Fastmail was pretty good while I was a customer, but this sort of thing is partially why I switched to Google Workspace. Google might be terrible for privacy but at least I can trust them to not get hacked or knocked offline. If they ever decide to randomly lock my account or anything I can always just point my domain back at Fastmail. Good luck to them and hopefully they'll be back online soon!
Fair enough. A big part I didn't mention was the desire to deprecate my old @gmail.com addresses while still having access to Google services, and as much as some of the redesigns have bothered me, I still prefer Gmail's Web UI over other providers.
At this point I've sort of just accepted that in this day and age, surveillance is inevitable and past a certain point, trying to maintain my privacy comes at a huge cost in terms of convenience that I'm not willing to pay. I certainly value my privacy but at the end of the day it's a balance for me. I'd rather put the effort into making sure I'm not so tied to a specific platform that getting cut off would be devastating, which is why I've been working on moving stuff over from old Gmail accounts to my Google Workspace account with my custom domain.
Which is why I use a custom domain with a paid Google Workspace subscription, if Google ever decides to lock my account, I can just change my DNS and go back to Fastmail.
Had this happened before while you were a customer? I believe it was just a year or two ago that Gmail suffered an extended outage and was even bouncing emails for a while.
They're a much larger company with massive infrastructure that dwarfs Fastmail's? The traffic Fastmail is accustomed to dealing with is likely nowhere near the amount of the traffic that Google deals with.
Yep, Google has the edge and frontend resources to absorb very large attacks, and DoSSec-SRE prowling around and adjusting the defenses around the clock. One of the reasons that cloud computing feels like feudalism is if you don't have the protection of an Amazon or a Google, you're pretty much screwed. Are your systems able to survive a billion packet-per-second botnet attack?
You can't imagine any cases where someone relies on timely email delivery and availability?
I am giving a presentation in a few mins and Bob was supposed to email me the updated price sheet?
I am running a facilities desk and my team gets assignments via email from the ticketing system?
I forgot the name of my hotel in Prague, but it's OK I'll show my taxi driver the email confirmation.
Like I said, you literally can't imagine a case where someone relies on their email to either be notified of something urgent, look up something urgent, or simply as part of their "what do I do next" workflow?
I think all the examples above have workarounds (ie, dependency on email is avoidable) but that's a different question.
I indeed can imagine being inconvenienced by email not working. I can’t imagine thinking an hour of downtime a year that might cause one of those inconveniences being something that is an unacceptable risk.
I don't know how to help you see it but I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...)
I ran you through a bunch of cases where you need information from your email urgently and there are painful consequences when you don't get it. Do you see how each one of these cases involves a painful loss of money/productivity/time? Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk?
Are you able to understand that the problem isn't "an hour of downtime a year" but the risk of that hour happening at a time that absolutely fucks you over?
It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?" It doesn't sound important except if that hour happens to be when you are getting your wife to the hospital to give birth, or when you're on your way to the airport for a flight you need to make, or if you're driving through the desert and breaking down for an hour is terrifying.
>I hope you don't do anything for a living that involves risk mitigation (I suspect you do not...)
Quite the opposite, I have worked a long time very closely with reliability and have done no small amount of time studying failure. Everything fails sometimes, there are always unknowns that aren't accounted for.
>It's like saying "who cares if there's an hour a year that my car doesn't work?"
This is often the case? Oh no, you have a flat tire, a dead battery, or whatever. It's not world ending, get to your destination another way or reschedule.
>Can you visualize how someone can blow a multi-million dollar sales presentation because a key piece of data doesn't reach them in time? Do you consider that acceptable risk?
If millions of dollars are on the line and you can't figure out how to work around a simple communications issue, you deserve to lose the deal. Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk.
> Not being able to handle failure or insisting on 100% uptime for dependencies is a sign that you have no idea how to handle risk.
Like I said 8 messages up this thread, I agree that people should have more resilient methods for handling these needs, the point is that this is often not existent.
People don't have text messages, phone calls, messaging apps, in person conversations, USB thumbdrives, somebody else's email at a different provider... you're not a brain in a vat connected to the universe with email, you can figure out how to communicate without it for a while if it goes down.
My son was able to book the last 2 seats on a Southwest flight so we only lost a day of a $500/night AirBnB. Luckily, my son uses gmail so we got the confirmation w/ a check-in link OK. We lost our car rental reservation because Alaska's idea of a replacement reservation arrived 32 hours later and Budget only holds for 24 hours. Even the SWA was 26 hours later, but somehow Priceline + Thrifty found a car.
So a shitshow could have been even worse if the 2nd outage had started earlier & my kid had taken my advice to de-google. My sister & parents also use Fastmail due to my advice, but aren't as dependent on timely email.
One thing that did save me is that I brought a notebook which has all my old email. Almost left it behind, but it's 2.8 lb & 1.61 cm thick. Smartphones still have their limits....
