Reply doesn't work for some mails.
 

I have no problem replying to other mails, but once in a while there is a mail that can't be replied to, That bar animation just goes on and on. Notice that there is no 3rd party content loaded. The current mail not working is simply text. Others from the same sender can be replied to just fine. Logging out and in again does nothing.

Are you using a browser or FM's app, or someone-else's app?

Is that browser/app uptodate?

If it's a browser, do you have any extensions installed, in particular ad- or script-blockers?

If it's a browser, how often do you clear its cache and cookies?

If it's a browser, and you do have extensions especially blockers, what happens if - once you've had a problem - you log out then back in with the browser in "safe mode" ie with none of the extensions loaded?


Note that nobody here will be able to fix the problem, if it is with FM's servers. You'll need to open a ticket with them.

I'm using Fastmail's website.

The problem went away after about 10 minutes, and I was able to reply. Notice that it was the same session, I hadn't logged out or anything. I have no idea why.

But when/if it happens again, I'll try your suggestions. But just for clarification: Do you suggest I clear cache and cookies? Because I never do. I can delete all Fastmail cookies and all the cache of course, but I don't see any need to clear other sites' cookies.

Thanks for your suggestions. Much appreciated!

If you never clear cache, then I think it will be huge, waste lots of disk space, probably slow down your browser (depending on how it indexes cache contents), and possibly mean that sets of files meant to be used together (eg a set of scripts) are not always a matching set. All of that depends somewhat on how the browser manages the cache, and on how the web servers providing the files are configured.

When a browser considers fetching a file, it presumably checks first whether it already has it in the cache. If not, or if the cached version is old, it will fetch it. Hopefully the headers that precede the file when it is fetched will properly say how long the file can safely be cached for. For that to work properly the server it comes from has to be set up properly and have been given (I don't know how) information about what time limits to send in those headers.

Cacheing was a valuable aid in dial-up modem days, and presumably still is these days for anyone using very slow (especially mobile) internet connections. But for anyone with a "fast" connection there's little point - it's better (I think) to refetch files frequently. So eg I clear all the history and cache and cookies and everything else from my browser usually once per day. Sometimes more.

Cookies clearly do have lifetimes defined within them, so one would expect that (a) the programmers for various websites, and (b) the browsers all to consider properly what those lifetimes should be and expire them as required.

One of the reasons I clear cookies regularly is that I wish to be able to use any browser on any pc equally easily. If I rely on cookies stored in a particular browser it'll be easy to forget that that browser has knowledge not available to the others.

Passwords are a similar problem - I do not use any of the browser-provided password managers because I do not wish the additional problem of doing that in a way that every browser on every machine I use can also see that same set of in-sync passwords.

Similarly I don't use per-browser bookmarks managers. I have just two bookmarks stored in each browser; one is for Google's advanced search page (I never use basic search nor search "toolbars" in browsers) and the other is a link to a local (on-disk) file which contains the URLs I use most and a set of links to subsidiary pages with subsidiary sets of URLs. Eg one subsidiary page is for lots of parts of the BBC iPlayer/Sounds website, another is for News organisations. I keep one of these pages open in the leftmost browser tab, all the time. All these URL pages are on-disk but synced between my machines via cloud storage. I didn't have to get to grips with umpteen browser suppliers' separate sync mechanisms, instead I've just used the cloud as I do for lots of other types of file.

It's true that this places on me a burden of making sure that I know how to login, how to configure websites etc the way I like them, which presents its own problems, but at least they're under my control and the browsers themselves are as unbloated as I can make them.