Sometimes entering fastmail.fm doesn't load (intermittent issue for 5 years)
 

GREETINGS.

Sometimes entering fastmail.fm doesn't load, and I have to hit re-load a few times, then it loads fine.

This has been an intermittent issue for me for 5 years.

The bookmark is:

http://www.fastmail.fm/

Step 1: Click on bookmark.
Step 2: Expect site to load.

Sometimes what happens is on Step 2, the webpage will just sit there, and nothing gets loaded. The progress bar does not advance, and I have to re-load. But other times it loads fine. I do not understand what this happens only with the Fastmail site or why it has been going on for years.

What's going on?

Mac OS X 10.10.3
Safari 8.0.5

Connectivity to fastmail.com
 

My guess is that you have network connectivity issues to the NYI Datacenter in New York City, NY (location of the Fastmail mail servers).

• Fastmail changed their main domain to fastmail.com six months ago. See this Fastmail blog post: Fastmail has moved to fastmail.com
• If you try an insecure (non-https) browser connection to the old fastmail.fm domain, you will be redirected to a secure connection at the new domain (https://www.fastmail.com/?domain=fastmail.fm).
• This redirection takes a few transfers between your browser and the Fastmail server. So you may get a faster and more reliable connection if you go directly to the new website: https://www.fastmail.com
• If your email domain is at fastmail.fm, you will be required to enter your complete email address (including the full domain name) if you use the new login website directly as I described above. If you have the remember passwords for sites feature enabled in your browser, your login credentials (address and password) may be automatically filled in for you.

You can check your connectivity to the fastmail.com server using the ping and tracert tools. You should not get any ping packet loss if you have a good connection.

Bill

Can we troubleshoot this further? This is still a persistent issue that I experience with just this website and also weather.gov, but not on other sites. The issue with loading Fastmail.fm also happens on my iPod touch, and not just on my Mac. So, can we troubleshoot this more? I'm also at a university so there should not be such connection problems here if I can load the other websites quickly. I switched to Fastmail.com from Fastnail.fm last year but the problem never really went away.

Here is what I get:

ping -c 4 www.fastmail.fm
PING www.fastmail.fm (66.111.4.56): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
64 bytes from 66.111.4.56: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=36.795 ms
64 bytes from 66.111.4.56: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=36.993 ms

--- www.fastmail.fm ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 50.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 36.795/36.894/36.993/0.099 ms


Also, it's currently 12:34pm edt, and Fastmail.com is very slow to load anyway.

Meanwhile, according to my memory, I have never had a problem with the status.fastmail.fm servers:


ping -c 4 status.fastmail.fm
PING www.fastmailstatus.com (74.52.167.106): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.52.167.106: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=55.057 ms
64 bytes from 74.52.167.106: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=55.198 ms
64 bytes from 74.52.167.106: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=55.839 ms
64 bytes from 74.52.167.106: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=55.846 ms

--- www.fastmailstatus.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 55.057/55.485/55.846/0.361 ms

The packet loss is confirmation of a connectivity problem between your ISP and Fastmail. The only way to totally fix the problem is to change the network. Fastmail and this forum cannot do anything.

That said, it is worth changing your bookmark to https://fastmail.com. As Bill indicated, this will reduce the number of round trips and may make the problem less noticeable (though it will still exist).

Have you ever discussed the issue with your ISP? NYI is one of the biggest data centers in the US, and all providers should provide good connectivity to it. Unfortunately, discussing this with some ISPs can be like knocking your head against a brick wall.

A possible fix might be to use a VPN. This will change the network route between you and NYI (Fastmail).

Just as an added note, if I and others experienced this problem, we'd be all over these boards discussing it. I have not experienced any problem similar to what you've described at all accessing fastmail.fm

I agree, you need to talk to the network engineers who provide service on your network.

Who knows, maybe they are using some type of a proxy and that is causing the problems...

Well here is an update. This intermittent problem happens on two local providers in Maine and one in New Hampshire. For example, if I was just loading a webpage to Fastmail on Safari on MacOS 10.11 ten minutes ago, then sometimes, after those ten minutes, if I try to reload Fastmail, it will just sit there (the problem that started the thread). But it'll load fine on Safari on my iPod Touch running iOS 9.3 while Safari on MacOS 10.11 still sits there not loading. This will go on for what seems like forever. Finally Safari on MacOS loads when I refresh the browser.

So how do I get more details to file a bug report to Apple?

Although rare, I have seem symptoms like this be the result of a flaky network card. Have you seen any abnormal behavior with other websites (for instance, streaming videos)?

If possible, try with a different network card (e.g. wired if you have been using wireless).

These kinds of issues can be extremely frustrating. It is unlikely to be Apple's fault any more than Fastmail's.

Try resetting hosts file & flushing DNS cache
 

I agree with BritTim's comments. You might first try resetting your local hosts file and flush DNS caches on the computer and routers. I don't use a Mac but these might be helpful:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202516
http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-flush-dns-in-mac-os-x/
http://osxdaily.com/2014/04/12/resto...osts-file-mac/

Bill

As was pointed out earlier in the thread, be sure to use https://www.fastmail.com, since the fastmail.fm address will just redirect to fastmail.com and waste some time.

You also might be sure to clear all of your cookies related to fastmail.fm and fastmail.com. I doubt this is an issue but sometimes browsers get confused by old cookies.

Bill

Well what about today's outage? Fastmail has been down for about the previous hour. I saw no announcement of it posted on status.fastmail.fm I've already tried clearing all of my browser's data, turning off Wi-Fi, then restarting my computer. Both that and MacNN have been down.

PING fastmail.com (66.111.4.147): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

--- fastmail.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss


Trace route is taking minutes to get to step 14 and from there it's all * * *

Fastmail is currently up for me, andrej......

The independent Pingdom report (http://stats.pingdom.com/w17m1yxzjyin) shows 100% availability of all Fastmail mail services for the last several days. Further, this board would be full of complaints if the systems were down (or even if there was a general routing issue involving many users).

The problem is almost certainly an issue with your ISP and how they are trying to route traffic to NYI (New York Internet) the major data center used by Fastmail.

If you cannot get your ISP to take the problem seriously and eliminate it once and for all, either change your ISP, or use a major VPN that uses its own network to route traffic. (PureVPN is cheap and seems to work well).

No outage for me....

Trace route is taking minutes to get to step 14 and from there it's all * * *[/quote]

Make sure you have the https://fastmail.com. note the https your link does not have the secure s