I am sorry, but my congratulations cannot go to those who are willing to accept _and are proud_ of being part of a closed netwo…
Well, you're right, but let's put this into context: the only viable alternative at the moment is Microsoft's ActiveSync, another proprietary protocol[1]. IMAP IDLE apparently isn't sufficient for power conscious mobile devices. So what alternative do they have? FastMail's already pushing their own JMAP[2] protocol which I imagine they'd be very happy to become a standard. Perhaps everyone should wait for a standards…
An HTTP-based IMAP replacement makes me want to put a bullet in my brain.
IMAP is actually really good for the most part. It just has a few legacy warts (like EXPUNGE notifications being index based instead of UID-based), but a lot of the newer extensions fix these problems.
The CONDSTORE and QRESYNC extensions drastically simplify re-synchronizing the client and server and have been around for quite a few years at this point.
Honestly, if I was to design a brand new protocol for mail, it would be very close to what IMAP is today and just make a number of the newer extensions mandatory (UIDPLUS, LITERAL+ with Google's caveat for APPEND, NAMESPACE, SPECIAL-USE, SASL-IR, CONDSTORE, QRESYNC, perhaps a few others). I'd also include IDLE, but not as a distinct command - rather just have it always-on (at least as long as a folder is selected).
The #1 issue most developers have with IMAP is that every server implements a different subset of extensions. This isn't an IMAP-specific problem, however, it's just what happens to any protocol that gets as much adoption as IMAP and lives as long as IMAP has lived. There will always be new extensions for any protocol to improve upon it in various ways just like no framework API is ever complete.
Forcing all mail clients to go through HTTP for mail access is just retarded. It's depressing that so many people love the idea of using HTTP for everything. Honestly, wtf?
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can promise you that we make no money on those SMSes, we just haven't updated the pricing since it really cost that much - and we're actually paying a minimum per-month rate that means it's costing us more than that for how rarely it's used.
Since you work there.. why did you guys choose that approach for 2fa? Reading what's written on the help page about the master password, it sounds like you want the master password to serve as a recovery code. So why not just have recovery codes instead? Also, since you would generate the recovery codes, there wouldn't be a need to explain why the master password should be long & random; and it would reduce the risk…
> Since you work there.. why did you guys choose that approach for 2fa? Reading what's written on the help page about the master password, it sounds like you want the master password to serve as a recovery code. So why not just have recovery codes instead?
History, mostly. Ten years ago 2FA wasn't really a thing for most sites. We built an "alternative login" system, where you could create secondary passwords for your account and optionally set that password to be a "restricted" login. This was when using FastMail on untrusted machines (eg public libraries) was not at all uncommon, and HTTPS and even cookie-based login wasn't widespread and being able to create a throwaway password was very useful!
Over time we added paper-based OTP, Yubikey, SMS and so on but at its core its still just for secondary passwords.
We have started work on a rewriting the whole way this system works, which will work like more "conventional" 2FA systems, and will allow a second-factor on the master password. We're expecting it to be available later this year.
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#47I haven't been happier paying for an internet service in a long time. FastMail keeps releasing more and more useful features. I can't wait for CardDAV syncing. Even after so many years, Gmail still doesn't support push notifications in the Mail app, but FastMail threaded the needle to do it. Such a wonderful change; works great in my short testing. (I had to toggle the account on/off a few times to force it, but thei…
> I can't wait for CardDAV syncing.
Its actually enabled for all accounts and fully supported. We just haven't advertised it widely yet because its a big, complex feature and we've got enough people travelling at the moment that we didn't want everyone to start using it all at the same time!
Documentation is at: https://www.fastmail.com/help/clients/applist.html
You can see that it is leasted on our pricing pages: https://www.fastmail.com/signup/
We'll announce it officially in the next 2-3 weeks.
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Congratulations and thank you to the Fastmail team and people at Apple who made this happen. No, sincerely no, no congratulations. My congratulations will go to those who fight to have that new kind of notifications standardised in a RFC or to those that will reverse engineer the protocol. I am sorry, but my congratulations cannot go to those who are willing to accept _and are proud_ of being part of a closed netwo…
Well, you're right, but let's put this into context: the only viable alternative at the moment is Microsoft's ActiveSync, another proprietary protocol[1]. IMAP IDLE apparently isn't sufficient for power conscious mobile devices. So what alternative do they have? FastMail's already pushing their own JMAP[2] protocol which I imagine they'd be very happy to become a standard. Perhaps everyone should wait for a standards…
> FastMail's already pushing their own JMAP[2] protocol which I imagine they'd be very happy to become a standard. Perhaps everyone should wait for a standards body to come up with a solution, but personally I'd rather they be pragmatic and actually help end-users until that happens, even though I agree with you on principle.
That's pretty much it. We want open standards as much as anyone, and our efforts with JMAP and building solid IMAP support into Cyrus reflect that. That said, the iOS Mail app is our #1 IMAP client by a long away, and a very common complaint is that we haven't been able to do push with it - its even been enough to stop people moving from iCloud. As a business decision its a no-brainer.
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
FastMail is an Australian company; whether that changes your feeling is another matter.
But their servers are in the U.S.
We've written about this before:
http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...
Re: FastMail gains push notifications in iOS Mail.app, joining only Yahoo and iCloud
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you're right, but let's put this into context: the only viable alternative at the moment is Microsoft's ActiveSync, another proprietary protocol[1]. IMAP IDLE apparently isn't sufficient for power conscious mobile devices. So what alternative do they have? FastMail's already pushing their own JMAP[2] protocol which I imagine they'd be very happy to become a standard. Perhaps everyone should wait for a standards…
An HTTP-based IMAP replacement makes me want to put a bullet in my brain. IMAP is actually really good for the most part. It just has a few legacy warts (like EXPUNGE notifications being index based instead of UID-based), but a lot of the newer extensions fix these problems. The CONDSTORE and QRESYNC extensions drastically simplify re-synchronizing the client and server and have been around for quite a few years at t…
I've worked on an IMAP server for a long time.
HTTP is just one potential transport for JMAP, the spec itself is:
* heavily based on IMAP concepts, borrowing particularly from CONDSTORE and QRESYNC but also taking the better bits from Card/CalDAV around opaque syncToken rather than forcing a sequential modseq, because that's harder to cope with distributed systems on the server with exact ordering * designed a lot more around server side sort/search, because UID ordering sucks in various ways - try moving some messages into your INBOX and noticing that iOS mail displays them in APPEND order rather than date order. * connectionless / stateless as far as possible, because connections drop in the IMAP world, particularly in mobile, and the cost of a new SELECT is high, even with QRESYNC. It still has to create a COW view of the message space because it has to keep message numbers that don't track EXPUNGEs just in case the client wants to run a pipelined command. * it's a regular datastructure rather than the abomination which is IMAP. Things like system flags starting with a \ which makes them not an atom, yet sent like an atom without quoting.
In general, IMAP has many things which are done implicitly rather than explicitly, which add cost that you can't avoid paying at both ends, even if you don't want it. Oh yeah, and it's really quite chatty. We're 280ms away from our server, so we really notice the chattyness. Go watch the video at http://jmap.io (recorded in Australia against a server in New York) and tell me you could do that via IMAP.
JMAP is a batch protocol that happens to be easy to implement over HTTP.