Why CardDAV took so long
blog.fastmail.com
blog.fastmail.com
That's why I'm a Fastmail customer.
I also recall they fixed an issue where "--" at the top of an email I was replying to was making the whole thing look like a signature and when I tried to send it was warning me about an empty message.
It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal email/calendar/contacts.
What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate email/calendar/contacts.
Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google Apps?
Original question, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000
Why would you get cloud based document editing and storage from microsoft or google, and then not use the freely included and well integrated calendaring and email that either provide.
We also couldn't use any of the nice sales tools that integrate with Google Apps (or any of the tools that make managing calendars easier, like https://claralabs.com/ or http://boomerangcalendar.com/). We're now on Google Apps and very happy.
And also these tools get access to all of your email, which is a privacy concern. And in the context of a company, that can mean industrial espionage. Personally I cannot understand how people can trust things like IFTTT, but whatever.
I mentioned in a separate comment, Sunrise substituted a generic email address for mine in an invite response, but with my name ("Brer Lapn <invite@sunrise.am>"), which when someone replied to the group began to propagate across multiple co-workers' Outlook as the autofill address for my name. I missed email from some people for a week before one of my coders noticed it and let me know, at which point I had to get colleagues to forward me any message with that address, contact the sender and ask them to remove it from their Outlook autofill settings, and repeat ad nauseum until correspondence started coming to me again.
I sent a bug report, they responded "we'll look into it" and never heard another word about it, so for all I know it is still happening. If we'd have integrated that into the company processes rather than just my using it to consolidate my calendars it would have been a serious problem.
I'd love to know more about deliverability issues - that's something we monitor closely, and we want to know if there are any silent blocks/drop rules anywhere that we can't monitor for!
I know that Sunrise isn't a Google-apps specific software, but after: * a co-worker sent me a screenshot of a meeting invite I had accepted via their app (along with a facetious question "You get a new assistant? Who's 'Sunrise' and is she cute?") that makes Sunrise branding too prominent for it to be appropriate for a professional environment, and * finding out that instead of masking a response with my email address it had sent it from a generic "invites@sunrise.am"-style email but showing up as my name "Brer Lapn <invites@sunrise.am>", and having to then contact over a dozen colleagues who had been emailing the black hole address at Sunrise--- I'd say these services are less suitable for business purposes than the standards that Fastmail uses (and publicizes). Fastmail has never screwed around with my emails or calendar invites, and unlike Gmail I can use multiple different clients without it filling my drafts folder with autosaves.
TL;DR, if I had a say I'd be running our company tools on Fastmail rather than Google Apps (although deliverability is definitely something I'd consider a showstopper, I've never had an issue with FM).
1. Silently dropping email (no smtp transaction bounce, not in junk, no rules in place) for a specific single sender at a domain, where email from other senders at the same domain is accepted. Hundreds of people have posted about this online with no fix or acknowledgement from Microsoft.
2. Overly strict hardfail SPF policy by default for new customers who have no idea of SPF and should be using softfail. These customers often use third party systems to send out hundreds of account statements. These get blocked by other email hosts. The customers themselves have no idea and never correct their SPF, saying something like "it must be an issue on your side".
3. Blocking entire /24 IP ranges including good senders with good reputation, on the basis of only a single spammer in the range. This particularly affects those in datacenters, even if you are on a dedicated machine and your IP is good.
4. It may be that Office 365 does not track or measure domain reputation at all, which makes things like SPF or DKIM of little positive use, and introduces loads of spam false positive bounces.
This is for Outlook365 using a custom domain for my work.
It's a very lame part-time job.
- my domain wasn't completely unknown so I had no issues with gmail flagging me as spam
- I use my gmail for signing up to things I don't care about mail from, so I have yet to actually receive any spam (at which point I will figure out how spamassassin works)
I don't think we need any additional software to make the process easier, maybe just better documentation from the distributions themselves or some already set up bundles. Hosting providers like DigitalOcean already have ready-to-deploy images for WordPress and Docker and whatnot, why not one for mail?
I was constantly plagued by worry that the important email I sent never actually arrived, or the important email I was waiting for had been sent but I never actually got it.
I tried running postgrey - a system that rejects senders it doesn't recognise, tells them to "try again in a minute", and accepts the second email. The theory being that spammers rarely check for these responses because they operate on a "fire and forget" basis. In reality it didn't work because lots of email services didn't correctly respond to the "try again in a minute" response - which is in the RFC!
Maybe it's an extreme example. You expect an SMTP server not to be up all the time, you don't expect them to randomly reject mail and ask you to try again later, but you get my point. It just adds to the stress/worry. I found myself default to Gmail a lot of the time for this reason.
If you fear longer server downtimes, you also have the option of secondary MX servers.
* Mail you send: Just display the mail log (/var/log/mail.info) and see if you get 250 OK responses when you submit messages. What happens next is not your responsibility anymore (except for spam filter rules of course, you need spf, dkim...)
I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12 months have made me decide to give up and just pay.
In short if you don't / won't / can't do the above you are indeed much better paying someone else to do it (preferably at scale with attention to detail like fastmail).
This didn’t used to happen, but it looks like they have now outsourced their spam filtering to the email service providers who now act as the gatekeepers to email ecosystem - email from a known service == good, email from business that has been around for more than a decade == spam.
I'm tempted to do so as well, but I haven't found a provider that will just use my domain and let me set up aliases as I can now in postfix. (Wildcard on the domain to me, a handful split out to separate mailboxes for scripts to chew on, etc)
edit: I've never spoken to someone who has and says it is 'easy'.
For more than I year now all I ever did as maintenance was apt-get update/upgrade.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to...
Ok, it did take me a while to find mail-stack-delivery but it really is a good basis.
Gmail marks my mail as spam, for new recipients, though. I don't care, every gmail user usually checks his spam anyway and when I do care, I'll call person to ensure he got my mail, regardless whether I use gmail or my server.
So you need to start a business where every hour waiting for a response means money lose for you.
With Fastmail for the past more than year, and very happy with them. I'm also very happy they're clearly at the forefront of OSS mail system development.
(Don't use CarDAV or CalDAV, so don't benefit from their efforts there.)
(Though oddly enough, just today I started getting a bunch more spam. Maybe there's a Christmas rush of spam, so the .01% that gets through is more noticeable?)
In general, I haven't had to go fishing for ham more than once or twice in the past year, which is pretty amazing.
I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared them all out. Today I checked and there's 3 more unwanted contacts.
It actually feels very broken to me that FastMail is automatically adding things to my address book without asking me, and without any obvious way to turn it off. I don't mind it recording this stuff in a separate addressbook to use for spam filtering and for auto-filling during message composing, but it should not be part of my normal addressbook and should not be coming down over CardDAV for my user addressbook.
The reason this is a problem is because I use my FastMail CardDAV addressbook as a shared addressbook for me and my wife (she doesn't use FastMail herself but I do), since we use iCloud for our normal address books but iCloud doesn't have a way to share addressbooks. It occurs to me now that since I'm actually using a Family account (for a single user, so I can have a custom domain without having the more expensive plan), I have a Shared address book available and I should just switch over to that (since I assume nothing ever auto-adds there). But it was still a rude surprise to find a bunch of unknown contacts appearing in my Contacts app on iOS.
Basically make a hacky workaround, and leave the situation as is for everyone else.
This is not meant directly as criticism, but one thing I really appreciate about the OpenBSD team is how they refuse to "fix" things by creating bad code as a workaround to other broken code.
They always submit patches upstream, and everyone gets to benefit.
If more people had that attitude towards code quality, we might not be in such a buggy universe as we are now.
When I switched from Gmail a few years ago (https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/), one of the most striking changes was how fast FastMail's interface was compared to Gmail. FastMail did a huge update to their search code just as I switched, and I haven't looked back.
It's probably on the website, but I haven't found it yet.