Fastmail Is Down
fastmailstatus.com
fastmailstatus.com
Edit:
I must clarify, though, that I have no affiliation with Fastmail - my endorsement is purely a reflection of my positive user experience.
But I disagree with
> all come with a modest price tag
The price tag may be modest for some people, but is not for everyone. If someone needs one mailbox per person in a family, the costs go up a lot with Fastmail. There are cheaper alternatives that have been around for long (though probably not doing things like developing new protocols such as JMAP). Some of these alternatives may also be suitable for people who don't want email to be hosted in the US.
I've got both, because I can buy 12+3 month O365 keys on black friday sales and stack them. I think my next bill is coming in 2027. Until then everyone in my family has a 1TB Onedrive account and full Office suite with email.
Are you familiar with what the failure mode is like with these systems? I’m assuming the login link shows up eventually, but not immediately?
It's possible some mail servers would have very short retry windows, so if your mail server was offline briefly a sending server could give up trying and fail the delivery. For a login link that expires quickly, it's probably not worth retrying for several hours or days.
[1] - https://bgp.he.net/net/103.168.172.0/24#_netinfo
[2] - https://bgp.tools/prefix/103.168.172.0/24#connectivity
traceroute app.fastmail.com (103.168.172.38),
[...]
7 4.1.86.34 (4.1.86.34) 4.341 ms 4.247 ms 4.909 ms
8 162.158.212.112 (162.158.212.112) 4.297 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 4.217 ms 162.158.212.109 (162.158.212.109) 4.265 ms
9 162.158.212.109 (162.158.212.109) 4.176 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 4.434 ms 162.158.212.113 (162.158.212.113) 4.355 ms
10 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 5.616 ms 162.158.212.106 (162.158.212.106) 4.337 ms 162.158.212.94 (162.158.212.94) 5.882 ms
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
[...]Does not work over SMTP or FastMail iOS app, but I can open FastMail over the web from the browser. And it seems like I got some new mail, so not sure if some other mail was bounced.
I have been using FastMail close to 10 years now (based on my blog post I wrote in may of 2014 about moving from Gmail to FastMail). I don't remember that big and long outage for those years. Which raises a concern for me:
- I don't like how they handled it, the latest update is 4 hours ago https://twitter.com/fastmail, they mentioned "We're in close communication with our provider", which probably means it is not their fault, but the ISP.
- Are they just too small, and it is just more likely to happen to them, comparing to GSuite or Outlook? For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages At this point FastMail is down for more than 7 hours.
- I feel like a lot of companies might move to other providers after this. As I see a lot of people complain on twitter, and don't see any responses from Fastmail team. I am sure people will be unhappy.
Kind of worries me. I am not ready to move away from FastMail. But if I will have to, the only option I see right now is Apple Mail with custom domains. But I feel like I am using so many mail customizations, and not sure if Apple Mail can even support all of them.
They've been brilliant otherwise. Able to import everything from gmail very easily.
Thanks for the tip. I can't access it via my home provider, but T-Mobile works. Interestingly enough, I'm getting new email notifications on my home provider; I just can't read the mail through it. They're probably using an unaffected Google service for notifications.
I made a table comparing different email services on the MacPowerUsers forum a while back. It's in need of updating but might be handy: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-fastmail-gmail-...
No new updates, just that they are still working on this issue.
Absolutely email is not intended for time sensitive Comms but absolutely it is used for them.
But it concerns me that we are in silent for 7 hours.
Shouldn't a system this big be redundant?
SMTP is designed to be resilient to outages. The sending MTA is supposed to queue messages if it can't reach the destination MTA. It should only bounce them after a significant outage (days, typically).
99% of outages on mail are supported totally by the protocol layer. It's a beautiful thing that if mail isn't delivered, the sender will just try again layer. It makes restarting services in a mail company much, uh, less risky. You won't miss any messages.
So I wouldn't think the mails should bounce unless someone used a really short retry period.
"Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days." from RFC 5321
One outage in 10 years sounds like a good reason to not move away, if you ask me.
I'll just say that over the years, Fastmail has always over delivered.
I'm a continued happy customer.
Definitely suggest trying a different internet connection - most people will have access to several - your cellphone mobile network, your wired/home network, your business network, a VPN may help.
What I see from reverse traceroute (http://traceroute.org has huge list), there are many huge global network providers (Cogent, for example) that are unable to connect any edge point to fastmail servers. This is a massive global issue for Fastmail and I don't think they are handling it well.
Love the service and it's been rock solid for over a decade for me.
I do understand the concern with the lack communication with this outage, however. It's a bit of an organizational/leadership red flag when a crucial service business like this doesn't communicate with its customers when things go south.
I just set up 3 people with Fastmail yesterday, and today they are asking me why it doesn't work :(
It's also funny how random the problem seems to be. It works for me, but a friend 200km away hasn't been able to reach Fastmail all day.
I'm a very happy Fastmail user.
Tracing route to app.fastmail.com [103.168.172.53] over a maximum of 30 hops:
...
6 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms ae0-0.alb2nqp8.dk.ip.tdc.net [83.88.19.117]
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 162.158.133.45
9 2 ms 2 ms 1 ms 162.158.133.72
10 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 162.158.133.37
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 94 ms 93 ms 93 ms www.fastmail.fm [103.168.172.53]I share the positive sentiment about Fastmail here. Using it close to 10 years without issues. The times I needed there support for some more complex configuration question and they replied thoroughly and quickly. I normally dislike web interfaces but their UI is really well done.
Same for me. It is accessible from my home network (AS206238) and from public transport wifi (AS202189), but not from any other network I can currently access (AS201975, AS50266).
it's there to give your perspective
add me to happy customers
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I’m a very happy customer, and feel compelled to speak up when they have a one off incident. It helps readers know this isn’t common, and that the negative title can be counter-balanced by customer anecdotes.
I think paid email is pretty niche in 2023, and I don’t want it to go away (for totally selfish reasons!), so I tell people to try them.
I did the same thing for Kagi when they were new. Then they raised their prices and I changed my opinion to negative. Then Neeva went out of business and I started endorsing Kagi again, because I really want them to keep existing lol.
I’m a lot more forgiving and willing to defend niche companies that are genuinely good, compared to someone like GitHub having an outage and providing horrific status updates, for example.
If the service starts to regularly degrade, I’m sure you’ll see the comments swing the other way in the future, but unlike AWS outages which are poorly reported by AWS and seemingly a regular occurrence, FastMail having one outage isn’t worth canceling over. If someone has a clearly better provider that’s easy to switch to, I’m not opposed to hearing about it though.
1. Support. You talk to humans. I do not know much about email configurations (probably more than average user), but not ninja in DKIM/SPF. Once I have received an email from "some hacker" about email configurations, easily forwarded to FastMail support, and they verified all my configurations and confirmed that everything is configured correctly.
2. Seriously, those 10 years of using their service is unnoticeable. I mean, on the same level of Google Mail, just with way more trust from my side. I have seen some mentioning of outages in other FastMail services, but this is the first time I am affected by Mail.
Fastmail has been very reliable and fast for me for many years, and their web app is just beautifully designed and implemented, and their spam filtering (after training) is excellent.
And we're mostly web engineers here, so we know that infinite .9s adds up to 1 in math but not in SRE...
Maybe you should try Fastmail out for a month and see how you feel.
Their mobile app is just a wrapper around their site, it does have no offline capabilities.
Their mobile app requires GApps to receive notifications, because Firebase. Ie no notifications on de-googled phones.
They would silently kill your account if their automated gearhead would think you are sending anything remotely resembling automated messages (that was a big ouch).
(too lazy to check if this is still a thing, with fronted mails they could had fixed it) You still can get an original mailbox name if you are sending from an identity of that mailbox.
Yes, they are rarely down, your support questions would be answered by a real humans (though not at your convienient time, so expect days to solve issues; probably should had added that into the list) but if you use it a bit more than a personal (or a business individual) account you are on the shallow grounds.
What do you mean by "a bit more"? Do you mean using them as a SMTP relay? Having many email addresses and users under one account? Sending a lot of handwritten emails? Or something else?
They are fine being (an authenticated) SMTP relay.
> Having many email addresses and users under one account?
I do have only one account, with many domains and addresses.
> Sending a lot of handwritten emails?
Opposite of this. I was just testing the exact SMTP configuration for Ghost and then suddenly not only it stopped working but the account were ghosted. If I did that on my main account then I would had lost all my mail.
> Note: Fastmail is not a bulk email sending service. Our rate limits are designed to be generous for individual users, but not for bulk sending. Our Terms of Service prohibits sending duplicative email, and we will permanently close accounts found doing so.
Oh, yes, I read it way before this conversation.
Oh, yes, water is wet, what's next?