Server problems... - Page 4

FromLine · 4 Sep 2002, 03:46 PM

We have a problem here.

During the past few hours, I have sent messages to my fastmail account to see if messages were getting to me.

I have received no emails in my inbox during the past few hours, including the test messages I have sent.

If I have not received the test messages I have sent then I'm sure other messages that may have been sent are in this problem also.

Rob, please let us know what the situation is with emails sent to our fastmail accounts during the past few hours.

I have sent myself test messages from yahoo to fastmail. The messages are not in my fastmail inbox and no error messages in my yahoo inbox.

Where are the lost messages?

bat · 4 Sep 2002, 03:49 PM

drobitaille has a point and I'm sorry, fb19, but you don't, not really. Come on - blaming fastmail because of how the internet works? If you don't understand the basics of email, it's better to keep quiet and research it than to just assume your instincts are correct and everyone but you is incompetent! That's the sort of kneejerk arrogance that gives us "civilised" Westerners a bad name in the rest of the world.

Fastmail is cheap, fastmail is reliable, and unfortunately fastmail is currently down. It's inconvenient for me too, tho I'm not silly enough to bet my money on something like the internet! Your right to complain is proportional to the amount of money you pay, and as drobitaille said, if the electricity company can charge like a wounded bull and then switch your power off for two hours without apology, then even the top-paying fastmail customer is going to have to wait a hell of a lot longer than this before he/she can being justified in complaining.

But the bottom line: if your customers are expecting instant replies, include a phone number on your web page. Email is not 100% reliable, nowhere near. That's not what it's for. The only mail service that comes close to 100% reliability is fastmail. Even if you had crashes like this every month, it would still be the best. I know I'm paying my ISP a whole lot more for worse service, and they're the biggest in Australia.

You'd better pray that "normal service" is never resumed round here, cos normal service would be a whole load worse than this!

eggman · 4 Sep 2002, 03:49 PM

Yes, its back.

The downtime was an inconvernience but now fastmail is faster than ever!!! (Fewer users I guess)

FB19 - Your email may be queued at the europe server and this may take some time to clear. Yahoo may need to retry which may take a few hours....

Thanks and well done for fixing it Rob.

robbie · 4 Sep 2002, 03:50 PM

During the downtime, I bought a couple of things on the net. I just logged into my inbox and recieved confirmations of all those purchases. I think Yahoo mail is a bad way to check if you recieved messages or not. When I first opened my fastmail account, i tested it with Yahoo and my work email. The work emails went straight to my fastmail inbox whereas Yahoo messages showed up hours later.

SanjaySheth · 4 Sep 2002, 03:51 PM

fb19, the messages are most likely not lost just delayed a bit.

Just picture the poor server .. it's probably chugging through a queue of messages that were held in the backup incoming server while it was down.

Most likely, the processing is done first-in, first-out so older messages will show up first in your account followed by the later ones.

rakhesh · 4 Sep 2002, 03:51 PM

Adam,

The messages are not lost. Like I wrote in an earlier post, http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...091#post58091, the messages get queued with the backup server. Give it 1-2 hours, and all your mails will be present in ur INBOX.

The backup server probably has a huge queue of messages to send out...

Thanks,
Rakhesh

nayyawi · 4 Sep 2002, 03:52 PM

Although the fastmail server is back up, I cannot read any emails that were sent to me during that time. Initially there were errors when checking my mail using OE. Now the web and OE simply indicate that I have no new messages, although I should. Furthermore, fastmail is not receiving the messages I send to myself using other email accounts.
Is anybody else having this problem?

alaken · 4 Sep 2002, 03:54 PM

Fastmail web interface is back up!

sharu · 4 Sep 2002, 03:54 PM

while it's understandable for even the best systems to go down sometimes, i am rather concerned with the lack of any type of estimate of down time.

i don't mind horribly if fastmail has to go down for 48 hours for required servicing, as long as i get some kind of prediction on outage time early on, so i can take the necessary alternative steps regarding time-sensitive materials.

SanjaySheth · 4 Sep 2002, 03:55 PM

BTW, is everyone's Fastcheck working now?

My FastCheck fails with the following message:

Code:

Could not parse returned message XML: 
<?xml version="1.0"?><Mailboxes>

This is using the recently released 0.0.1.1 version

bbrener · 4 Sep 2002, 03:56 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by bat
drobitaille has a point and I'm sorry, fb19, but you don't, not really. Come on - blaming fastmail because of how the internet works? If you don't understand the basics of email, it's better to keep quiet and research it than to just assume your instincts are correct and everyone but you is incompetent! That's the sort of kneejerk arrogance that gives us "civilised" Westerners a bad name in the rest of the world.

I think people are missing the point. I will wait patiently for the explanation but this has NOTHING to do with the Internet. This has to do with an architecture and design that included a SPOF (single point of failure). Maybe Jeremy and Rob were not aware of this and now they are, but the fact is this outage seems from anecdotal evidence to be due to poor design. I do this stuff for a living and talking about how reliable it is most of the time may be true, but irrelevent. This was a controllable event vs the uncontrollable "Internet"

Brian

rakhesh · 4 Sep 2002, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by sharu
while it's understandable for even the best systems to go down sometimes, i am rather concerned with the lack of any type of estimate of down time.

i don't mind horribly if fastmail has to go down for 48 hours for required servicing, as long as i get some kind of prediction on outage time early on, so i can take the necessary alternative steps regarding time-sensitive materials.

Downtime estimations were given, IIRC. Check the posts from Rob - they had them.

mail2me · 4 Sep 2002, 04:00 PM

Hey, give these guys a break. I know that the FM crew are very dependable and efficient. This is the first time this has happened and it can't be compared to the Runbox downtimes. It was a totally different situation there where the downtimes were nearly reoccurring everyday, sometimes several times a day and even as much as 24 hours on one occasion. This kept occuring for about a month following a month being blacklisted for being a haven for spammers. The good part was that all the incoming messages were queued. There were other instances when incoming messages were reported as bouncing back due to server overload, but not during the downtimes since the server cannot be overloaded without access to it.

A reasonable level of downtime is acceptable as long as it is not reoccuring continously on a daily basis.

rakhesh · 4 Sep 2002, 04:02 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by fb19
Perhaps I should link you to some postings of Jeremy Howard, harshly documenting and critisizing Zoneedit, Mydomain, and other services for outages so slight, hardly anyone even noticed.

And what about the extremely harsh response to Liz when runbox was down for only 30 minutes.

IIRC, atleast in case of Zoneedit and Mydomain, Jeremy was criticzing on their architecture and the fact that they didnt have redundancy. That point has been brought up in this discussion also, and nobody has any issues with that. I am sure Jeremy and Rob will check into the matter once things have settled.

steve.nz · 4 Sep 2002, 04:02 PM

It's back up, I've got my mail and as predicted I'm about to forget about it.

4 Sep 2002, 03:50 PM	#49
robbie Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Boston, MA Posts: 28	Recieved messages sent during downtime During the downtime, I bought a couple of things on the net. I just logged into my inbox and recieved confirmations of all those purchases. I think Yahoo mail is a bad way to check if you recieved messages or not. When I first opened my fastmail account, i tested it with Yahoo and my work email. The work emails went straight to my fastmail inbox whereas Yahoo messages showed up hours later.

4 Sep 2002, 03:52 PM	#52
nayyawi Junior Member Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: California Bay Area/MA Posts: 22	although it's back up . . . Although the fastmail server is back up, I cannot read any emails that were sent to me during that time. Initially there were errors when checking my mail using OE. Now the web and OE simply indicate that I have no new messages, although I should. Furthermore, fastmail is not receiving the messages I send to myself using other email accounts. Is anybody else having this problem?

4 Sep 2002, 03:54 PM	#53
alaken Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Washington, DC Posts: 7	Yay! Fastmail web interface is back up!

4 Sep 2002, 03:55 PM	#55
SanjaySheth Master of the @ Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Chicago Posts: 1,079	BTW, is everyone's Fastcheck working now? My FastCheck fails with the following message: Code: Could not parse returned message XML: <?xml version="1.0"?><Mailboxes> This is using the recently released 0.0.1.1 version

4 Sep 2002, 03:46 PM	#46
FromLine The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 2,619	We have a problem here. During the past few hours, I have sent messages to my fastmail account to see if messages were getting to me. I have received no emails in my inbox during the past few hours, including the test messages I have sent. If I have not received the test messages I have sent then I'm sure other messages that may have been sent are in this problem also. Rob, please let us know what the situation is with emails sent to our fastmail accounts during the past few hours. I have sent myself test messages from yahoo to fastmail. The messages are not in my fastmail inbox and no error messages in my yahoo inbox. Where are the lost messages?

4 Sep 2002, 03:49 PM	#47
bat Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Canberra, Australia Posts: 27	drobitaille has a point and I'm sorry, fb19, but you don't, not really. Come on - blaming fastmail because of how the internet works? If you don't understand the basics of email, it's better to keep quiet and research it than to just assume your instincts are correct and everyone but you is incompetent! That's the sort of kneejerk arrogance that gives us "civilised" Westerners a bad name in the rest of the world. Fastmail is cheap, fastmail is reliable, and unfortunately fastmail is currently down. It's inconvenient for me too, tho I'm not silly enough to bet my money on something like the internet! Your right to complain is proportional to the amount of money you pay, and as drobitaille said, if the electricity company can charge like a wounded bull and then switch your power off for two hours without apology, then even the top-paying fastmail customer is going to have to wait a hell of a lot longer than this before he/she can being justified in complaining. But the bottom line: if your customers are expecting instant replies, include a phone number on your web page. Email is not 100% reliable, nowhere near. That's not what it's for. The only mail service that comes close to 100% reliability is fastmail. Even if you had crashes like this every month, it would still be the best. I know I'm paying my ISP a whole lot more for worse service, and they're the biggest in Australia. You'd better pray that "normal service" is never resumed round here, cos normal service would be a whole load worse than this!

4 Sep 2002, 03:49 PM	#48
eggman Essential Contributor Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: AU Posts: 471	Yes, its back. The downtime was an inconvernience but now fastmail is faster than ever!!! (Fewer users I guess) FB19 - Your email may be queued at the europe server and this may take some time to clear. Yahoo may need to retry which may take a few hours.... Thanks and well done for fixing it Rob.

4 Sep 2002, 03:51 PM	#50
SanjaySheth Master of the @ Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Chicago Posts: 1,079	fb19, the messages are most likely not lost just delayed a bit. Just picture the poor server .. it's probably chugging through a queue of messages that were held in the backup incoming server while it was down. Most likely, the processing is done first-in, first-out so older messages will show up first in your account followed by the later ones.

4 Sep 2002, 03:51 PM	#51
rakhesh Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Muscat, Oman Posts: 551	Adam, The messages are not lost. Like I wrote in an earlier post, http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...091#post58091, the messages get queued with the backup server. Give it 1-2 hours, and all your mails will be present in ur INBOX. The backup server probably has a huge queue of messages to send out... Thanks, Rakhesh

4 Sep 2002, 03:54 PM	#54
sharu Junior Member Join Date: May 2002 Location: here. not there. Posts: 13	while it's understandable for even the best systems to go down sometimes, i am rather concerned with the lack of any type of estimate of down time. i don't mind horribly if fastmail has to go down for 48 hours for required servicing, as long as i get some kind of prediction on outage time early on, so i can take the necessary alternative steps regarding time-sensitive materials.

4 Sep 2002, 04:00 PM	#58
mail2me Master of the @ Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: California, USA Posts: 1,597	Hey, give these guys a break. I know that the FM crew are very dependable and efficient. This is the first time this has happened and it can't be compared to the Runbox downtimes. It was a totally different situation there where the downtimes were nearly reoccurring everyday, sometimes several times a day and even as much as 24 hours on one occasion. This kept occuring for about a month following a month being blacklisted for being a haven for spammers. The good part was that all the incoming messages were queued. There were other instances when incoming messages were reported as bouncing back due to server overload, but not during the downtimes since the server cannot be overloaded without access to it. A reasonable level of downtime is acceptable as long as it is not reoccuring continously on a daily basis.

4 Sep 2002, 04:02 PM	#60
steve.nz Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Wellington New Zealand Posts: 24	It's back up, I've got my mail and as predicted I'm about to forget about it.