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Comment by brongondwana | Hacker News Reader

We also stalk you on... I mean, we read the same tech news sites you do.

(I'm on third line ticket duty right now, so if you have something significantly more complex than RTFM, or an actual bug, you'll probably be talking to me this week)

The most common cause of getting locked out other than you abusing your fastmail account is having your credentials stolen and used for spam/fraud, which is why we recommend 2 factor authentication:

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/securityupgrade.html

But yeah, even then we don't lock you out forever - just need you to reconfirm your identity and re-secure your account.

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Awesome - I moved across to fastmail a couple of days ago. I've been using a custom domain for email for awhile (josephg.com), merged with a gmail account. I'm very happy I set that up because moving to fastmail was a cinch - there's no forwarding to do, just a few DNS records to reconfigure. And with a custom domain I'll have that email address for life, no matter what happens to fastmail.

My gmail account (josephg@) gets a tremendous amount of email for other people. Earlier this year I was getting a lot of marketing trash from a particularly excited group of car dealerships in Illinois. Around the same time youtube suspiciously started advertising new cars to me. Its all way too creepy, and reading articles like this about people's gmail accounts getting locked out I'm very happy to reinforce my digital independence from google.

> My gmail account (josephg@) gets a tremendous amount of email for other people.

Same with my josephb@. It's amazing how many companies start sending personal identifiable information to a random email address without validating it.

Doctors, real estate, universities, banks and the list goes on.

The only thing that has put me off Fastmail very recently, and indeed I moved to another provider (Runbox), is the loss of their Family plans.

Requiring three accounts now for instance would cost $150 a year minimum for the size I would have needed and unfortunately because I needed to rearrange my old grandfathered plan to re-organise accounts I'd have lost my previous plan.

Basically, Fastmail is good (very good), and you can still do admin type stuff by creating your master account first and creating your 'users' under it, but do look around if you are price conscious.

NOTE - I know you can't please everyone and that doesn't detract from the fact Fastmail was extremely stable, fast and had excellent customer support so don't take this as a 'Fastmail is bad' type post, because it isn't. Just look around and make sure you're getting the rid price/value for your needs.

Fastmail killed their Family plan?

Damn. I was going to move to them at the end of this year when my VM (where I currently run my mail) is up for renewal. But if I now need to buy several Standard plans instead, and get several gigabytes of storage I don't need, then that's less appealing.

Runbox looks good. Any other suggested alternatives?

> Fastmail killed their Family plan?

They announced this on 18 August: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/08/18/easier-user-management-...

PloarisMail is pretty 'barebones' on the face of it but works well:

https://www.polarismail.com/

Zoho is actually very good too but they (like Gmail) enforce IMAP connection limits, so it you have a lot of folders etc or use mobile clients like K9 that open a connection per folder then you can get errors very regularly.

The above is true for Zoho on the free plans anyway, but it may be different for the paid ones. But the free ones have pretty much all you could need if you don't run into the high number of IMAP connections issues.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/

If you have enough accounts to make it worthwhile I think Rackspace is supposed to be very good, but last I looked you needed a minimum of 5 accounts (I only had 4) so it didn't work out:

https://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail

Really helpful. Thanks.

Previously I've been hesitant to disuse Gmail, but now I'm 100% confident to actually transition to Fastmail. And I'll take Fastmail in consideration for my company usage too (we're a smb).

You should, it's awesome :)

I also transitioned from gmail to fastmail a few months back and am very happy so far. Haven't had any issues and moving over was less stressful than I had imagined.

I've been w/ you guys since there was a 'bounce' function (miss that, btw). Used to use 2FA w/ a Yubikey, but stopped for some reason that made sense at the time, though I don't recall what happened, was so long ago.

What keeps me from enabling 2FA again, is that there's always some kind of "I lost my 2FA device" function which essentially allows it to be bypassed. So whoever's determined enough could find answers to secret questions or whatever to gain unauthorized access. If it were possible to disable this attack vector I'd get another Yubikey & try again- if...

...The other thing that prevents me from going this route, which is: The fact that it's impossible to implement an additional Yubikey functioning as a "clone" of the one used to secure the account. I can't say I've never lost my (physical) keys. But when I do I just grab my backup copies, make new backup copies, & all is well. No can do with a Yubikey.

-My 2c

Isn't making "impossibly" hard security questions and storing them where you would store your secondary yubikey basically the same thing? Or can't you pick your own security questions?

Sorry for butting in uninformed.

Nice. :) Reading this in the context of this thread made me setup my own trial account, with a new domain name. As soon as those MX records propagate, I'll be good to test it for a while.

Wish you had a dark theme, that'd be my only feedback for now (Stylish also works). Appears to be very fast, but of course, my account is 100% empty.

ime: it stays very fast, even with 1.5k emails in inbox, ~30k emails / 2.5G total in various folders.

Also, changes propagate faster even than gmail. If you have your inbox open on 2 computers and move an email out of your inbox on one of them, you'll see it replicated in near real time on the second computer. I don't know how they do it, but it works really well.

You can know how we do it if you like:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/02/dec-3-push-it-real-good...

and how we do the initial load as well:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/dec-15-putting-the-fast...

Thanks, that was fascinating. And props to the salt-n-pepa fan!

Interesting, thanks for that. I'm up and running on my own domain after waiting for the domain name server to transfer from Bluehost where I registered the domain. I did start out doing manual configuration until deciding I might as well use Fastmail's; their DNS config page is rather nicely laid out.

Was very easy in the end, but must admit I had forgotten just about everything I once learned about DNS. As such it was nice to get a little refresher.

EDIT: I would probably have gone for Google Apps / G Suite if not for this article. So, yeah, hope it served Google well to freeze those accounts with no warning.

I started switching to fastmail due to their economical family plan but then they changed plan structures to where that is no longer available and the new plans were all a lot more expensive for a family. I was grandfathered in (I signed up just before the change), but won't start using a service on a deprecated plan. It was to bad because it seemed very good for the week or so I played with it.

Will Fastmail have CDN? I'm currently in Vietnam and latency to Fastmail isn't good (250ms RTT), as I connect to server that's located in US. While my home's internet service might be worse, so I hope Fastmail servers are closer.

Based in AU I'm further away than that by latency. As a fastmail web interface or mobile app user I don't notice the latency.

CDN for unique items like mail probably doesn't offer tons of gain for the additional complexity.

We tried using CDN for static files (interface javascript and such) for a while, but we found that it didn't really give much benefit. The faster connect times got eaten up in the second SSL negotiation required for a different hostname. And it meant fun and games with content security policies or giving a third party SSL certificates that were inside our domain, so it was a wash. We decided the benefits didn't add value.

And yeah, our core dev team is in .AU, so we know all about the latency. It's really not a big deal once you sync up the first time - all the static artifacts are cached and the dynamic data is loaded in the background, often before you need it.

Can you clarify what this means:

"Flexible tamper-proof data retention policies with unlimited archiving space" - from the pricing page.

I am considering to switch to Fastmail, seems nice!

At a techinical level it means we take a copy of each incoming and outgoing (assuming you send via our web interface or via our SMTP servers) email and dump them into a separate folder in a separate account on our server which your admin accounts get a READ-ONLY ACL to, so you can see the messages, but can't remove them or modify them.

Unlimited is a bit buzzwordy, because we do have sending and receiving rate limits, so you can't grow the archive user faster than that.

Also if you go over about 850Gb of data right now you will make me very sad because I don't have facilities for splitting users yet, and we segment users across 1Tb partitions. I'm hoping nobody hits that point before I've got sharding inside users working - but worst case I spin up new hardware with larger individual partitions and put the user there :)

That's awesome. I've just gone through setting up my domain account and it was a slick experience. Neat 2FA authentication etc. Proud to see you're Melbourne based as myself, too.

PS. I hope no-one reads your post now and takes it as "challenge accepted". :-)

Alright, one more question: where is the data located? My main reason for switching is to move the data from US-based servers and/or companies.

> Our main servers are located at New York Internet (NYI) in New York City, USA.

Nvm... :(

some feedback from a happy fastmail customer: please add 2 factor authentication via sms! I neither have a smartphone or yubikey.

SMS is not very secure, there have been quite a few stories of people losing digital access due to an attacker just calling Verizon and taking over their phone account.

That's in the US. In other countries things may be more secure. In Russia I barely can make any changes by phone because they verify so much info. Forwarding will certainly require an in-person visit to the carrier office.

So I guess it's better to leave the choice to the user, with an appropriate warning text.

—Another happy Fastmail customer

There's the other side of it, which is that SMS delivery is awfully unreliable in many places, and it's a frustrating experience for everyone. We can fire off the SMS, but if it fails to reach you it's an expensive and time consuming support headache for us, and a shitty experience for you.

A Yubikey costs less than a year's FastMail service.

So no, we're not leaving this choice to the customer sorry, SMS sucks for too many reasons to consider adding back.

Here is another fastmail customer. Just curious how do you confirm identity? I don't remember setting a backup email.

Possibly something similar to this[0]?

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/icantlogin.html

Thanks for the link. Need to prepare for it.

Another happy fastmail customer here :-)

Keep up!!!

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