Fastmail's irresponsible secret

[Fretts]

Has anybody else been treated to this introductory experience?

New subscriber to Fastmail. We had had it with the horrible, spotty performance of HostGator for important business email. Fastmail had the least downtime and generally high marks so we made the big switch and encountered nothing but business nightmares from day one.
Some emails with important attachments would never arrive to us at all, others would arrive a day or more late - too late to be of any business use- sometimes emails with attachments would pass through quickly. Very frustrating.

We spent over a week in "damage control" mode, sending out apologies and excuses to angry business associates, using alternate one-off emails to work around the problems of not being able to count on Fastmail to deliver important emails in less than 24 hours, and simultaneously working with Tech Support to try to isolate what could possibly be causing these problems which they insisted were unique and not being reported by other customers.

We uploaded our entire business address book - all 854 names with no improvement. We reduced the level of spam protection to the lowest available level of protection with no improvement.

After a week of this ridiculous nonsense, we decided that first thing Monday, we are dumping Fastmail and moving on to something dependable.

At the 11th hour, lo and behold, tech support "discovered" what the problem is, after I submitted an email header that revealed one of their own servers was just sitting on our emails for 7 to 24 hours and then eventually releasing it.

The revelation is that, thanks to an undisclosed policy of Fastmail's, "new" accounts such as ourselves are considered highly suspect and all emails are subjected to spam scanning, many of which are held in limbo until a human gets around to looking at it and either rejecting or allowing it! With four employees handling the work of 10 to 25 outside reporters, we routinely handle hundreds of email messages a day. How long would this arrangement serve us?
Ultimately the tech "cured" this intentionally-created "problem" by Whitelisting our company's emails.

Fastmail has a responsibility - and I have a right to know- that this policy is in effect.
The excuse is that, oh, many new signup accounts exist only to send out spam.
Well I am not one of them, and this arrangement should be properly divulged to new accounts such as us, this "secret" has caused us untold distress, frustration, anger and wasted time in troubleshooting a mystery that is no mystery at all, it is an intentional policy.

We are making amends with the clients that very rightly expected timely responses from us but this experience has been one not to be repeated, and has won Fastmail no love from us for the way this has been handled.

Beware new users, there are things they will not make plain to you, and will just let you suffer until you take the initiative to reveal that they are causing the problem.

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by Fretts

The revelation is that, thanks to an undisclosed policy of Fastmail's, "new" accounts such as ourselves are considered highly suspect and all emails are subjected to spam scanning, many of which are held in limbo until a human gets around to looking at it and either rejecting or allowing it!

I would hardly call that a revelation - was it never considered by yourself, or anyone at your company, that this might happen?

From a provider's point of view, that is IMHO a reasonable assumption that this new account was being used to spam.

Perhaps a lot more liaison, from both sides, would have made for a better outcome.

[kaptitsky]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

I would hardly call that a revelation - was it never considered by yourself, or anyone at your company, that this might happen?

From a provider's point of view, that is IMHO a reasonable assumption that this new account was being used to spam.

Perhaps a lot more liaison, from both sides, would have made for a better outcome.

"I'm sorry. After paying your money and transferring your service to FM, you actually wanted the service to work properly right off the bat, because your mail is important to your business?

"Maybe you should have through that whole idea through..."

[William9]

In my opinion, holding messages as you have described for business accounts is unacceptable.The other potential risk is having FastMail's sending servers (or any email service's servers for that matter) blacklisted by someone. I had that happen to me once or twice when I had my business accounts with Fastmail and was one of the reasons for my finding another provider. I understand that blacklisting can happen to any service, but since moving my business accounts to LuxSci several years ago it hasn't happened to my knowledge. Fretts, you may want to consider a more business-focused and expensive provider such as LuxSci. I've been very happy with them for my most important emails. On the other hand, moving a complex setup may have some temporary problems (as FredOnline and others point out) until every thing is configured correctly.

[poma]

Not giving new users a good idea of "it could take about time t for your mail to get through for the first n days" is certainly troubling.

[Fretts]

Originally Posted by poma

Not giving new users a good idea of "it could take about time t for your mail to get through for the first n days" is certainly troubling.

That is the crux of my complaint. We are going on a wild goose chase here and losing sleep, while the whole time it was a contrived arrangement that nobody felt responsible enough to divulge?

[Fretts]

I am in fact holding LuxSci as my ace in the hole, but I'm willing to give Fastmail another week to prove itself worthy of business email. The price difference is considerable so I wanted to see if Fastmail would be able to live up to its own claims and its reputation as a service that rarely, if ever, goes "down".
We made this switch expressly to improve reliability and speed. The opening demonstration of service qualitiy by Fastmail was a dismal failure in both categories.

Originally Posted by William9

In my opinion, holding messages as you have described for business accounts is unacceptable.The other potential risk is having FastMail's sending servers (or any email service's servers for that matter) blacklisted by someone. I had that happen to me once or twice when I had my business accounts with Fastmail and was one of the reasons for my finding another provider. I understand that blacklisting can happen to any service, but since moving my business accounts to LuxSci several years ago it hasn't happened to my knowledge. Fretts, you may want to consider a more business-focused and expensive provider such as LuxSci. I've been very happy with them for my most important emails. On the other hand, moving a complex setup may have some temporary problems (as FredOnline and others point out) until every thing is configured correctly.

[Fretts]

No, I never considered seriously any of the Universe of possible things a provider could conceivably do and not disclose, that would render their offered service useless for its intended purpose. It would not be reasonable to take that position, and it isn't reasonable for a provider to play such a game where money and business survival is at stake.
In a way, you have touched on the core of my argument -- while it's bad enough to do this to a brand new paid subscriber, it's far worse to just keep it a secret and then just sit idly by and see if I can guess what the problem might really be. That to me is heinous behavior.

Originally Posted by FredOnline

I would hardly call that a revelation - was it never considered by yourself, or anyone at your company, that this might happen?

From a provider's point of view, that is IMHO a reasonable assumption that this new account was being used to spam.

Perhaps a lot more liaison, from both sides, would have made for a better outcome.

[robn]

Thanks for posting your story. I'm sorry your initial experience with FastMail was anything but awesome - that's not how its supposed to be!

I'd like to review your case. Could you please give me your support ticket number?

I can confirm that we do some additional spam protection work for new accounts, mostly to protect against automated sign ups, but it shouldn't have been this painful.

[Fretts]

Yes, I'll contact you with the details. It certainly shouldn't have been this painful, I can agree with that.
Other posters - I will follow up with the outcome of this development.

[ioneja]

Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience at the beginning. I currently pay for both FastMail and Luxsci (among others), and while Luxsci's customer support is certainly the gold standard, IMO, FastMail is still perfectly usable for business email. Yes, the support is definitely slower with FastMail (compared to Luxsci), but that's just a result of the noticeable cost difference. Let's be honest, for their price, you can't expect FastMail to match Luxsci in terms of support response time.

However, once you get things straightened out, (and I'm sure FastMail will help you sort this out), then you should still get excellent results with them for hopefully years to come. I've been with FastMail for a while now, with very good service overall for several accounts I pay for. I may complain from time to time about something FastMail does or doesn't do, but overall, they're still good enough for me to pay for several people's accounts with them.

Having said that, you can't go wrong with Luxsci. If you pay for their premium services and support, you won't be able to do better for quality of customer support. They do have other drawbacks besides higher cost (their webmail interface, for example, is still unattractive to my eyes), but personal design preferences aside, their service has been nothing short of exemplary.

Good luck, I hope you get it all taken care of soon!

[robertchow]

I've a problem with the contacts. The problem is that I cannot import contacts to Fastmail (in vcf and csv formats). It get stuck at 1% and doesn't response at all.
Hence, I emailed Fastmail regarding the issue and with a screenshot of it at 1%.
I want to mention here that I'm on Trial Usage for 60 days. Perhaps this was why the reason for their lackadaisical attitude.

After 16 hours, there was still no response at all. I emailed them again and told them that I was very dissapointed that they didn't response to the issue and I've to find the solution myself on the internet.

In less than 30 minutes, they responded to me this time asking me to attach my address contacts to them so that they can forward it to the developer to look into it.

Seriously??

I'm really having serious privacy concerns.

First, they didn't read my email properly as I told them I'm dissapointed that they didn't reply to me and I've found the solution to the problem on the internet myself.

Second, they asked me to attach my contacts file to them so their developers can work on it.

Third, are they blind and can't read that I've fix the problem? They totally ignored me without explanation when I asked them about the privacy issues.

[bwat47]

Originally Posted by robertchow

I've a problem with the contacts. The problem is that I cannot import contacts to Fastmail (in vcf and csv formats). It get stuck at 1% and doesn't response at all.
Hence, I emailed Fastmail regarding the issue and with a screenshot of it at 1%.
I want to mention here that I'm on Trial Usage for 60 days. Perhaps this was why the reason for their lackadaisical attitude.

After 16 hours, there was still no response at all. I emailed them again and told them that I was very dissapointed that they didn't response to the issue and I've to find the solution myself on the internet.

In less than 30 minutes, they responded to me this time asking me to attach my address contacts to them so that they can forward it to the developer to look into it.

Seriously??

I'm really having serious privacy concerns.

First, they didn't read my email properly as I told them I'm dissapointed that they didn't reply to me and I've found the solution to the problem on the internet myself.

Second, they asked me to attach my contacts file to them so their developers can work on it.

Third, are they blind and can't read that I've fix the problem? They totally ignored me without explanation when I asked them about the privacy issues.

Developers have to be able to reproduce the problem to be able to fix it. If I was a developer and someone sent me a screenshot of a 1% upload and then expected me to magically find out what the problem is and fix it, I'd just be like "WTF?!"

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by Fretts

Some emails with important attachments would never arrive to us at all, others would arrive a day or more late

Originally Posted by Fretts

The revelation is that, thanks to an undisclosed policy of Fastmail's, "new" accounts such as ourselves are considered highly suspect and all emails are subjected to spam scanning, many of which are held in limbo until a human gets around to looking at it and either rejecting or allowing it!

If true, that's very strange. I wouldn't be surprised if email providers carefully monitored outgoing messages from new accounts, but it looks like your incoming messages were being delayed. Spammers typically send a lot of emails and don't care much for receiving anything. So it's unlikely that an anti-spam policy would aggressively filter incoming emails.

From a technical point of view, what is most likely to have happened is that the DNS for your domain got messed up during your transition from HostGator to FastMail. It can take a couple of days for DNS changes to be recognized by your business acquanitances' mail servers, and in the meantime some of them will try to send their emails to the wrong servers. This can cause unnecessary bounces and delays, sometimes up to 1-2 days, which is consistent with the problems you experienced.

Meanwhile, when you asked FastMail what the heck was going on, they probably told you "Someone's servers have been holding your emails for a while", which you might have misunderstood as "Our servers have been holding your emails for a while". Or maybe it was indeed FastMail's own servers behaving erratically. Who knows, it could even be HostGator's fault. SMTP terminology is confusing like that . . . But in any case, if the DNS was the culprit, I wouldn't be surprised if this is what you heard from them. Which makes me suspect even more that what you experienced was a DNS problem and not a surveillance problem.

Anyway, in order to prevent any DNS confusion when you migrate from one email service to another, it is important that you only update the MX records. Don't bother changing your name servers until you're sure you need to do so and you're sure it's safe. It is unfortunate that FastMail's documentation recommends changing your name servers, because that's just a recipe for confusion for any business that already has an online presence elsewhere.

[robn]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

If true, that's very strange. I wouldn't be surprised if email providers carefully monitored outgoing messages from new accounts

We do. We scan outgoing messages from new accounts for spam, and any that look like spam go into a quarantine area for an admin to confirm that whether or not they really are spam. If they are, the account usually gets blocked pretty quickly. If not, they're let through. Its a fairly basic protection.

but it looks like your incoming messages were being delayed. Spammers typically send a lot of emails and don't care much for receiving anything. So it's unlikely that an anti-spam policy would aggressively filter incoming emails.

In this specific case, the business in question sends and receives a lot of legitimate email that just happens to be full of terms that tend to trip the spam filters. So a lot of stuff was going to the outgoing quarantine or to incoming junk folders. Its really unfortunate that this happened but there's always special cases that do things that weren't expected.

In this case I pointed out that the spam filters can be tuned. I haven't heard back so I hope a good solution was found.

It is unfortunate that FastMail's documentation recommends changing your name servers, because that's just a recipe for confusion for any business that already has an online presence elsewhere.

We recommend that because we can guarantee that mail will work, which keeps our support load down. If a customer has their own DNS setup because they have services hosted elsewhere then hopefully they already understand DNS or have a technical person available that does.