We're not interested in a race to the bottom. We provide a high quality service and we charge enough to provide that service. We're clear about our values:
Is there followup post-mortems to incidents like this which is over a month ago?
[Fastmail] Services have been restored. The problem was a a network peering issue, leading to our services being unavailable to parts of the internet. We're working with our network provider to understand what happened and what improvements we can make in the future. Thank you for your patience.
An 1hr15mins of connectivity issues is quite significant imo.
Wary after the Imgix several hours of 500/504 disaster and still no technical post-mortem..
Hmm... this is the Aug 5th incident right? Here's the post-mortem from NYI:
"On Saturday, August 5, 2017, there was scheduled maintenance period on a core switch in our NYC Datacenter Facility that was scheduled from 10:30PM - 2AM. Customers that were directly connected to this switch were notified that there would be a service impacting maintenance but there was no expected impact beyond these specific connections.
For some time during this maintenance, traffic from some upstream peers, including Cogent and the NYIIX Peering Exchange, experienced increased latency and intermittent loss of connectivity, due to a misconfiguration that did not effectively re-converge this traffic to other upstream providers. This incident started at approximately 11:30PM and was resolved by 12:30AM.
We have resolved the root cause of the issue, added additional monitoring and updated our notification procedures to ensure that all customers are notified in the future for such maintenance windows, even when there is no expected service impact. We are also upgrading our notification systems and customers will be contacted in the near future to confirm the contacts listed on the account to ensure that all such notifications are properly received."
This is the first time I've seen them mess something like this up in a very long time, and they're really good about fixing their proceedures afterwards.
We've been offline for similar lengths of time during the nasty run of DDOS attacks on providers a couple of years ago, but having upgraded to Fibre to the rack, 10G drops to the external bladecentres and DDOS protection services on our public IP range plus hidden private ranges for our backhaul services, we have successfully mitigated all the driveby attacks since.
... that and we haven't been a target for a bit (touch wood) - though we will write up something the DNS attacks at some point, they were a bit spectacular. Went from 200 req/sec to 100,000 req/sec for random hostnames on our servers. The engineering challenges to cope with that while still providing our powerful custom DNS options are quite interesting in retrospect. Not so much at the time!
Are you localized in regional datacenters yet such as SGP? Not so much a problem on the web combined with a CDN, but old school IMAP can be quite chatty, combined with high RTT latency, it becomes quite noticeable.
Good morning from Melbourne. I myself am not localised in datacentres all around the world, so I had to sleep.
That's why we're working on JMAP! Localising comes with a ton of downsides, including the fact that of the 3 other datacentres we've installed into, none have been anywhere near the quality of services that we've had from NYI over the years.
(and yes I see another comment in this thread that I'll reply to in a second about a 1 hour network outage we had... it's the biggest outage we've had in years. Our other datacentres have had much bigger downtimes during that period)
Particularly with the increase in mobile clients that change networks regularly, we don't see a future in old school IMAP as the preferred way to access email. Please check out the JMAP working group for what we see as the future :)
I disagree. You charge a very high price for a service because you know you have no competition, like Apple does. You have your right to do so. But that's the way it is.
As others have already noted (and I should stop reading this and go to bed, it's after midnight here and I have to work in the morning!) we have plenty of competition, and it's either plastered with ads or similarly priced, because that's what it costs to run a service while giving your staff a decent living and continuing to improve your service over time.
... one of the most common questions was "aren't you worried about giving away all your secrets?" Actually, we really are not. Running an email service is hard work, and providing the speed, reliability and stream of new features would not be easy to replicate. So we're happy to share our stories...
We contribute a lot to open source, and we're doing a lot in the standards space now to make sure email remains open. Topicbox is built on top of a draft of the JMAP protocol which is currently being worked on at the IETF, and will be updated to follow the standard. We have staff going to CalConnect to work on calendaring standards in a couple of weeks because we're investing in advancing the field as well. That also costs money, and we're self funded, so we can't afford to sell email accounts at a loss.
It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from. It's a simple business proposition, money for service. I'm proud to charge money for what we do.
> It also means we have no secret customer. Our paying customers are our actual customers, not the product we're using to pump up the valuation or collect data from.
As an actual, paying customer I just want to express just how much I appreciate that someone is actually doing this.
The internet has lots of creepy companies spying on your every move. Actually paying for a service and knowing that there's nobody looking over your shoulder feels really good. I wish there were more companies like that.
I've been a personal paying user of Fastmail for over 5 years now. It's been great. For my own company and for another business I started late last year I've also selected Fastmail as an email provider again. Just wanted to say thanks to you and the rest of the team. Keep doing what you're doing and I'll happily keep on shelling over some dollars your way.
As a new customer of Fastmail, that was the exact reason I went to you. I like that Fastmail cares about my privacy and doesn't track me, fully supports open standards, interoperates with other services seamlessly (so I can decide what features I want and do not want to use) and I can fully download and delete my data if I want to. It is well worth the premium, please keep up what you do!
Thanks to those who've replied to this - feeling the love!
This is the hard bit about trying to sell Topicbox to you lot - you already HAVE a good interface to email, and the value of the easy-to-use archive comes later when you add another person to a group months down the track.
Another happy personal user of FastMail here. I love the service, it is literally really fast for delivering and receiving email. I went with FastMail due to the privacy concerns I had with other providers. It also lets me use my own domain with full DKIM and SPF, has shared calendars and separate 'account' passwords for different apps. Happy to pay for reliable, somewhat secure email.
My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now. I was fortunate enough to get a Google Apps account back when it was a free service, and I have been providing all the Google services for me and all my family for free for several years.
Fastmail looks absolutely incredible and I've never heard the slightest bad thing about them, but it'd cost me $250/month to get the same level of service I get now for free. :/
> My personal problem is that I'm way too deeply engaged with Google now.
That's exactly the reason I migrated to Fastmail. Ever since Google shutdown Reader, I've been slowly replacing Google services with alternatives as much as I can.
Not only does FastMail have a lot of competition, they have a lot of cheap competition. Bear in mind, they not only have to beat companies like Slack here which offer their service free to a certain extent, but old mailing list classics like Google Groups as well.
Fastmail has plenty of competition. Some of it with markedly lower prices, but one of it with a comparable quality and smoothness of operation.
Where I live, $5 will buy you a sort of decent loaf of bread or about 3.5 liters of gasoline or cup of coffe out on the town if you are lucky. I happily shoot Fastmail that small amount every thirty days for a neat, stable, well thought out product which saves me all the joyless hassle of running things myself.
Spot on. There is some very odd psychology at work with people's attitude towards software licensing/service prices. It's clear that many people are actively angry when something is more expensive than some ideal arbitrarily low price (unrelated to the costs of providing the service) they have in mind.
I don't even use Fastmail any longer, great though it is, because I have had to cut my costs absolutely to the bone in recent years. But I'm truly glad such an excellent service exists for if/when I'm again ready to pay for it, and that the engineers involved can get paid for doing a good job.
I've had FastMail about a year, and have yet to get enough spam (200 messages) to trigger their personalized spam filter. Despite the address being signed up... everywhere. The non-personalized ranking system uses common spam ranking services out there, and scores emails about as well as you'd expect from the average corporate spam filter.
FastMail's data collection of your email for their own use is incredibly, incredibly limited, so a lot of things other providers use won't really work for FastMail.
Re: Zoho, when things go wrong expect days of issues and no real replies, but green status pages due to old school sharding behind the scenes (only small number of customers effected so well stay green, I.e. no mail for three days). Premium customer? Call their support number, yep a voicemail, a callback? not within 24hrs. Terrible company. Sloppy products. Dont ever recommend this to clients, even if the client is a cheapstake and 5 free accounts appeals just say 'not on my name'
Zoho Mail? Don't even get me started … We had so many laughable problems with that service. Like being unable to remove a user account because the whole management UI was just plain broken. We tried removing the account for I don't know how many months. When I let them know about the issue I got a response asking for a scan of the CEO's ID card. Finally they fixed it but then the login broke. When I tried logging in to the management UI, all I got was a redirect back to the login screen. Hell I could go on. Moved everything off to AWS WorkMail and learned my lesson.
Yep. So many WTFs. You could lock an account (and associated IMAP connector) just by paging in the web UI too fast, with users that like to page vs search to find a message this was quite a problem as they could no longer get messages via UI or their phone. When they explained this 3 days later (typical response time) I nearly fell off my chair, this was after six unanswered voicemails and a few emails (paying customer of 9 accounts I think ~ $90/m)
I wanted to try Zoho about a year ago, but couldn't even get through their sign-up process without errors that prevented completion. Never went back. First impressions and all.
It's pretty good, especially after I've trained it with enough spam & ham emails to turn on its personal ruleset - probably not as good as Google spam filter, but at least I have some visibility into why given message was misclassified.
Additionally, you can read the email's source transmission. That way you can read the SpamAssassin headers and see exactly why it was flagged ham or spam. It's been a pretty indispensable tool for email testing for my personal projects for how nifty it is.
I've noticed a few (2-3 per month) getting through with names of people in my address book, but not the email address, so it seems to be doing some type whitelisting there, other than that, its catching everything.
I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)
Staff to run things well and develop new features, plus redundancy. We have roughly a 10/1 ratio of disk usage to quota by the time you count RAID overhead, local and offsite replica plus backups, and that includes really high end SSDs for indexes and recent emails.
Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.
I've had a lot of people ask me why I pay for email service (I use Fastmail). There are many free options available. Email is important to my work, and the free options are not at all what I'm looking for.
If you want to play the premium price game, you better be able to back it up with a good customer experience, and Fastmail does. That's why you see so many positive comments in any discussion of email.
Fully agree. Fastmail is one of the very few "cloud" services I think is worth paying for (as an individual -- obviously businesses find value in e.g. AWS). I do the annual payment of $50 which effectively is two free months out of the year.
You're right - people who don't see that value won't be our customers, and I should have said "quite reasonable for the product that we provide" or similar instead.
We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer.
We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product.
And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution.
I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles:
"Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life."
We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.
You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email.
BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
The Mastodon instance I use is hosted at Scaleway. It's had multiple multi-day outages due to failures at Scaleway's end.
Cheap is great and all, but this experience has not been the kind that would lead me to recommend using Scaleway for any service you need to be reliable.
As a paying user, I find it's more than reasonable. Although, I do wish they'd seperate their calendar portion to another app - their email service is superb for the price. Else, I'd have to pay $5 / month minimum, to host my own -_-
https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/13/fastmails-values/
and we unashamedly charge enough money to keep building a good service and providing a good service.