I can't imagine being locked out of my fastmail account for anything other than abuse of my fastmail account. Or not paying my bill.
(I'm on third line ticket duty right now, so if you have something significantly more complex than RTFM, or an actual bug, you'll probably be talking to me this week)
The most common cause of getting locked out other than you abusing your fastmail account is having your credentials stolen and used for spam/fraud, which is why we recommend 2 factor authentication:
https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/securityupgrade.html
But yeah, even then we don't lock you out forever - just need you to reconfirm your identity and re-secure your account.
My gmail account (josephg@) gets a tremendous amount of email for other people. Earlier this year I was getting a lot of marketing trash from a particularly excited group of car dealerships in Illinois. Around the same time youtube suspiciously started advertising new cars to me. Its all way too creepy, and reading articles like this about people's gmail accounts getting locked out I'm very happy to reinforce my digital independence from google.
Requiring three accounts now for instance would cost $150 a year minimum for the size I would have needed and unfortunately because I needed to rearrange my old grandfathered plan to re-organise accounts I'd have lost my previous plan.
Basically, Fastmail is good (very good), and you can still do admin type stuff by creating your master account first and creating your 'users' under it, but do look around if you are price conscious.
NOTE - I know you can't please everyone and that doesn't detract from the fact Fastmail was extremely stable, fast and had excellent customer support so don't take this as a 'Fastmail is bad' type post, because it isn't. Just look around and make sure you're getting the rid price/value for your needs.
Damn. I was going to move to them at the end of this year when my VM (where I currently run my mail) is up for renewal. But if I now need to buy several Standard plans instead, and get several gigabytes of storage I don't need, then that's less appealing.
Runbox looks good. Any other suggested alternatives?
Zoho is actually very good too but they (like Gmail) enforce IMAP connection limits, so it you have a lot of folders etc or use mobile clients like K9 that open a connection per folder then you can get errors very regularly.
The above is true for Zoho on the free plans anyway, but it may be different for the paid ones. But the free ones have pretty much all you could need if you don't run into the high number of IMAP connections issues.
If you have enough accounts to make it worthwhile I think Rackspace is supposed to be very good, but last I looked you needed a minimum of 5 accounts (I only had 4) so it didn't work out:
They announced this on 18 August: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/08/18/easier-user-management-...
Same with my josephb@. It's amazing how many companies start sending personal identifiable information to a random email address without validating it.
Doctors, real estate, universities, banks and the list goes on.
What keeps me from enabling 2FA again, is that there's always some kind of "I lost my 2FA device" function which essentially allows it to be bypassed. So whoever's determined enough could find answers to secret questions or whatever to gain unauthorized access. If it were possible to disable this attack vector I'd get another Yubikey & try again- if...
...The other thing that prevents me from going this route, which is: The fact that it's impossible to implement an additional Yubikey functioning as a "clone" of the one used to secure the account. I can't say I've never lost my (physical) keys. But when I do I just grab my backup copies, make new backup copies, & all is well. No can do with a Yubikey.
-My 2c
Sorry for butting in uninformed.
Wish you had a dark theme, that'd be my only feedback for now (Stylish also works). Appears to be very fast, but of course, my account is 100% empty.
Also, changes propagate faster even than gmail. If you have your inbox open on 2 computers and move an email out of your inbox on one of them, you'll see it replicated in near real time on the second computer. I don't know how they do it, but it works really well.
https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/02/dec-3-push-it-real-good...
and how we do the initial load as well:
https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/dec-15-putting-the-fast...
Was very easy in the end, but must admit I had forgotten just about everything I once learned about DNS. As such it was nice to get a little refresher.
EDIT: I would probably have gone for Google Apps / G Suite if not for this article. So, yeah, hope it served Google well to freeze those accounts with no warning.
CDN for unique items like mail probably doesn't offer tons of gain for the additional complexity.
And yeah, our core dev team is in .AU, so we know all about the latency. It's really not a big deal once you sync up the first time - all the static artifacts are cached and the dynamic data is loaded in the background, often before you need it.
"Flexible tamper-proof data retention policies with unlimited archiving space" - from the pricing page.
I am considering to switch to Fastmail, seems nice!
Unlimited is a bit buzzwordy, because we do have sending and receiving rate limits, so you can't grow the archive user faster than that.
Also if you go over about 850Gb of data right now you will make me very sad because I don't have facilities for splitting users yet, and we segment users across 1Tb partitions. I'm hoping nobody hits that point before I've got sharding inside users working - but worst case I spin up new hardware with larger individual partitions and put the user there :)
> Our main servers are located at New York Internet (NYI) in New York City, USA.
Nvm... :(
PS. I hope no-one reads your post now and takes it as "challenge accepted". :-)
So I guess it's better to leave the choice to the user, with an appropriate warning text.
—Another happy Fastmail customer
A Yubikey costs less than a year's FastMail service.
So no, we're not leaving this choice to the customer sorry, SMS sucks for too many reasons to consider adding back.
Keep up!!!
I would also be afraid one day if Google sees people fleeing to them, they'd come in and buy them. I'd almost whish there was a public trust or non-profit who would run an email server. Post office is a government service (for better or for worse), email is a bit like what regular mail was 100 years ago.
I've had zero deliverability issues.
edit: to be clear, the spam detection works well, and if you're going to make an error, it's far less annoying to bias (as they do) towards a few spam showing up in your inbox rather than actual messages getting lost in spam. Also, they show the spam score, and you can hand adjust your spam threshold if you want.
That's because it's not spam. I'm pretty sure there's a blog post coming soon about the difference between spam and "email I don't want to receive". If you just don't want to hear from a particular email address, the way to stop it is to put an explicit discard rule for that address in your Rules screen.
Likely changes for next year include making a much easier UI option for "don't show me email from this address again", because that's a fairly common request for situations like this where you have a vexatious sender. I suspect it will be implemented as an addressbook group - the anti-whitelist!
The student loan confirmation is sent to spam every month. I mark it as not spam.
In their defense, the message is full of all caps words that look like a sentence formatted from a sql query with little attention paid to formatting plus it has all sorts of spam words (bank, payment confirmation, loan, etc).
Issues: they've fixed many of them -- in particular, charging for 2fa at $0.1/sms and the settings area in the web client used to feel like a bad programmer's first js project ever -- but mostly it comes down to, across almost all experiences, they're slightly to mildly inferior to gmail. Google's apps are just best of breed. Fastmail is the best non-google I've found, and I looked pretty hard a couple years ago.
Things I miss from gmail are things like: fastmail is a hybrid conversation based email with folders rather than tags. I miss tags; some folder weirdness occasionally peeks through. Fit and finish like after a message is selected, choosing add rule from message doesn't offer to filter other messages in your inbox that match the new rule. Etc.
Paying $40-ish/year to have email that isn't used for ads and that is run by a company with actual support seems like a good deal to me. Particularly if you don't have a friend inside google or the ability to hit the front page of HN to get customer service.
You can see the improvements in fastmail even over the 3 years. So that's really promising.
Never been happier. Their Webmail UI is less cluttered and more intuitive than Gmail (at least to me - but I'm not a huge webmail user anyways).
Well worth the money.
So yeah, if I have my phone, I have a 2FA option already without SMS. I normally use the Yubikey because it's super easy.
"Basically, the current regulations require companies with utility poles in the public rights of way to provide access to certified telecommunications providers and to TV/cable companies," Paul Lewis, assistant manager of telecommunications and regulatory affairs in Austin, told Ars. "Google is not a certified telecommunications provider, and it's a video service provider as opposed to a television/cable company."
If Google were to apply to the Public Utility Commission of Texas to become a qualified telecom, "It would make them subject to all of the state and federal telecommunications regulations," Lewis said.
[0]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-c...
I think it's indicative of more than just Google being unwilling to be held to the legal responsibilities; it appears that even their Fiber arm doesn't want them as well.
You can essentially get locked out of your Steam account.
That's why I also feel uneasy towards all these number-based messengers. They're targeted at users who rarely leave their countries.
(Doesn't help, though, if you lose the phone number and your mail account at the same time.)
If Google has the only copy of some of this content, I wonder if a copyright claim might have any leverage. It's one thing to give Google a license; it seems like quite another for Google to deny you access to your own copyrighted material.
In the event that becomes reality, the time would have to be taken to define what minimum level of services the web site would have to offer. Simply saying Google must keep X service available would be archaic. Would other email providers be exempt from having to maintain these rights? If your job gave you an email address, would they have to maintain it after you leave the company? These are probably contrived questions, but ones that would certainly have to be answered first.
Also there could be a distinction in the law for mass communication, e.g. #users > 1M.
And it's actually harder to switch to a secondary. With my ISP, if they cut me off I can fall back on my cell provider within minutes. I have no such failover for my Google services.
Or use backups. Don't go crying to the government when you can handle it yourself.
If Google wants to have a monopoly on all of that stuff, they need to be subject to regulation that compartmentalizes their services and what they can and can't do arbitrarily.
Missed texts and phone calls? How did you even get into the position where Google controls your telephony? Missed emails? Why are you using gmail.com? Third-party authentication? Did they not have the option to use e-mail or a username?
You can't fix every problem by band-aiding regulation on top of it. Sometimes you need to step back and wonder how you got here, and solve that instead.
Of course they do. Every strategic decision the company has made over the last two decades is to try to secure a monopoly on your data.
You make it sound like it's easy to run your own full stack of all web-connected applications. It's not. The cost is INSANELY high. So your real choice is whether to use one company, or dozens of individual companies for every individual service. The latter protects you against the risk of something like this happening. But it comes at a day-to-day expense which will far outweigh the prevented risk for 99.9% of people.
I wonder if any G Suite customers had their accounts closed.
Absolutely not! That way you are slowly making people to lose any bits of the common sense they might still have. Perhaps losing data once or twice will make people look for alternatives. Throwing in another regulation will just increase barrier of entry for companies offering emails and who knows what else some dumb politicians could come up with, maybe this will open the gate to even not being able to self host an email server.
> f I am unable to pay my entire bill, what can I do to maintain local dial tone?
> The Arizona Administrative Code specifically states that a telephone company may not disconnect a customer for failure to pay an unregulated portion of their bill. To maintain local service, you must pay for the regulated (landline) charges on your telephone bill while you work to resolve problems with the other portion of your bill. If you fail to pay the unregulated charges on your bill, those services may be subject to disconnection and a deposit to reestablish. (R14-2-509)
> How much notice does a telephone company have to give before disconnecting service?
> A telephone company is required to give 5 days advance written notice before disconnecting service. (R14-5-509 Section E)
In this case, Google killed people's email without any prior warning, and in retaliation for an unrelated business transaction (selling smartphones). Having your email disrupted like that is at least as bad as getting your phone cut off.