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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

This thread seems astroturfed to hell. We are talking about a service outage and the comments are all the equivalent of glowing fake Amazon reviews.

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It's unusual in 2023 for a company to be run well. The default today is to have an adversarial relationship with your customers. When folks discuss the rare companies that they don't hate, it feels like astroturfing, because it doesn't seem possible.

Curious if you are their customer. I mean in the early comment I included a thought about moving away from FastMail. But later start to think about it:

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.

It definitely might be, but also, at least I always try to promote and share good thoughts about a few niche products that I like a lot.

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.

Fastmail just has a lot of very happy customers around here. I saw this post and my first thought was to come and show solidarity.

I see how it could look that way, but these are glowing real Hacker News reviews ツ Turns out the secret to customer loyalty is working hard to deliver a great product...

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...

I’m not affiliated with them in any way beyond being a customer. I work at a giant tech company, and the only money I’ve ever received from fastmail was a referral credit when one friend signed up for their service.

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'm a real person, been a fastmail customer for almost two decades, and it's one of the very few companies that I cheerfully evangelize for. They provide all the features I need, plenty of configurability, and it's very reliable (this morning notwithstanding). Doesn't at all surprise me that other people are chiming in to say similar things.

I don't know, it seems genuine to me. I switch to Fastmail years ago and haven't looked back, I get annoyed when I have to use Gmail for work. I can understand that others might have similar feelings.

Maybe you should try Fastmail out for a month and see how you feel.

I started using Fastmail a couple of years ago because it's so loved on HN, so I think it's just genuine (I'm a happy customer myself)

because people use it for 10+ years and never experienced outage?

it's there to give your perspective

add me to happy customers

I was happy to see it as a long time customer who checked my email in the last half hour successfully. If this becomes a problem for me, I’ll chime in. But Fastmail is one of the easiest decisions I’ve made, and is consistently reliable. I think HN commenters are basically the company’s target demo, and we’re very happy with the service.

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.

No astroturfing on my part, I love Fastmail.

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