Personal Redundancy Plan discussion

[Edward Velo]

Originally posted by ewal
Is there a way of Fastmail setting it such that for specific domains their secondary MX server in Texas is NOT used?

I don't know if it's techically possible, but indeed it would be very interesting to have a switch in the Options screen: "do not accept incoming mail if your IMAP server is down". So users who have setup a second MX record would get their mails at their second email provider, while mail for users who leave that switch disabled still get their mail queued at Fastmail.

I think that is a good solution, and would eliminate the "single point of failure" greatly. If Fastmail's IMAP is down, try the next email provider.

PS. The problem of the "sent mail redundancy" could be solved with a fuction that Tuffmail has: auto BCC at the SMTP level (even when you use an email client, your backup email account will still get all your sent emails). I wrote something about this a few days ago: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...threadid=44019

[emanon]

Interesting thread in light of the current server3 problems.

[Shelded]

Originally posted by Edward Velo
PS. The problem of the "sent mail redundancy" could be solved with a fuction that Tuffmail has: auto BCC at the SMTP level (even when you use an email client, your backup email account will still get all your sent emails). I wrote something about this a few days ago: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...threadid=44019

I think you can do this at FM with an alias to forward everything to a second address? In any case when either address goes down you would not bounces coming back to senders which would cause them to think you missed the message. Imagine FM being down, forwarding mail to Gmail but also bouncing all messages. Quite confusing.

[Edward Velo]

Originally posted by Shelded
I think you can do this at FM with an alias to forward everything to a second address?

I don't understand what you mean here. I was taking about auto BCC at the SMTP level. So it doesn't matter if you use the webmail or an email client, you'd still get backup copies of all your mails to a second account. How would you do that with an alias?

Originally posted by Shelded
In any case when either address goes down you would not bounces coming back to senders which would cause them to think you missed the message.

I was talking about a BCC of all message you send yourself to a second account. So if that second account is down, the bounce message would just come back to yourself.

Originally posted by Shelded
Imagine FM being down, forwarding mail to Gmail but also bouncing all messages. Quite confusing.

Why would Gmail bounces your messages back if Fastmail is down?

[lane]

For what it's worth, my redundancy plan:

True safety requires your own domain, very very cheap these days. I purchased my from Yahoo during a sale they had, and I got 5 years for $14.95. However, the level 1 protection described below would work fine if you had only a Fastmail address.

In all of the following, outgoing email should be bbc'ed to your backup account. The Fastmail web interface makes this easy, and there is also an option in Thunderbird to make this automatic.

Level 1:
-- use only aliases, not your main username, for email, or use your own domain
-- set each Fastmail alias, and/or your domain addresses, to send email to your Fastmail account and a backup account (I use gmail). This is done via Options > Aliases (you can use a comma separated list of addresses) or Options > Virtual Domains.
-- Now if your Fastmail IMAP server or disk partition is down, mail will still be delivered to your backup account. The handoff is from mx3.internal (or mx1 etc.) to frontend1.messagingengine.com (or 2...) which sends directly to your backup account, bypassing your own Fastmail server (e.g., server3...). Unfortunately spam checking and sieve are bypassed on the way to the backup, so hope your backup has good spam features (I find gmail to be very good).

Level 2 -- you need your own domain (I use Yahoo):
-- Set in1.messagingengine.com as your primary MX receiver (priority 10), i.e., first choice is Fastmail.
-- Set your secondary MX receiver (priority 20) to another place which will host your domain, for example Tuffmail. I use runbox. Test it out first and get it working, even if you have to try it for a while with your secondary as the primary. This might be your backup email (for me it is different).
-- Set a tertiary MX receiver (priority 30) if you like to in2.messagingengine.com. Not a bad idea since many spammers like to send to the lowest MX priority hoping that it is a backup with little or no spam checking -- this way fastmail can do your spam checking for you.
-- If level Fastmail's MX receiver (mx1.internal etc. via in1.messagingengine.com) are not working, incoming mail will be automatically switched to your secondary.
-- Worst situation is if Fastmail accepts email but does not deliever to your Fastmail account and also does not send to your backup. As soon as you notice, move your secondary MX to primary to minimize your lost messages.

Level 3:
-- Store copies of all mail locally on your computer using a client and backup it up. Some folks like IMAPSize, and it is very nice. At the moment, I am popping my email from my backup (gmail) into Thunderbird and backing up that storage. This allows access to your historical email in an outage.

Final comment: IMAP is for people who access their email for different places. I won't join the IMAP vs. POP debate, but the following works very well for me becuase I use Windows XP (yes, I know, but that's what big corporations do!). I travel a lot. I purchased a 2gb Kingston USB drive with encryption (this drive is extremely fast 12+ MB/s). Although the encryption needs to be set up on a machine where you have Windows XP adminsitrator privileges, you can then use it on machines where you are not administrator. I use Portable Thunderbird and run it right from the drive, there is no apparent speed penalty. This drive can be carried in your pocket, is secure is case of loss, and can be stuck into any Windows machine with internet access to run Thunderbird with no setup whatsoever. Your choice of IMAP or POP. Back it up every night.

I hope all that helps somebody somewhere.

[Shazzer]

Originally posted by uweigl
Using Fastmail you can set up an alias with 2 destinations. One can be your fastmail mailbox and one can be another email provider. This kind of forwarding will be done at the "smtp level". That means, that the mx-server which accepts your mail and hold the incoming queue will trigger the forwarding. So it will also work, if the imap server isn't available. This kind of forwarding is even more "robust" than using sieve (which is processed from the imap server) for forwarding mail.

This is super info friends! I had no idea that I could direct my FastMail aliases to more than one location...let alone that the forwarding took place at the smpt level. Had I done this before "The Great Server #3 Meltdown of 2006", it would have saved me a lot of anxiety over the past couple days.

Like alot of others, I sprang for a personal domain last weekend. But I've had a Full account for years and can't see shelling out another 20 bucks annually just to have FastMail host the MX records for a single domain with two email addresses, which I will use for critical groups like my immediate family in the U.S., freelance business clients, clubs I have leadership responsibilities in and the organizations I volunteer with, etc.

I have the forwarding at my domain host set to both FastMail and GMail, so if there's an extended F-M server failure in the future, I'll be able to access all the really important (and usually time-sensitive messages) via GMail until it blows over. Thanks to this thread I'm now forwarding all of my F-M aliases to GMail as well, which means I'll have something close to 95% redundancy of my personal e-mail in the event of another FastMail server failure.

Of course I realize that forwarding introduces another possible point of break-down for delivery, but this solution was cheap, fast and easy for a non-techie like myself to set up.

[Edward Velo]

The MX records of my domain are pointing to Tuffmail, at the moment. And Tuffmail keeps a local copy of all my email, and also forwards them to my Fastmail account. I use the Fastmail webinterface for reading my emails. => I have all incoming mail both at Fastmail and at Tuffmail.

When I use an email client to send emails, I use Tuffmail's SMTP server, which is setup to send a BCC (at the SMTP level) to one of my Fastmail folders and also to the Sent folder of my Tuffmail account. => I have all outgoing mail both at Fastmail and at Tuffmail.

However, a problem occurs when I send emails from the Fastmail webinterface. I tried to setup a BCC in my main personality to fastmailsend@mydomain.com, and setup Tuffmail to move mails to that adres in their Sent folder (and not forwarding it to Fastmail again). This does not work unfortunately, because Fastmail doesn't want to send out emails to @mydomain.com on the Internet, because my domain is registered in their settings! (my domain is registered both a Tuffmal and at Fastmail, because of MX priority). So they end up back in my Fastmail Inbox...

I think they should check the MX servers, instead of keeping the mail internally! Tuffmail has a setting for this: *Use DNS MX records for routing outbound mail to this domain*, but unfortunately Fastmail does not...

Does anyone know a solution for this?

(I don't want to disable my domain at Fastmail. I could, but I want to host my A-records there for my website)

[Edward Velo]

Originally posted by uweigl
Using Fastmail you can set up an alias with 2 destinations. One can be your fastmail mailbox and one can be another email provider. This kind of forwarding will be done at the "smtp level".

Are you absolutely sure about this? (just want to make sure :-)

[lane]

Originally posted by Edward Velo
Are you absolutely sure about this? (just want to make sure :-)

Yes, I have done it and it works well. See my redundancy plan above.

[lane]

Originally posted by Edward Velo
... However, a problem occurs when I send emails from the Fastmail webinterface. I tried to setup a BCC in my main personality to fastmailsend@mydomain.com, and setup Tuffmail to move mails to that adres in their Sent folder (and not forwarding it to Fastmail again). This does not work unfortunately, because Fastmail doesn't want to send out emails to @mydomain.com on the Internet, because my domain is registered in their settings! (my domain is registered both a Tuffmal and at Fastmail, because of MX priority). So they end up back in my Fastmail Inbox...

Does anyone know a solution for this?

(I don't want to disable my domain at Fastmail. I could, but I want to host my A-records there for my website)

You could set up a free account at gmail, and set it to forward all received mail to Tuffmail with no local copy. Then have Fastmail set to bcc to that gmail account. One thing to watch for -- gmail will not forward messages it thinks are spam, so check it occasionally to see if it trapped a message. It will be your own message, of course, so it isn't as though you would be missing anthing.

[William9]

The problem that I see with some of the personal redundancy plans is that you have two different mailboxes to go through to be sure that you have read and responded to each of your messages. This is quite a burden to determine which are duplicates (backup only) and which are "original" when you get lots of messages and when one of your provider's servers is intermittently down.

Some of the proposed plans seem so convoluted that they may introduce the possibilty of misdirection of messages or bypass spam filters.

The ideal situation is to find a single e-mail service provider with >99.9% uptime and no lost messages. Where is that list of uptime statistics? I doubt that FastMail is in the top tier with these long outages.

[ewal]

Lane

Your analysis and recommendation on setting an alias to point to TWO addresses at the SMTP stage is just so spot on. I have been around these parts for some time now and, even though this has been mentioned in passing by others, I failed to realise the significance, and power, of this possibility.

Anyway, I changed one of my aliases to also point to another email address (an external one), waited for a few minutes, sent a test email to that alias and bingo, the message was received at both my Fastmail and external accounts.

Do you know if there are any reliable (uptime >99.9%) sites that allow for such double pointing of an email in an own domain? Or can this only happen at Fastmail's smtp level?

Also, does the bandwidth at our Fastmail account get consumed to take into account the double destination? Not that this matters much as Enhanced level BW allowance for me is far more than I need normally.

[Edward Velo]

Originally posted by William9
The problem that I see with some of the personal redundancy plans is that you have two different mailboxes to go through to be sure that you have read and responded to each of your messages.

Not really. You should work with only one account (for instance Fastmail) and just make sure that all mails are being copied to another account. That second account is not meant for using, just for storing.

Originally posted by William9
The ideal situation is to find a single e-mail service provider with >99.9% uptime and no lost messages.

True, as someone already mentioned in another thread: we shouldn't be doing all this redundancy ourself. We are paying Fastmail to provide redundancy and to be reliable.

Originally posted by William9
Where is that list of uptime statistics? I doubt that FastMail is in the top tier with these long outages.

In the past, Trip used to post some statistics here, for instance: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...=uptime+report but that is obviously before the last two big Fastmail outages :-)

[danrather]

Originally posted by William9
The problem that I see with some of the personal redundancy plans is that you have two different mailboxes to go through to be sure that you have read and responded to each of your messages. This is quite a burden to determine which are duplicates (backup only) and which are "original" when you get lots of messages and when one of your provider's servers is intermittently down.

Some of the proposed plans seem so convoluted that they may introduce the possibilty of misdirection of messages or bypass spam filters.

The ideal situation is to find a single e-mail service provider with >99.9% uptime and no lost messages. Where is that list of uptime statistics? I doubt that FastMail is in the top tier with these long outages.

The biggest problem with all of this is believing that there are any guarantees with SMTP to begin with. The RFC itself states that it is "reliable", that does not imply 99.9% of all email will get delivered. You then need to add the network and the computers themselves. All-in-all, you are asking for a guarantee that there is less than 9 hours of down time per year.

How much are you willing to pay for this? And good luck finding a provider that will put that in a SLA.

[lane]

ewal,

Originally posted by ewal
Lane

Do you know if there are any reliable (uptime >99.9%) sites that allow for such double pointing of an email in an own domain? Or can this only happen at Fastmail's smtp level?

You mean Fastmail is not 99.9%?

The documentation at Tuffmail says that their smtp server implements forwarding as it receives the message. And most folks are saying their reliability is better.

Also, does the bandwidth at our Fastmail account get consumed to take into account the double destination? Not that this matters much as Enhanced level BW allowance for me is far more than I need normally.

I don't know.