[brongondwana]

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:

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.

[sitepodmatt]

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..

[brongondwana]

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!

[sitepodmatt]

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.

[brongondwana]

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.

https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/

(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 :)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/jmap/documents/

So we prefer to consolidate in a few high-quality datacentres and build protocols which work well from anywhere in the world.

[nanoniano]

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.

[brongondwana]

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.

As I said here: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/01/fastmail-advent-2016/

... 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.

[josteink]

> 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.

[santaragolabs]

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.

[kop316]

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!

[brongondwana]

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.

[PenguinCoder]

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.

[random023987]

As a happy customer, I came for the custom sieve script many many years ago, and I've stayed for many other reasons.

Thank you.

[tjr]

As (yet another) paying customer, I greatly appreciate what you do and how you do it. Charge me more, if you need to!

[calcifer]

Really? $0.1 per day ($0.16 w/ custom domain) for high quality, privacy oriented email is a high price?

I would gladly pay quadruple that if I had to.

[fbnlsr]

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. :/

[calcifer]

> 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.

Gmail -> Fastmail

Calendar -> Fastmail

Reader -> Self-hosted Commafeed

Drive -> Self-hosted Nextcloud

etc.

[ocdtrekkie]

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.

[sleepyhead]

Yeah if only someone else would launch an email service!