Fastmail Down? | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail Down?

fastmail.fm

57 pointsShank64 comments

Interesting to see how many of the HN crowd use the web interface. I would've thought that this would be the one place on the internet where web interface usage would be the lowest and IMAP clients the highest. Personally I just use Apple Mail, it's good enough at what it does.

excellent application.

Agreed.

I'm annoyed by one thing: the font weights of the read email titles are a bit too heavy and black in the list of emails, making it unnecessarily hard to distinguish them from unread emails with a quick glance. The blue dot doesn't really help much IMO. Gmail with all of its faults still nails this.

When I switched over to Fastmail, my intent was to use clients for reading and composing. As soon as I started using the web interface, I realized it was better than running a separate mail application.

On iOS is still use the default Mail app, but on my two desktops the web app is fantastic.

I must say, I've got too many catch-all domain's on my Fastmail. Somewhere to the order of 30 to 40 domains lol.

Weird obsession.

I haven't found any clients that can handle replying with wildcard aliases, which is a feature I use several times a day. If anyone has a recommendation, I'd be very grateful!

Thunderbird has had it for ages - you do need to pick it from the menu (“customize from address”) for completely free form. You can also set up multiple identities to pick from for the more frequent addresses you use; I set up the 6 most used, and now only need to use the “customize..l option about once a week (compared to several a day before, like you)

I use outlook which lets you set the from address as required.

I started using their app/web when I got into snoozing messages and inbox zero. Third party apps tend to do snoozes in their own unique ways that only work in their app (or backend saas thingy in some cases)

I've been using Fastmail for well over a decade (first signed up as xxx@fastmail.fm). I use the web interface for the very simple reason that it's just as good as any desktop app I've used and it's available without installation on whatever machine I'm on - even across Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's not sexy at all, but it does what it's supposed to do consistently and without slowing me down. IMO there should be something to justify installing an app, and there just isn't in this case.

I do use the Android app, though. It has exactly the same "not sexy but works" feel for a platform where making a decent web app is even harder.

I use fastmail because of their webui. Though I'm considering moving to O365 EO1 since their contact sync is first party, I want to get rid of Google.

I'd have to front it with something like "forwardemail" for catch-all though, but it'd still be cheaper per month. And O365 is quite nice, used to work with it.

@fastmail team: please make contact sync a thing in your app, I don't want to use $megacorp, but nothing else does it well (davx doesn't cut it)

Hey. What do you mean? Fastmail does have a decent contact sync. In my opinion better than O365.

My FM client (android) doesn't appear as a place to put contacts.

https://ibb.co/NTwM9Jm

I might be holding it wrong, but it's my only issue with FM as it is right now!

"Access to the Fastmail web interface is currently offline. We are currently looking into it."

https://www.fastmailstatus.com

Edit: Seems to be fixed now.

iOS app down too. Must use web interface. Wonder if Fastmail engineers use iOS.

It’s a little alarming to discover that when Fastmail is down I have access to literally none of my email. No local cache.

They do have IMAP...

This is one reason I switched to Apple's mail services. Apple's client is 100% offline and it all just sort of works without having to fuck around with IMAP settings.

How come? No jokes, even free tool like thunderbird has local cache, not even mentioning The Bat and Outlook.

Cannot imagine.

Possibly the JMAP endpoints are down but IMAP still works, something along those lines?

These status pages are just useless. I've never encountered one that actually reflected the status of their observed service.

I'm not sure if there's a joke I'm missing, but Fastmail's status page seems to be accurate?

It wasn't at the time. Mobile Apps didn't work but it showed them as green.

Fastmail's status page has historically been pretty good.

Historically when everything was working maybe. That day not because services that were green clearly weren't working.

My takeaway from this post is that among the HN-crowd, FastMail is now big enough to warrant a front-page story.

Maybe the days of the complete gmail mono-culture here is finally at an end?

Sadly outside of me, and a few colleagues/friends who actually have heard of Hacker News, I know of nobody who has email through anything other than gmail (and the occasional yahoo or AOL holdout who just has an email address from the 'old days').

I think on HN it's front page news, but those of us who browse here (and even fewer, those who comment and upvote) are a tiny sliver of the Internet.

There are a few people who have corporate email addresses that aren't @gmail.com, but probably 30% is through GSuite, and the other 70% is through Office 365 or Exchange.

I've seen these posts for several years now

Gmail monoculture? Sounds like wishful thinking for me. On premise and/or Outlook considered to be 0 by such statements. Any stats behind this?

Third party clients, ~their app~ and the http://betaapp.fastmail.com still work. This only seems to affect their regular web interface.

Their ios app is inaccessible at the moment too

The android app I'm using isn't working so it seems to be more widespread.

Android app on this Pixel 6 seems okay.

Official Android app doesn't work for me, but I was under the impression it was just a WebView?

My backup app that uses IMAP is 100% working.

Official Fastmail Android app is working for me.

For me the official android app is stuck on loading.

It’s been hit and miss all morning. Sometimes it will retrieve and send mail, other times the the progress bar pulses along like it’s trying without success. The status page says everything is ok. If any of their engineers are listening and the problem is geolocated, I’m in the St. Louis, MO USA area.

Maybe just in certain regions? Web page is working for me. East Coast USA.

Or they fixed it already.

It was down for me for a while, but is now back up. Western Europe.

it works in europe as well.

Was offline here but it's just come back.

Yes.

> 8 Oct 2022 18:42:08 UTC

> Access to the Fastmail web interface is currently offline. We are currently looking into it.

https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

This happens to me a lot: "Mail is not working!" "Meh, just roundcube instance is out of resources"

I get 503 Service Unavailable but their status page [0] says all green. [0] https://www.fastmailstatus.com/

As always. At this point, status pages seem to be only useful for previous issues.

The beta interface still seems to be working for me: https://beta.fastmail.com/login/

The status page was updated 4 minutes after parent message

Fair enough, but at that point it was already down for at least 15 minutes for me.

The web interface seems down, however using pop/smtp with Claws Mail worked: I just did a send/receive test from and to my Fastmail account succesfully.

Edit: it appears now the web interface works as well.

Interesting to see how many here use the web interface, as I do :)

It’s a very good web interface imo

It is absolutely my favorite and very different than most UIs out there. I wish more UIs were like FastMail. It is super snappy.

It is... although I regularly hit performance problems when email chains get a bit long - even not extraordinarily-busy ones less than a month or so long.

Not sure why this is flagged. It explained last night why my emails were it appearing in peoples inboxes during a small window

I can still send and receive emails using a client.

Yup - has been flawless for years but feel like recently there have been more and more issue.

Based on their status page the only issues in the past 7 months were regular "some routing issue on the internet" related issues, which are not really avoidable.

Personally I never had an issue and definitly don't have a "more and more issues recently" feeling.

> past 7 months were regular "some routing issue on the internet" related issues, which are not really avoidable

Being available in more than one location and being able to fail-over to other instances does solve this.

No, it doesn't, not if your inbound traffic is being routed incorrectly. It might reduce the blast radius though.

Backup and was working until a few minutes back, looks like it's down again.

Seems to work fine right now.

Status page says all resolved about 15 min ago

It's back down again

it works for me

looks like it.

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