Fastmail makes the baby Jesus smile
I hate to go on endlessly about Fastmail 
, but how sweet is this announcement today?!
All users email is now on replicated servers. This means that every email delivered or deleted and every email action performed is replicated within a second to a completely separate server with a completely separate copy of all users emails.
We now have at least three levels of redundancy, three copies of every email, and all those copies are on RAID redundant storage themselves.
- All users now have their email stored on a system with RAID disks and all servers and RAID arrays have dual power supplies. This means a single drive or power supply failure should cause no interruption to service at all, we just replace the drive/power supply while the system is live and online…
- All users now have their email replicated to an identical replica system (RAID drives, dual power supplies, etc). Each system is completely separate…. The replication is performed at the semantic email level, not at the filesystem level. So a filesystem corruption on the source server will not be replicated. This means if there is a disk or filesystem corruption on a single machine, we can just switch to the replica…
- All users have their email store backed up incrementally each night to a separate system and RAID array. The backups of email are kept for 1 week after the email is deleted to allow restoring in case of accident. In an emergency situation if both a master and replica server should fail catastrophically, we can still perform a restore from this backup…
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November 2nd, 2006 at 12:41 am
Unfortunately this announcement came after many fastmail users suffered an outage lasted three long days.One of their servers crashed badly and it took a weekend to restore it. I was among the unlucky users… and nothing like this had happened to me before with many providers. If you rely heavily on email for work this can kill your business.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:47 am
That’s a sad story. Were these the (”relatively few”?) users left on server3 over the weekend? (Not that the answer makes your story any better.)
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:00 am
Yes… I was lucky to be able to forward my mail to gmail but I was not able to check it on my mobile phone. I think to have lost at least a couple of messages in the first hours of the outage, but I am not sure of this.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:37 am
As another one of the “unlucky” server3 users back a few weeks ago, I’ve all but stopped using my Fastmail account. My DreamHost acct supports catch-all addressing, and with IMAP access (and the lovely IMAP idle plugin!), I’ve moved almost everyone over to my domain.
I was with Fastmail for six years before this happened. But I won’t go back.
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:06 pm
I’m relatively new to FM, but I got burned by the server3 downtime and am currently weighing my options. I’ll give folks one or two chances to screw up, y’know? Shit happens and all that.
The announcement is sweet, but if you were on server3, it’s pretty damn sour. Here it is Wednesday night and I’m still 1) missing emails sent to me between the last backup and the crunch [which are coming back, I know, but still] 2) unable to touch the server via the IMAP proxies [which was the main reason that I moved to FM] and 3) unable to use the Webmail interface to properly report spam and ham so I can train the filters. Very, very, very frustrating. I’m a patient guy, but my patience is wearing a bit thin.
That said, the amount of hardware they’re putting behind the current setup is great. Hopefully prices won’t go up as a result, although I guess I’d understand it.
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I guess I am one of the lucky ones. I have been a Fastmail user for some time: its my main email set-up, and I have had an enhanced account for a year or so. Like Tim, I think the ~ $40/year is well-spent.
I haven’t had any problems with FastMail; in fact, I have had more problems (though very few) with my GMail account (essentially my ‘junk’ account).
So, you might wonder why today I coughed up $140 for a .Mac account (as well as $299 for a 120 gb external drive, for backups). I think I mainly did it for the Backup software that comes with .Mac. because the minimal blogging I do will probably still be with Blogger and Opera. Sometimes I can’t figure myself out. (I am paranoid though about losing all my wife’s photos in iPhoto).
But, for me, FastMail was one of my better choices. (And getting an Mac of course :-) I am sorry that others have had less happy experiences (Really).
November 8th, 2006 at 8:49 am
I was on server3 and was not effected by the outage. It was a filesystem corruption issue that effected one of the four partitions so it would be fair to say that the outage effected one quarter of the users on that server which is one of five servers FM runs (I believe it’s five now but it might be four). So that’s basically one twentieth of their userbase which is actually quite a few people.
This outage didn’t effect me at all because I was apparently on a different partition than the one that died, but I was hit by an earlier server3 outage about a year ago. That outage was much more benign than this one and it really didn’t effect me except that I couldn’t check my mail for a day or so (I was still receiving mail though, none was lost). The big issue that people had with this latest outage was that FM was supposed to have their redundant servers up and running shortly after the last server3 outage, and then almost a year later, this latest outage happened and a lot of people were pretty disappointed about it.
Now that FM finally has it set up, I will probably renew my service with them the next time it comes around, but up until this point, I was still on the fence between them and TuffMail.
November 8th, 2006 at 10:35 am
Thanks for your post, MEP. That’s one of the most objective accounts I’ve yet read of the good and bad things have come out of what happened.
November 8th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Oh, I think that it’s still money well-spent, and having read up on their replication, I think I’ll stick with them. As they noted, if this particular hardware breakdown had happened this week rather than a couple weeks back, we’d see … a half-hour of downtime and no data loss? That’s the power of their new system.
You were just bound, Tim, to hit a bit of a sore spot with those of us who were having a rough go of things at the time. All my issues are now resolved, so I’m back to being a quite happy FM customer. :)
November 8th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
I think that I will not change my email provider, too. I like fastmail web interface and
the features it has. I am giving them another chance. I hope in the new replicated
server.
And as a compensation for the outage FM gave the affected users one month of free
service. They also sent an email containing all the lost messages recovered from the last backup
November 8th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
@Geof. That’s true. To my shame, I didn’t even know about the server3 melt-down, when I posted this slightly gushy post.
Because I was happy, I just imagined that everyone was happy. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere ;-)
November 8th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
That lesson is probably that the Baby Jesus sure smiles a lot, but even He cries, too.
[If you wanna be really twisted, cue up R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts". Heh.]