Fastmail is having problems again

mailbox has no working mfa implementation. and that's already all there is to say about it.

For me, I had a bad experience that soured me on them. I signed up for service and forgot to change over my credit card or something and the service lapsed. So a few months later, I signed back up for another six months of service and it said I had only 3 months of service. So I double check and I did sign up for the six months of service. So I contact customer service and they say that they were giving me service when I wasn't signed up so they're going to charge me for that even though I wasn't even using it then. So I ended up only getting half of the service that I paid for in the end and they were just like tough luck when I contacted them.

Their Android app also doesn't have offline support, which makes me sad. Email is a great fit for offline first, and it's always frustrating to see a notification and tap it to get a loading screen.

Do they have this feature that if you have catch-all enabled and you had just used a random email on some website random-email-addr-smjgg@your-domain.tld and you receive email sent to that address and when you reply it automatically starts the reply from random-email-addr-smjgg@ and not from some preset-alias@?

Because on Mail.app (iOS/Mac) if you want to reply from that random-email-addr-smjgg@ you have to first add that in "Email Address" for that account in Settings. I am trying to find an app that does it (my mail provider is not fastmail, it's mailbox).

Ya know, I never thought of it before now, but you’re right. I just want to read an email that I’ve already received!

It's not. Unfortunately. Might be up for seconds and then down again for minutes. Very annoying. I am not going to complain though. They've offered stable service for years.

More than 24 hours waiting to send a message with a simple attachment.

Me too. I came from posteo. The fastmail app is pretty great. This is the first downtime I’ve noticed in the last four years.

History really does repeat itself. It won't be long before Cloudflare provides email, a search engine, cloud hosting, DNS, etc. and before you know it, we have another Google!

I would much prefer multiple smaller companies that do one thing well, than a monolith that, even assuming they did everything well, has complete control over our digital lives.

they did announce free forwarding:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/

https://www.cloudflare.com/email-forwarding-waitlist-sign-up...

Agreed. I switched the last time they were mentioned on here. I haven't had any issues and migrating was relatively painless. I still need a shared calendar solution that passes the wife test. For now, we've kept our family calendar on Gooole.

Any concerns about it being, seemingly, a one-person show? See https://purelymail.com/about

You could also stand up a receiving server and then relay outbound through something like Postmark. Deliverability is the hardest part, it's worth it to farm it out.

I think deliverability is going to be a bigger challenge than uptime; good luck!

>I'm thinking of trying to stand up my own server on my own domain and see if I can get a good deliverability established.

I've been doing that for decades.

I had some deliverability issues back in the early aughts, but I haven't had issues for many years.

Over the past decade or so, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and not running an open relay (not that I ever did that) has kept deliverability very good for me.

That said, none of the IP addresses I've used are on consumer ISP ranges. That may have an impact too.

The PRO/CON page [0] says they don't have 2FA yet, is that still true?

And anything else you'd mention as a con? I'm trying to remember why I didn't put them on my short list, maybe it was the 2FA thing, but I think there was something else.

0: https://www.migadu.com/procon/

I will second this

Me too. This is my third year with them I think. I believe there has been three downs. The worst was for almost a day IIRC.

I like mailfence for several reasons. Quick, at personal support is one important factor.

However I do think it would suit any provider if they publicized an annotated downtown log, so that we didn't have to guess how often or why they had issues.

Yandex gives me storage, reliability, custom domains and government spying for free. How can Fastmail compete when it charges for the same things? They don't even have custom domains on their cheaper plan.

Fastmail is a bargain for me. I’d pay $40/mo for super high quality email.

Been using them for nearly two years now. I’m on the 2,50€ plan, which I think is now legacy and was upped to 3€, because that’s the cheapest plan which supports own domains.

They offer a bunch of extra stuff like cloud, video conferencing, calendar etc. but I’ve never touched it.

In my opinion the interface is terrible and the settings are not so user friendly, in the settings menu is a kinda sub-settings menu which seems to be embedded from a subsystem…? But if you’ve got everything setup and provided you’re using your own email client, the service is top notch.

Never had a problem, maintenance and stuff like this was always communicated clearly and early. They split the parent company behind mailbox.org into its own one and even this one was very nice communicated.

I’d love to try providers like Purelymail because I think 30€ per year for my few mails is a bit overkill but the money is well spent on people knowing what they are doing and most important, the servers are all hosted in Germany.

YMMV but I’m happy with them and would definitely recommend them!

I wish they had an app or an app that would make catch-all feature more usable. Ability to reply from any random email I had used as long as it's on my domain.

For basics they are fine. Their cheapest plan is not the old cheapest. They added some new plans and now on cheapest plan there's literally no support (not even email or ticket) and many features simply cut off - no personal domain either.

IMHO one must not consider a paid email provider if it doesn't support custom domain, no matter how cheap that plan is.

UX is pathetic and there's no sign of that being fixed.

Ideally this wouldnt need to happen. In a perfect world we should just be able to shut down ideas we dont like without resorting to this kind of behaviour.

Plus you're not locked into one email provider, instead of dying addresses on hotmail, yahoo, aol and gmail.

Unfortunately if you do not fully own your own ICANN registrar, for example, like Facebook [1], then your domain remains open to the weakest link: humans and social engineering [2].

An Njal.la hosted domain was successfully transferred to Namecheap (through no fault of Njal.la). Obviously, this is very rare and extremley targeted.

[1] https://registrarsec.com/ [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8833/dark-fail-fake-court-...

I do this too, with Fastmail, but they do have a limit on how many aliases you can have without paying them more (last I checked).

The way around this is that they let you do alias+something@domain.com, or for sites that won't accept a plus address, alias@something.domain.com. This works very well for me, although I get funny looks when some vendor asks me for an email address and I give them e.g. alias@your_company.domain.com. Especially fun when you end up having to spell it out while the clerk eyeballs you like you're trying to screw with them.

I started doing this thinking it would let me identify who was selling/leaking emails to spammers. I now have a lot of unique email addresses like this, one per vendor. Fastmail is either excellent at filtering spam without me ever seeing it, or vendors just aren't selling/leaking my address(es); the only 'vendor' that I'm sure distributed my address after 3+ years is a state government entity.

A lot of websites reject that despite it being part of the standard.

That makes sense. Thank you!

Someone have commented that (for brevity and to ensure anonymity, the wording have been changed):

  Your answer makes no sense, DNS are decentralised!

Someone have forgotten Facebook's outage.

Ask facebook ...

Depends on your DNS hosting. FB found out a bit ago what happens when everything is hosted on the same infra.

Everyone hireable for ops not only knows what you meant to say, not what you said, but that they’re also solving for completely different problems than you’ve inferred. It’s not about who hosts the target.