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Fastmail was down

fastmailstatus.com

122 pointsopen-paren117 comments

I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but the number of outages recently has been a little concerning. There has been at least one outage per month for the past several months. And what's worse is that I've never seen a postmortem published. It's hard to maintain confidence in a service that isn't being transparent about why they keep having outages, or what they're doing to prevent future outages.

What did their support say when you wrote them and asked for a post-mortem details?

I haven't gone as far as emailing support, but my single tweet asking if there would be a postmortem after a previous incident did not receive a reply. My other tweets to them, such as inquiring about a recent increase in spam, received replies.

I've admittedly put in very little effort to obtain postmortems from Fastmail. But I also posit that I shouldn't have to. Postmortems should be made readily accessible, just as the outage was. I reserve my detective skills for figuring out my own service's outages.

I don't use Twitter and I don't read their blog, so if I wanted to see their post-mortems, I would have just asked their paid support no matter whether they've made one readily accessible or not.

It seems like your primary goal is to call them out, rather than to get an explanation, and so I don't really have any advice to offer in that regard.

Post mortems should be published and easily accessible via status pages.[0] Otherwise, what’s the point? The parent wasn’t asking for advice; they were complaining that no post mortem was published via the expected channels. I agree with the parent: they shouldn’t have to contact support to get that information. If I’m paying for a service, generally, I want transparency without needing to hunt down info.

These priorities and expectations aren’t universal, but they’re common enough and perfectly reasonable.

[0]: https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

If it’s not public—if a customer needs to go out of their way ask—then it largely defeats the transparency that I personally value. I suspect I’m not alone in this sentiment.

Also, since the parent didn’t mention writing to support, your response comes across as condescending and passive-aggressive. I’m not sure it was intended that way, but it reads as though you fully expected that the parent never wrote to support in the first place. If that tone was intentional, HN really isn’t the place for that sort of attitude. Simply suggest that they write to support—no need to be condescending about it.

Fastmail is an excellent company with an amazing product. The web UI really is insanely fast. And with keyboard shortcuts you can be super productive. They’re also pushing new standards (JMAP) and seem committed to privacy and best practice etc.

Really one of my favourite tech companies.

Not an employee just a happy customer!

Regarding privacy - they don't really market this feature much, but Fastmail is one of the only email providers which lets me set up per-app per-service passwords and include ACL restrictions where possible. And you can set multiple per-app passwords for the same service with different ACLs - one can be R/O to your IMAP while another has R/W access for example.

I tested a lot of providers, many of them do not have per-app passwords at all, and the ones that do tend to only allow one per service endpoint. (note: I didn't get a chance to test Zoho, it has them listed as available but I decided against the service for other reasons)

Agree. After using gmail for many years it seemed like an unnecessary expense to pay for email.

Finally jumped to Fastmail 6 months ago and all I can say is I should have done it sooner. Weaning off the big boys and returning to being the customer, not the product, as they say. Feels good.

Count me as another happy Fastmail customer reporting their satisfaction!

I switched off of Gmail to Hey last year when the hype train was at full steam. Hey was... okay, but missing so many features that Gmail had. Most importantly to me was literally any calendar integration, and custom domain support.

Instead of going back to Gmail I found Fastmail after doing some research. It's just exactly what I want, a fast web based client that has the right features. And nothing else. Bravo to the company that makes it :)!

Yeah if you want any sort of power features then Fastmail will win over HEY every time.

I confirm, excellent email provider.

I won’t comment on privacy since they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech and has blanket surveillance laws. But at least it’s not Gmail, so it is safer to conduct business where Google could be competitor.

Yes the Australia thing is unfortunate for them but I imagine this may change over time with a new administration.

I’m not too bothered by it, it’s email and I’m more concerned about high quality product, availability, stability and them not selling my data or using it for ads.

If I wanted to send something truly private by email I’d just use GPG :-)

> Yes the Australia thing is unfortunate for them but I imagine this may change over time with a new administration.

What do you mean by "new administration"? Do you mean if Australia has a change of government? (The term "administration" is used in presidential systems like the US, not parliamentary systems like Australia.)

Both major parties in Australia are big fans of surveillance so I don't think a change of government would make any significant difference to Australia's surveillance laws. The police and intelligence agencies start up a chorus of "we need this to stop terrorists and pedophiles" and both sides of politics reply "of course! of course! whatever you need!"

I don't think the legal situation for Fastmail in Australia is hugely different from that in other countries – look at national security letters in the US, bulk collection warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, etc. Yes, the Australian government can demand information but the same is true in many other countries. The most disturbingly unique thing about Australian laws is the government could – at least in theory – order a company to circumvent encryption or insert spyware into their product's code. Given Fastmail has all the data in cleartext, and it is server-based, I don't think Fastmail has to worry about such orders from the Australian government, they aren't relevant to Fastmail's product.

But if Australian law does become a big issue for their business, they could always relocate elsewhere.

Indeed, people have drama'd a lot about Australia's surveillance laws, but they have little applicability to Fastmail. Additionally, if you are worried about government surveillance, your safest bet is just to be storing your data under someone else's government.

If you live in the US, it's very easy for the US to get your data, and more irritating for the US to ask Australia for your data.

Australia is part of the 5 eyes alliance which automatically shares data between the US/Canada/UK/New Zealand which means it is a safe bet that the US can get this data as easily as it would be on it's own soil.

As an American storing data in Australia creates another problem. The US can't spy in the US on it's own citizens but another country can at the request of the US government and will report everything back to the US.

I would pick Russia or China first...

Or just use protonmail which is designed to offer some protection.

This kinda depends whose radar you are trying to stay off of...

If you are planning to be a terrorist, having data in a Five Eyes country is a bad thing, because the CIA can probably get it easily. However, for your garden variety crime, no, the local police department can't easily get the CIA to get information from Australia for them.

So depending on your threat model, this may or may not be a big deal.

Apologies for incorrect political parlance! Yes, I meant a change of government. You’re probably right but one can hope and dream ;-)

I don't understand why they stay in Oz. What's the point? Being a SaaS provider they should be able to set up camp in Switzerland and be done with the privacy concerns.

The data centre is located in New York but the staff are in Aus. I guess it's hard to move all of the staff to another country, many of whom are probably quite attached to Aus.

Oh sorry for my ambiguity. I meant something like:

1. Get capacity in Switzerland

2. Move data there (big project ofc)

3. Start swizz business

4. Move customer billing to swizz company

5. Make Australian company bill swizz company enough to pay the wages and offices

6. You're now technically not part of spyware haven anymore. (employees could still be pressed for backdoors I guess, but it'd look a lot better on paper)

Loads of VPN companies do this kind of move, though they rent colo all over the place usually.

I did that backpacker year in Australia, believe me I understandthat people don't want to move. It's as close to paradise as I I can imagine a place on earth could be.

I realise its not as simple as projected here, but it must've crossed their minds, as a fastmail customer myself I would like to read about the thought process on the topic.

Their servers seems to be hosted in the USA though. That means they should be subject to US laws?

> based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech

By that definition, which countries have freedom of speech? And why must America be the definition of freedom of speech?

> they are based in Australia which doesn’t have freedom of speech

Which countries do have freedom of speech?

In the US, companies have the freedom to take away an individuals freedom of speech.

What? That makes no sense.

Twitter can’t stop Trump from publishing his own website, nor shouting in a public square, nor just talking in front of the live camera he literally had in his own home but seemed unable to use.

They can stop Trump from posting on Twitter but I was also being facetious.

Also a very happy customer. Their mail product is top notch, but so is their calendar. And everything (mail, calendar, notes, storage, contacts) is fast and accessible using standard protocols.

Only thing I still miss is a web interface for managing tasks/to-do’s.

The notes product could do with a bit of love I think.

A todo feature is an interesting idea.

I'm also very happy with the product - I'll add that their iOS integration for email/calendar/contacts works as almost a seamless replacement for syncing to an iCloud account, which I found really delightful.

Thanks, that's exactly what I've been looking for. Is that only the $5/month Standard plan or will the $3/month basic plan allow you to add it to iOS Calendar?

Pretty sure you do but that extra $2 buys you a lot more if you can stretch the budget - 30GB storage over 2GB and custom domains. Annual billing is cheaper I think and you can get 10% off first year with a referral link (DM me if you want)

The $3 plan doesn't include hosting your own domain, you'll want to go with the $5 plan so you can get you@yourdomain.com up and running. (edit: grammar)

Doesn’t that come off really pretentious when you give out your email? I don’t think I really want that feature.

It could if you let it! So don't let it. :) I spent a lot of time finding my domain and eventually found one that makes people chuckle when they read it, it's lightly funny and innocuous. I work in the tech industry, many (many) people have their own domains - it's not as uncommon as you'd think depending on which circles of friends. It's very common to see a domain based on their last (family) name and several family members share it, I see that a lot and have seen it for 2 decades.

It also means that you can move to another provider without having to change your address. I generally recommend having your own domain. It means you can get you own name (and partners/kids can get their own name too) as the local part, otherwise you're fighting for a good localpart name against every other Fastmail customer!

I think that says more about the domain you own than anything else. My last name is fortunately rare enough that my email is firstname@lastname.com, and the only comments i’ve gotten are from nontechnical people who didn’t know that was possible and are impressed. I suspect technical people understand how easy it is and just think “must be nice having the .com of your last name still be available for less than tens of thousands of dollars”

I've been using my custom domain email for years and no one really cares, except maybe for a few techy friends who have the same. Very rarely I've run into badly written email validators that only accept well-known email domains.

I never thought about that. But really, why do you think so? Have you ever heard people comment on other people's email addresses?

not if you buy the right name.

pasc@notpretenious.com

pasc@ihelpoldpeoplecrossthestreet.com

Although Fastmail in general is offering an excellent service, their support can be too slow in an emergency.

I had my Fastmail account incorrectly flagged by their scripts, account fully disabled, bouncing all my emails. It took 5 days for their support to investigate, admit their mistake, reinstate my account and issue an apology (in the form of 1year subscription). Still, 5 days of emails lost.

I had the same, also took 5 days for me because of the timezones. I was a customer for barely 2 days when I was locked out.

I triggered their spam algorithm by using the ‘redirect’ button in Apple mail to send an invoice to my administration tool, which keeps the original sender in the ‘from’ field.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt for now, since their offering is really good.

Ouch, that’s tough :(

Were you on your own domain? In that situation I guess you could have changed DNS and piped it to Gmail temporarily.

Partially, yes.

Oh, and one other thing- they disabled my account silently, no notification, no email, call, sms, anything. Found out only when one of my friends called to ask why my address was bouncing emails. As my account was disabled, I could not even easily submit a support ticket as a customer (which requires to be logged in), had to use some contact form on their website.

Can I have domain aliases with fastmail? I saw I can have email aliases but can I specifically have a second domain aliased to a primary domain?

EDIT: They do. https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored

Yes - only one domain is the primary/default, you go into their Aliases section and have to set up a foo@domain1.com to foo@domain2.com mapping (if you use the add domain wizard it makes it for you). You still need to set up your DNS records for the second domain like the first.

(I bought two domains and did exactly what you're asking - after using the first for a day or so, having decided I liked the other one better I reached in and simply flipped the dropdown and chose the second one to by the default, clicked OK and it all just worked nicely)

When I look at my set message headers, it would appear that your primary @fastmail.com (or whichever of their domains you choose) is your actual primary, and that even your first domain is just an alias to the actual user account domain.

Is this what you have in mind? See the section on mirrored domains.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html#mirrored

Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking. I think I like the way fastmail does it more than gmail too.

For what it's worth I have found Fastmail's documentation to be really good. Whenever I had to look up things like configuring email clients or their spam rules I have been pleasantly surprised.

Not sure if this answers your question specifically. But yes, they do allow for domain aliases. I specifically use their wild card alias. For example, let's say I own the domain `mydomain.com`. Fastmail allows me to have `contact@mydomain.com`, `apple@mydomain.com`, `linkedin@mydomain.com`, etc. on the fly.

Yes, on a per-address basis. I have several email addresses aliased to my main account on a different domain.

Nice. Thinking about it more, I think I could live without it but I have it with Gmail at the moment. I like the per-address basis though, in Gmail I add the domain alias then when I add an email alias that alias applies to all the domains.

I also am a very happy customer. I moved as much off of Google as possible last year and even moved my mother to a fastmail domain that I manage as well. She quite likes it. The calendar works great with everything and I like that they use one use app passwords and profiles for devices. It makes device management very straightforward.

Another happy customer of many years.

I've got around 10 domains there, each of which have up to 4 addresses. Emails arrive filtered into separate folders in the same account, so I get all that whilst only paying for a single account (they'll even host static sites for all those domains, though I currently use Netlify).

Always performant, excellent web UI for mail, contacts, calendar, and (optionally but included) DNS, and if they have occasional blips I have to say I've never noticed.

Far superior to GMail, which these days seems stale and slow (and possibly only gets away with it because it is ubiquitous enough to set the level of people's expectations).

I wish I had bought my own domain when I signed up for Fastmail so I could switch more easily. Their web UI usually takes 3+ seconds to load for me on a gigabit connection which is about the same as Gmail, search also takes 2+ seconds which is definitely worse than Gmail. And they haven't upped their storage limit in 6+ years during which the cost of hard drives has fallen 50% or more.

edit: Bulk moving or deleting items in the web interface can take 20+ seconds! It's not that fast, honestly. But maybe there isn't anything better.

I honestly don’t load it that often - it just sits there in a open tab all day. Viewing, moving, composing messages (esp with keyboard shortcuts) is literally instant for me. I have never noticed it being anything other than fast. Same for their iOS app (which I think is largely a web view).

How many things are you moving for it to take that long?!

I accidentally marked everything in a folder as unread recently and that did take a while, but I did get a very helpful progress bar while it chugged away.

I was just looking at their "about us" page, and it seems their technical staff consists of only 3 people, which I think is quite impressive.

I’m pretty sure that can’t be all of them. The founder (or maybe CTO, can’t remember) often pops up on Hacker News.

It would be good if they would blog about more about the company itself actually. I don’t remember them publishing much about that.

Yeah, the technical team is quite a few more than that! We're roughly 1/3 support, 1/2 technical (split between ops, backend and frontend) and 1/6 for the rest - which makes us very light on marketing and sales compared to most companies!

Oh wow thanks for replying. How many people in the company in total, if you’re able to say?

Thanks again for a fantastic product and service! I really think you should blog a bit more about the company and culture, that would probably be all the marketing you’d need :-)

Currently just under 50 total.

I love Fastmail. Well worth the money.

I second this, highly recommended!

Agreed. Also, I emailed them to clarify their privacy policy and a real human wrote me back to reassure me about the few clauses I was unclear on. We live in an age human support is not that common so this felt great

Does anyone know if the file storage can be used to sync files? Some kind of improvised Dropbox. Say a script on my computer would sync a few GB over webdav, in order to access them on my phone.

Same here. Used Fastmail at my old company for years and wish my new company moved onto it. Google Mail is so damn slow.

Haven't noticed yet. I want to say most Fastmail incidents come and go without me noticing, apart from their tweets about them.

My experience was that Fastmail has regular hiccups, they just don't make the news. I left for Google Apps years ago mostly for that reason.

I've used them as my mail provider for three years or so without noticing any. So if they have regular hiccups, most of them can't be that serious.

Been a customer for over a decade. Can count the number of outages I've actually noticed on one hand, and they've all been very minor.

I'm surprised that anyone who thought Fastmail was a good choice would even consider Google as an alternative.

I chose Fastmail for business, as an upgrade over self-hosting, because it seemed to be a solid provider, not because "Google, ew!" Turns out, Google's the more solid provider (three years as an FM customer before reaching that conclusion).

In it's entire history, I'm not sure Fastmail has ever had an issue the scale or level of complete failure of https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/gmail-is-a-little-broken-r...

All good here too. Regional?

Just this week, I uninstalled all my desktop mail clients: no more Thunderbird, MailMate, or eM Client.

Fastmail's web app feels faster, uses fewer resources, and has the same UI on all of my computers.

Instead of redirecting all other accounts into Fastmail, it has a simple UI to setup fetching-from and sending-as from other mail providers, and with using my own domain, it does not feel like a lock-in.

Aren't you concerned about getting locked out of an email account and not having a local backup? Or even Fastmail having a serious issue and losing data?

I did something similar and opted to solely use Fastmail's web client.

For backup, I regularly run isync on my home server: https://isync.sourceforge.io/

This just isn't feasible for me from a usability perspective. Private email is with Fastmail, but work email is something else entirely. Both have good webmails, but vastly different UX. By using Thunderbird I can get the same UI/UX for all the different email providers. If I only had Fastmail, I'd also be OK with just using their webmail, it's excellent.

I'm a Fastmail user and I've been pretty happy with my mutt + mbsync / msmtp setup on macOS. It's nice to have a local copy of your mail at all times.

Text data compresses well. Mail archive can be extremely useful. Didn't you consider some archiving options? Putting all bets on webmail seems a bit risky to me.

I love how Fastmail challenges the status quo (for the better) down to the smallest of details like them NOT using http://statuspage.io for there status page but instead use an opensource offering called 'towncrier'.

This company is a breath of fresh air.

Love fastmail. 500 aliases means a unique email login for every single online account. Hope they fix this soon.

You can set up a wildcard/catchall alias instead of having to manually create an actual alias for each service. Someone can send email to anything@yourdomain.com and it will go to your inbox.

You can also send with a wildcard - the big desktop email clients, as well as the FastMail web interface, as well as FairEmail on Android all let you type something for the part before the @, so you can send from anything@yourdomain.com.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

You can even do more than that.

I have different categories per services: paid services go to @paid.mydomain.tld, social logins go to @social.mydomain.tld etc. So that means something like paypal@paid.mydomain.tld or twitter@social.mydomain.tld.

Edit: using Route53 for DNS subdomain wildcard.

> paid services go to @paid.mydomain.tld, social logins go to @social.mydomain.tld etc

Any specific reason to do this over the usual way (paypal@mydomain.tld, twitter@mydomain.tld)? How are you benefitting from the extra hierarchy?

I imagine it's for easier management of rules used to file email from certain accounts into folders.

Even better if you use their Web interface, you'll reply with the same email alias that received the email.

On top of this, I purchased a `.email` domain. Something about `anything@yourdomain.email` feels clean.

That does seem clean, but I would worry about normal people being confused by it. Having (business's name)@myname.com already gets a lot of questions / confirmations / confused responses.

Yes, doing that certainly does raise a lot of questions from people. They often pause and ask for clarification. Also, I've come to learn that some company's email validators do not accept `.email`. Thankfully this is a rare occurrence. And when it does happen, I've always been successful in bypassing it. I'm too attracted to the appeal of `.email`, so I happily put up with it.

I'm very interested about the aliases, but I'm not sure that I understand it correctly. I have a example00@fastmail.com address, does this mean that I can also register example01@fastmail.com and example02@fastmail.com as an alias on my account, and it will seem like I have three accounts and recipients will never known about example00@fastmail.com if I send from one of the two aliases? Do I then also "own" example01@fastmail.com and example02@fastmail.com in the same way I "own" example00@fastmail.com while a customer?. If understood correctly, I could register an alias for mailing lists, and disable it if too much spam is received without ruining my main address.

Yes, exactly. As long as the name is available. They all forward to the same inbox and if you use the web interface then fastmail knows to reply from the same alias as well.

Killer feature indeed. I just wish the same thing existed for phone numbers.

Fastmail's web UI has a really annoying bug on macOS Safari where it locks up the browser tab burning 100% CPU, and the only way out is to close the tab. Happens to me roughly every two days. I wish I had some steps to reproduce it, but it just comes up randomly when clicking on messages.

I like the web UI, but if a desktop mail client crashed this often, I'd have deleted it long ago and switched to a different program. With webmail I don't have that choice.

"With webmail I don't have that choice."

Through a web browser is not the only way Fastmail offers to use its services. It also supports IMAP, so you could use any IMAP-supporting mail client (which is probably all of them).

Also, while you're waiting for them to fix this Safari bug you could try using a different browser.

I could just go back to using IMAP (which I did for 20+ years), but for me the whole point of switching to Fastmail was to have a good webmail that's not tied to Google.

I'm sure they'll fix the Safari bug eventually, I'm not worried about that. It's just an illuminating example of how difficult it is to create high-performance web apps that actually work in more than one browser.

Could it be a Safari issue, though? I'm using Fastmail with Firefox and it's quite snappy. No CPU issues.

This does not happen to me and I have used Fastmail with Safari for seven years. Could be an interaction with an add-on? You also might try beta.fastmail.com.

No add-ons, just out of the box Safari 14 on Big Sur.

Out of curiosity I once did a process sample with Activity Monitor from the crashed tab. Looked like WebKit was stuck in a text layout loop.

>Happens to me roughly every two days

If I were their dev I'd suggest first, use another browser for your sanity and second, get in touch with the support team to see if you can help improve it!

That's precisely what I was about to suggest. Here's what one of our devs just said on seeing this comment:

> "This is the first I’m hearing about this — would it be worth it to respond and ask the user to reach out to support?"

So yeah - please do contact our support team (support@fastmail.com or you can use the web form at https://www.fastmail.com/support/) and give as many details as you can about what you're doing when it happens!

Thanks! Next time it happens, I'll save an Activity Monitor process sample (pretty much the only way to get any insight into a locked-up Safari tab) and send it to your support.

Hugops to the team firefighting.

Operation Cuddles was a success

I'm in the western US. I noticed it for a few minutes and assumed it was my internet connection. Love these guys.

Most people would expect an open postmortem on Twitter or at the news blog of the service, as this is normally what is done. Going through level 1 support or through any of the support channels is too much of a burden for customers, due to likelihood of this resulting on an unknown, not so fast, number of communication hops. Being a company with focus on privacy, is normal to expect them to be quick to give explanations and open by making it easy to get to postmortems

Seems to be resolved, noticed it 15 min ago for a couple of minutes. My first incident with fastmail and am very pleased with the fast and easy to find updates from the team.

Haven't noticed any issues (London), but I do appreciate the attention FastMail give to their uptime and outages, given they handle something as critical as email.

Saw a brief 503 once. Was back after 5 minutes.

Curious, I thought I'd noticed issues this morning at around 6 AM CST, I wonder if it has something to do with that. Hopefully this doesn't result in any dropped emails that arrive at Fastmail during this outage..

edit: Looks like no mail has been lost.

I've had emails throughout the day, eastern time: 3am, 5am, 6am, 8am, 9:30am, 11am, 11:30am, 12:50pm, 3:15pm

Just wrote some emails, checked things, completely fine for me. It might be affecting people in other areas.

Noticed no problems today, west coast, I have their web mail interface always running in an open tab

We should distinguish between fastmail being down and access to it being down.

Beyond E2EE and being Swiss-based, how is FM different from ProtonMail?

This is affecting me (East US)

All working fine here

Will take this opportunity to mention Migadu[0]. Their pricing is simply based on email volume, at all pricing levels you get a ton of features. The web interface is really good if you like that sort of thing, the support is responsive and helpful. They're also based out of Switzerland as well in case that's significant to you. Highly recommended.

0. https://www.migadu.com/

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