FYI: Fastmail delayed mail on 2024-07-17 | Hacker News Reader

FYI: Fastmail delayed mail on 2024-07-17

files.catbox.moe

4 pointsentrepy1238 comments

A suggestion (to Fastmail): add an indicator to the mail dashboard that warns when there are delivery issues. Currently it just displays as though all is dandy. I was only made aware that I might have undelivered mail because I tried to sign in to a service that emails a login code which never got delivered. It took 20 minutes to trace the problem back to Fastmail. I have to go through a search engine to find the status page. I can easily imagine a more delicate situation where, expecting time sensitive communication from another party, action with non-trivial consequences is subsequently taken based on the belief that it was never sent. Just informing clients that "hey, we have mail that isn't displayed" could go a long way.

I love Fastmail still, just letting people know about this current degraded service since it's not obvious in the client currently.

Status page says no mail is lost, which is good. But I 100% have some delayed mail I have not received yet, which is also reflected in the status page.

(Aside: I guess I was smart to forward mail to 2 locations way back when; that's how I noticed.)

It has been like this since 11:30AM ET today for me; extremely disruptive considering I also was doing a reinstall of macOS today and need to log into a lot of services that require password-less email. They should have a warning on their frontend and I really hope to see a postmortem from them on this. Without the postmortem and how they plan to avoid a day-long outage like this in the future, I'm going to start looking for a new provider in the next week.

If anyone has any suggestions, especially ones that deal with spam better, I'm all ears!

Fastmail fan here.

Sad to see Fastmail beimg so evasive in these announcements.

How long is the max. incoming mail delay? From the announcement times, are we to assume 36hrs?

FWIW Fastmail Support 2hr ago told me "I assure you that our servers are no longer delaying emails."

Any phone user found a way to read the full headline status message on https://fastmailstatus.com/ ?

The best I can get - landscape - is the first four and a half words.

Sure, two steps on iOS:

1. Install the Zoomable app (free, with Pro upgrade available in app), which is a "zoomable" web browser letting you see sites as they "actually" appear on Desktop (better than the request-desktop-site option built into other mobile browsers).

2. Then, visit https://fastmailstatus.com within the Zoomable app and slide the zoom-level slider to the left a bit, until all the words are visible.

Explanation: Your phone probably has thousands of pixels in one direction but insists on pretending it only has 400 pixels or something, so websites massively simplify themselves to accommodate that handicap. Zoomable fixes that.

(Also, the full message happens to be visible in the story link, but I expect you were looking for a generic solution.)

> Desktop

Thanks.

Android Chrome Desktop Site reveals:

Mail delivery experiencing degraded performance

...weaselly avoiding mention of delay. Fastmail, you used to be better.

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