FM & POBox appear to be down - !st August @ 08:25 BST

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by TenFour

IMHO reliability and security are the top two items I look for in an email provider. Everything else is way down the list.

I agree. It is ironic that in another recent thread I opined that robustness and good privacy policies were FastMail's main selling points. Depending on the explanation of what happened, and what FastMail intends to do about it, I may be reevaluating.

[Jacinto]

Originally Posted by TenFour

. . . Have they sent out an email explaining what was happening?

I haven't received any and only found out about the issues on this Forum.

Originally Posted by TenFour

. . . I, as a POBox customer, only learned of the issue via Twitter, which is invaluable for breaking updates like that. . . . .

I don't believe Twitter should be a substitute for proactive customer service, including E-Mail notices of issues that affect subscribers' use of Fastmail.

Not everyone uses Twitter and there is no reason why a Fastmail subscriber should be forced to become a Twitter member in order to stay current with FM's goings on.

I've been a Fastmail paying customer for over a decade and remember the very old "good times" when Rob Mueller would actually reply to tickets.

In some ways, the Opera days were also good times compared to the depersonalized company that Fastmail has become during the last few years.

Having had a Runbox paid account for almost as long as my FM account and with RB's continued improvements and, more importantly, its personal touch, I've often thought of using RB exclusively. Unfortunately (for me, not for Runbox), I need an E-Mail provider with US based servers. If not for that, I would have canceled my two Fastmail accounts by now.

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Jacinto

[TenFour]

I agree that paying customers should not have to rely on Twitter, but assuming there is an email outage how exactly can customers be notified? Maybe they could have an option where any service warnings are sent to an alternate email address.

[Jacinto]

Originally Posted by TenFour

I agree that paying customers should not have to rely on Twitter, but assuming there is an email outage how exactly can customers be notified? Maybe they could have an option where any service warnings are sent to an alternate email address.

You ask a fundamental question and offer an excellent solution.

An alternate email address would be a great idea and one that other providers already have implemented. However, if the mail servers are down to start with, we go back to the chicken or egg question.

Opt-in SMS text alerts or phone calls would also work and would not depend on mail servers.

Having said that, Fastmail is not likely to invest what its owners could take home as profits to purchase the necessary equipment (or subscriptions to third party providers) in order to keep subscribers in the loop.

FM's management probably figures that Twitter is cheap or free to use and let those who are not members be damned.

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Jacinto

[TenFour]

No matter what precautions stuff does happen to every service provider. I have heard tell there have been Gmail outages, though I have never noticed one in more than a dozen years of use. I worked for a large email service provider in the past and we experienced an outage when a Tier 1 provider went down, knocking out the Internet for a large portion of the country. No redundant servers did us any good because they were in one location, though we were able to keep Canada up due to those servers being located there. We could still communicate with customers using our corporate email through Microsoft. The largest providers, like Google and Microsoft, can reroute to various server farms all over the world to get around major problems. The typical email service provider can't do that.

[Jacinto]

Can't or won't?

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Jacinto

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by Jacinto

I haven't received any and only found out about the issues on this Forum

3 days ago Brong posted this on Hacker News:

Core router issue at NYI - apparently it's not just us, though we're one of their major non-US customer-base customers, so it affects a lot of our users. I spoke to their techs briefly to confirm details, but otherwise am leaving them alone to do their jobs!
It's particularly annoying that it's a partial outage and our main 66.111.4.x range is the most affected (I suspect because it runs through DDoS protection that our more hidden ranges don't) so most our monitoring is running just fine, but customers can't get in. And it would take an hour (thanks "sensible" DNS timeouts) to move the traffic with the knobs we have access to.

Rob M. and now Bron promised us a blog post.

And... we appear to be back Far out. Stay tuned for a blog post about this later.

[Terry]

Originally Posted by TenFour

I agree that paying customers should not have to rely on Twitter

I agree, why do we have a Fastmail forum without fastmail, perhaps Edwin should change the title to Ex Fastmail forum.

Also the testimonials thread should be deleted as its out of date and most of the info does not relate to the last few years.

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by Terry

Also the testimonials thread should be deleted as its out of date and most of the info does not relate to the last few years.

I suspect FastMail might be happy to see that thread go. It does not look good that there have been no new testimonials for about 15 months.

I regret the fact that FastMail no longer wants this forum in its original vibrant form. I think it still has value as a place for us to share experiences and perspectives.

[Terry]

Originally Posted by BritTim

I regret the fact that FastMail no longer wants this forum in its original vibrant form. I think it still has value as a place for us to share experiences and perspectives.

Yes I suppose you are correct.

Really I should not come on here and complain about things I cant change, its just annoying to find that Fastmail have become very supportive on here and I dont use Tinder or what ever it is they use so we have no idea what is going on....and it keeps breaking down.

[TenFour]

I just bookmarked the FM status page.

[Terry]

That one was way out of date about 30 minutes behind, but this one was a little more up to date http://stats.pingdom.com/w17m1yxzjyin

[FredOnline]

From the FastMail Blog:

The full story on the FastMail outage on August 1st: what happened, and what we'll be doing to prevent it from happening again:

https://fastmail.blog/2018/08/08/fas...ge-2018-08-01/

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

From the FastMail Blog:

The full story on the FastMail outage on August 1st: what happened, and what we'll be doing to prevent it from happening again:

https://fastmail.blog/2018/08/08/fas...ge-2018-08-01/

This is generally a pretty clear explanation. However, there are two issues I can see

1. Unexplained is why (as reported by Pingdom) the secondary MX server through Seattle went down for about an hour. There ought to be complete incoming network isolation between the different MX servers to ensure appropriate levels of availability. This is significant as the clean solution for clients to set up backup email through another service relies on high availability of the MX servers.
2. Although some mitigation is being put in place, and NYI has proved reliable in the past, the fact remains that FastMail is going to remain vulnerable to NYI as a single point of failure. IMHO this means that those who would be severely hurt by email outages need to set up email backup. FastMail does make this easy (as long as at least one MX server remains available) but the need is unfortunate. Also, based on the outage last week, it seems we cannot rely on an available MX server.

I do not intend to take precipitate actions. I have not introduced new clients to FastMail for some years. The question is whether in switching anyone away from FastMail is prudent or outweighed by the disruption involved.

[vivil]

> Unexplained is why (as reported by Pingdom) the secondary MX server through Seattle went down for about an hour.

also than FM staff read this thread ^^ noone was silly about that...


> Also, based on the outage last week, it seems we cannot rely on an available MX server.

also, it is basic to have backup hardwares/softwares if you want high QoS. period.

Funny comment:
For non-web services, we can host endpoints in multiple datacentres with minimal performance impact. There is the triangle problem (connecting directly to New Jersey via the internet will almost always be faster than connecting to Seattle and from there to New Jersey), but with the fast DNS switching above, we could ease this in only when needed."

For them they think speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed and speed.

Customers thinks reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability and reliability.

FM STAFF PLEASE OPEN YOUR EYES AND READ AGAIN THIS THREAD !