Support Tickets - Response Time?
 

Just seen this tweet from someone saying they've been waiting 2 days to get a response to opening a support ticket!

https://twitter.com/jenslund/status/1465607759701893120

Is the Fastmail response really that bad?

I've had no recent experience myself, but can anyone on the forum comment on their experience?

Update: The tweet that I had linked to has since been deleted by the user. I contacted him on Twitter (via @EMDiscussions) to ask if his problem had been resolved, and he responded YES it had.

Yes, it's that bad.

If someone's question is trivial, then at least the first-level support person might be able to answer it properly. But my experience is that often the first-level person produces an answer that is wrong (usually because they did not, it seems, understand the question).

If you're lucky they'll instantly realise that someone more expert needs to answer, at which point the question gets queued to someone else, otherwise you have to restate the issue and ask for it to be escalated. Escalation often takes days, though I find that once the right person is answering, the to&fro, if there's a discussion about aspects of the problem, has a better turnaround.


I had a quick look at old support tickets, just to make sure I'm not misremembering.

The worst one (raised in 2019) had fast initial replies but then gaps of 15 days, 12 days, 3 days, 32 days and lastly nearly 10 months between updates from FM staff.

More recently I've seen first-level support answer generally between half a day and two days after I asked a question, once 3 days (over a weekend, but why should that matter?), but if they choose to escalate that there's usually a 5-day delay, sometimes a bit longer.

In one ticket I pointed out a factual error in the text on one of their help pages. First-level support replied in 12 hours, but escalated it, which took just over 5 days. The expert agreed with me and said they'd scheduled a task for someone to update the page. That took a shade over 5 MONTHS.

I have no recent experience to report, but the uncertainty around support is why I no longer recommend Fastmail to organisations for which email is mission critical. It is not just the possible lengthy wait for response to standard support requests. It is also the fact that, in a critical emergency, you cannot escalate your request for any amount of money. If there was a way where for US$5,000, you could immediately reach a senior support person by phone in an emergency, I might consider once again recommending Fastmail as I think their service overall is good. However, the support issue just makes it too dangerous.

Last week I opened a ticket and got a response within 24 hours. Maybe they are still recovering from DDos attacks they had to deal with all month

A response within 24 hours means a first-level response, which is to say it's at the level of weeding out simple problems - eg helping people who don't know where options are in the FM webmail application.

I would not expect anybody who's providing that level of response to be involved in solving DDOS issues! I suppose it's possible they might still have to pacify angry users though.

Anyway, the much-degraded response (compared with, say, 8 or 9 years ago) has been bad for several years, so can't be blamed on any aspect of the recent DDOS issues.

FWIW, looking back at my most recent ticket (bug in the iPhone FM app*) I reported it on 11/17, it was updated as "escalated" on the 18'th, and finally updated again on the 21'st stating bug was found and will be fixed on the next update of the app. Of course now it's the 30'th and the app has still not been updated but that may be because there was a workaround so there's really no real rush to update the app.

My general experience is that they are fairly quick (day or two) in acknowledging the ticket but after that not to expect a quick followup if the level 1 needs to escalate. Maybe it depends on which level 1 person you get. I always see the same 2 or 3 level 1 guys fielding my tickets. Or maybe that's all they have for these!

* Bug was you couldn't use Photos app to push a photo into the FM app as a draft attachment. Workaround was you could use the FM draft attach to pull a photo from the photos library.

I noticed that same bug but hadn’t reported it yet. It seems to be fixed in iOS (and iPadOS) version 3.3.2, which was pushed to my devices over the past 24-48 hours. I don’t remember seeing that bug until recently, so my guess is that this bug appeared when iOS/iPadOS v15 or v15.1 was pushed.

I worked as a field Application Engineer for Tektronix supporting electronic test instruments for 32 years before retiring two years ago. When I started in 1987, most instruments had no internal computer with operating system or even a microcontroller. We only had a couple of products with ran a version of the UNIX operating system. Now, of course, all significant products have at least a microcontroller and many use an internal Windows 10 PC. The reason I bring this up is that 30 years ago email was still being developed and voicemail wasn’t even in use. Sending a message from our Dallas office to the company headquarters in Beaverton Oregon was largely done using IOC (Inter-Office Communication) forms sent via the US Mail or air freight. So a customer would call into my office, leave a message for me (written down by my assistant using a paper “while you were out…” form), then when I returned I would call the customer (no voicemail then, so it might take several tries) and either discuss in detail the issue or (if they were within a one hour drive) I would make an appointment to see the problem in person. I would then write up an IOC with the issue and it would get mailed to our headquarters.

My point here is that support times are much better now than in the past for most organizations. But the people who can fully understand, verify, recommend fixes, and make the fixes are still limited for large operations. Critical issues (system down, emails delayed significantly, etc.) receive immediate attention, but those issues don’t require communication with an end user. I emphasize with those with support tickets which take days or weeks to resolve, but without a large and nightly trained support staff, improving response times to a few hours must be difficult. That’s why the Help online support document is important, and I agree that the Fastmail Help isn’t always as clear or complete as it should be. The best solution (which I believe that Fastmail is attempting to achieve in the long term) is for the user interface to be clear and allow users to discover solutions directly by themselves. But there will always be problems when things are broken.

Bill

I think it's a bug in the FM app itself and not iOS specific because I am still using an old iPhone 5s (don't ask but I do plan to update to a iPhone 13) which cannot be updated past iOS 12.

On the other hand when the app is updated and if the bug is still there in my iOS 12 version (assuming I am still using the 5s) then there possibly is an iOS dependency. In that case I might expect the update to be restricted to iOS 13 or greater and my copy of the FM app to no longer work at all. It doesn't even matter that I have auto updates turned off. Been bitten by that situation in another app.

I only posted to illustrate an example of my experiences. So long as such bugs are not "show stoppers" (and I don't recall the last time that happened to me with FM) I am happy to have any kind of email tech support at all with actual feedback and in no hurry to get to a final result.

Update: Note, if I had to comment on a problem with FM tech support at all it would be their stupid ticket system which I think was recently "updated". No text entry grow box and no formatting controls are I think my biggest gripes there.:mad:

My experience is the same as @JeremyNicoll. 1st level response is not quick, and usually not helpful. They either don't understand the question or are replying so quickly that the reply is not helpful. Escalation takes a long time.

Fortunately, I've never had a really serious issue that needed immediate attention. The issues have been, at worst, annoyances that I could live with, even if I didn't enjoy doing so.

For the sake of completeness I thought I would post this update to my earlier post and mention that the iPhone FM app was just updated and this bug appears to now be fixed. :)

Who is similar/close to Fastmail-capable, but with more-reliable tech support?
 

[Disclaimer: I've less time to make a properly-concise or better-structured post; pls pardon my wonderings below.]

Extremely helpful discussion, thanks all. I wish I'd done my homework and reviewed this prior to experiencing (and rant-writing) about these things.

In general: I care far more about quality of support and less about response time, particularly for the tougher issues. I'm willing to wait if I can get a good person (preferably) to assist, or at least good info. So far I'm getting none of either.

Further, I'm quite familiar with multiple levels of (tech) support, large-company org charts and bureaucracy, etc. My crew and I have worked with the largest organizations in the world. (I'll refrain from comments about efficiencies for larger orgs.)

What people have to remember Australia is in a different time zone so there can be 10 hour difference, if the support is ex US same problem depending where you live.
Also there are different internal stages of support.

[Pls see notes I added in my previous post edit re: response-time vs quality, and larger-company dynamics.]

I removed the following question, originally posted to my above note, and posting it here:

Question: Which email-service providers might offer similar-or-close to Fastmail capabilities, but with more-reliable tech support?

I'm seeking a high-level, _subjective_ and not necessarily "hyper precise" comparison. But if anyone can provide specific differences (between Fastmail and another email-service provider), I also welcome those comments.

Also: I'm not (yet) seeking to choose "just one" provider, similarly to @pjroutledge's comment. I'd probably prefer a primary one to serve most of my email-served domains. But for some domains/projects I might route services and/or work to sync-over-time email trees between providers (not sure if the latter is any way possible with the likes of https://imapsync.lamiral.info/, built-in-email-services syncing capabilities, etc).

Potential answers (to my above question)?

I found this recent "providers comparison" discussion:
https://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=78818

The following searches have not yet provided me much else that seems useful, but I could have easily overlooked something (I did not perform anywhere near a comprehensive search):
https://www.emaildiscussions.com/sea...archid=8365677
https://www.google.com/search?q=emai...pare+providers

Additionally: I'm guessing this "providers comparison" might be wandering into FAQ-like and/or controversial-topic territory that regular EMD contributors tend to avoid. Maybe. And/or maybe there's a/more "comparison" analysis discussion_thread/docs/etc to point to?

I think FM should have more trained staff answering Twitter questions. Whenever someone tweets and ask a simple, FM Twitter tells them send an email to support to open a ticket. Most of questions can easily been answered instead of opening a ticket. For example, someone asked if he will lose his data from other email provider when he imports his data to FM. Twitter told him to file a support ticket. A trained rep would say no you won't lose your data from old email

Imo, a great idea, and a mature support model (Twitter-oriented support interfacing). Easily offers re-usable discussion without having to build an interface (like a discussion forum) to do it.