Really - what's the big problem now??

astrodog73 · 2 Nov 2012, 03:39 PM

I'll be the first to agree that Tuesday's 'maintenance' was badly done. However, since then, I've not noticed much difference in my (excellent) fastmail experience, aside from a font change in my preferred stylesheet....

I just changed the URL of a bookmark, and have reselected the stylesheet I like, granted it's a little different... but not much.... not worth threatening legal action, that's for sure.....

I really don't love the new homepage and think the new interface should still be in beta, but little has actually changed for me....

Am I missing something??

BritTim · 2 Nov 2012, 03:56 PM

No, for most users I think your post is accurate, with one caveat. The key issue is one of trust. For the worst affected users, it goes like this:

Inability to log in at all in some cases (some posting on these forums were locked out for three days)
Severely impacted productivity for several hours (or longer if they did not have someone to call or time to browse these forums) of greatly reduced productivity as they did not know how to access the classic interface
A few days after the oft repeated promise that the existing interface would remain fully supported alongside the new one, the current interface (once located) was changed in ways that had real impact on some. This is not just a matter of color preferences.
Custom UI rules that have avolved over several years now fail to have their desired effect in some cases.
The email experience remains degraded in non trivial ways for some.
It is really difficult to have faith in the management of an email service that could perpetrate this. The vague promises we are hearing are no different from the vague promises we were hearing before. If moving mail providers were easy, I would be recommending to my most demanding customers that we do so now. As it is, I want to let things settle and see if there is evidence that lessons have been learned and the needs of business and other power users will be better considered going forward.

kijinbear · 2 Nov 2012, 04:18 PM

It's also an issue of communication.

A lot of the angry shouting could have been avoided if FM clearly communicated the upcoming change. They should have sent an email to everybody saying that the Beta will become the new default in 30 days, followed by detailed instructions for accessing the Classic interface. It would have been even better if Classic went live 7 days before Beta was moved to the default location (i.e. Classic accessible at both www.fastmail.fm and classic.fastmail.fm for a week), so that anyone who wanted to change their bookmarks could do so before the big day. Is it too much to expect that kind of careful planning from a respectable company such as Opera?

People will always be upset if somebody moves their cheese. But you can make them a lot less upset if you explain to them in advance that their cheese needs to be moved for such-and-such reasons and that they will find their old familiar cheese at such-and-such coordinates.

At least half of the name-calling could also have been entirely avoided if the classic interface retained its old theme (as well as any custom theme that people may have painstakingly set up). Perhaps FM didn't want to repeat the difficulties they experienced with the "old" interface, running an entirely different set of programs on virtual servers at a significant cost. But if that was the worry, they could have announced some sort of deadline, e.g. "Classic will be turned off in April 2014 (18 months from now), and we promise to implement all of its current functionality in the new interface by December 2013." There is no excuse not to do so, since Debian 6.0 (FM's current software stack, according to the link above) will be fully supported by the vendor until late 2013 or early 2014. Again, it was lack of communication, not any technical limitation, that caused the customer uproar we've seen this last few days.

Does anyone else feel that FM has become a lot less communicative over the last few years, and especially since the Opera acquisition? I've used FM on and off since a few years before I joined this forum, and FM used to be friendly and very open to suggestions. Now they feel like a large multinational corporation, which in fact they are.

Berenburger · 2 Nov 2012, 04:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kijinbear

Does anyone else feel that FM has become a lot less communicative over the last few years, and especially since the Opera acquisition? I've used FM on and off since a few years before I joined this forum, and FM used to be friendly and very open to suggestions. Now they feel like a large multinational corporation, which in fact they are.

Indeed, you expect with more employees in the team someone will take the reponsibility for the PR. Not with FM.

mephistodan · 2 Nov 2012, 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BritTim

No, for most users I think your post is accurate, with one caveat. The key issue is one of trust. For the worst affected users, it goes like this:

Inability to log in at all in some cases (some posting on these forums were locked out for three days)
Severely impacted productivity for several hours (or longer if they did not have someone to call or time to browse these forums) of greatly reduced productivity as they did not know how to access the classic interface
A few days after the oft repeated promise that the existing interface would remain fully supported alongside the new one, the current interface (once located) was changed in ways that had real impact on some. This is not just a matter of color preferences.
Custom UI rules that have avolved over several years now fail to have their desired effect in some cases.
The email experience remains degraded in non trivial ways for some.
It is really difficult to have faith in the management of an email service that could perpetrate this. The vague promises we are hearing are no different from the vague promises we were hearing before. If moving mail providers were easy, I would be recommending to my most demanding customers that we do so now. As it is, I want to let things settle and see if there is evidence that lessons have been learned and the needs of business and other power users will be better considered going forward.

Excellent post. It's now a matter of trust. Opera lacked the decency to even issue a statement or a blog post to explain what happened, apologized for how it happened, to clear the mess with the privacy breach and assure its paying customers what they were sharing..etc etc

Everyone in their right mind should leave. I don't see why opera will not (hypothetically) completely kill the classic interface next year with no warning and start sharing email addresses with facebook. They can do anything they see fit. They have no understanding of communication with their paying customers or respect of their privacy.

JohnMike · 2 Nov 2012, 06:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by astrodog73

Am I missing something??

This is the question everyone is asking - quite a few people would say yes I am missing quite a lot.

Of course if you weren't into the fastmail way of doing things and wanted a dumbed down interface you probably won't notice much change.

robert@fm · 2 Nov 2012, 07:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BritTim

Inability to log in at all in some cases (some posting on these forums were locked out for three days)

I still am; I have two accounts, and a computer which doesn't have the resources to run more than one browser at a time (looking on the Processes tab of Task Manager, Firefox takes up most of the available memory), hence I need to log in using the bookmark-containing-encrypted-password method; but that facility was withdrawn on Tuesday morning without warning, and without any explanation which is acceptable to me (just the arrogant one that they know better than me what security risks I should find acceptable). As of a few moments ago, this key functionality has still not been restored.

What will they remove next -- IMAP access?

brong · 2 Nov 2012, 09:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by robert@fm

I still am; I have two accounts, and a computer which doesn't have the resources to run more than one browser at a time (looking on the Processes tab of Task Manager, Firefox takes up most of the available memory), hence I need to log in using the bookmark-containing-encrypted-password method; but that facility was withdrawn on Tuesday morning without warning, and without any explanation which is acceptable to me (just the arrogant one that they know better than me what security risks I should find acceptable). As of a few moments ago, this key functionality has still not been restored.

What will they remove next -- IMAP access?

I think you still have a misunderstanding here. There's nothing stopping you using more than one account in the same browser, that works fine.

The only thing you CAN'T do is use both the classic UI and the new UI at the same time, in the same browser - because you only get one session per (account, cookie jar) tuple.

I use both my @fastmail.fm and personal @brong.net address in separate tabs of the same browser frequently, and I can assure you it works fine - even if one of them is using classic and the other isn't.

thymara · 2 Nov 2012, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brong

I
The only thing you CAN'T do is use both the classic UI and the new UI at the same time, in the same browser - because you only get one session per (account, cookie jar) tuple.

In my browser, Safari on Mac OS X 10.8.2, I can have 2 tabs open at the same time, one using the new UI and one using the Classic UI.
ChinaLamb has a post about this, I just can't locate it at the moment, but he suggests bookmarking the inboxes for each UI.

gltech · 3 Nov 2012, 03:57 PM

Anyone fine with the new UI is not using the pro/expert features that a lot of us signed up with fastmail for in the first place. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they keep the option for the classic (expert) UI. It's that simple.

astrodog73 · 3 Nov 2012, 05:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnMike

Of course if you weren't into the fastmail way of doing things and wanted a dumbed down interface you probably won't notice much change.

I'm still using classic, so the only change is some slight aesthetic stuff in the stylesheet.... no big deal....

montmorencyfm · 4 Nov 2012, 11:09 AM

To Kijinbear:

I agree wholeheartedly and 100 percentagely with your post here....

....all except that highly regrettable, threadworn and outdated "cheese" analogy of course.

2 Nov 2012, 03:39 PM	#1
astrodog73 Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Australia Posts: 150	Really - what's the big problem now?? I'll be the first to agree that Tuesday's 'maintenance' was badly done. However, since then, I've not noticed much difference in my (excellent) fastmail experience, aside from a font change in my preferred stylesheet.... I just changed the URL of a bookmark, and have reselected the stylesheet I like, granted it's a little different... but not much.... not worth threatening legal action, that's for sure..... I really don't love the new homepage and think the new interface should still be in beta, but little has actually changed for me.... Am I missing something??

2 Nov 2012, 03:56 PM	#2
BritTim The "e" in e-mail Join Date: May 2003 Location: mostly in Thailand Posts: 3,095	No, for most users I think your post is accurate, with one caveat. The key issue is one of trust. For the worst affected users, it goes like this: Inability to log in at all in some cases (some posting on these forums were locked out for three days) Severely impacted productivity for several hours (or longer if they did not have someone to call or time to browse these forums) of greatly reduced productivity as they did not know how to access the classic interface A few days after the oft repeated promise that the existing interface would remain fully supported alongside the new one, the current interface (once located) was changed in ways that had real impact on some. This is not just a matter of color preferences. Custom UI rules that have avolved over several years now fail to have their desired effect in some cases. The email experience remains degraded in non trivial ways for some. It is really difficult to have faith in the management of an email service that could perpetrate this. The vague promises we are hearing are no different from the vague promises we were hearing before. If moving mail providers were easy, I would be recommending to my most demanding customers that we do so now. As it is, I want to let things settle and see if there is evidence that lessons have been learned and the needs of business and other power users will be better considered going forward.

2 Nov 2012, 04:18 PM	#3
kijinbear Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: ~$ Posts: 652	It's also an issue of communication. A lot of the angry shouting could have been avoided if FM clearly communicated the upcoming change. They should have sent an email to everybody saying that the Beta will become the new default in 30 days, followed by detailed instructions for accessing the Classic interface. It would have been even better if Classic went live 7 days before Beta was moved to the default location (i.e. Classic accessible at both www.fastmail.fm and classic.fastmail.fm for a week), so that anyone who wanted to change their bookmarks could do so before the big day. Is it too much to expect that kind of careful planning from a respectable company such as Opera? People will always be upset if somebody moves their cheese. But you can make them a lot less upset if you explain to them in advance that their cheese needs to be moved for such-and-such reasons and that they will find their old familiar cheese at such-and-such coordinates. At least half of the name-calling could also have been entirely avoided if the classic interface retained its old theme (as well as any custom theme that people may have painstakingly set up). Perhaps FM didn't want to repeat the difficulties they experienced with the "old" interface, running an entirely different set of programs on virtual servers at a significant cost. But if that was the worry, they could have announced some sort of deadline, e.g. "Classic will be turned off in April 2014 (18 months from now), and we promise to implement all of its current functionality in the new interface by December 2013." There is no excuse not to do so, since Debian 6.0 (FM's current software stack, according to the link above) will be fully supported by the vendor until late 2013 or early 2014. Again, it was lack of communication, not any technical limitation, that caused the customer uproar we've seen this last few days. Does anyone else feel that FM has become a lot less communicative over the last few years, and especially since the Opera acquisition? I've used FM on and off since a few years before I joined this forum, and FM used to be friendly and very open to suggestions. Now they feel like a large multinational corporation, which in fact they are.

3 Nov 2012, 03:57 PM	#10
gltech Junior Member Join Date: Nov 2012 Posts: 18	Anyone fine with the new UI is not using the pro/expert features that a lot of us signed up with fastmail for in the first place. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they keep the option for the classic (expert) UI. It's that simple.

4 Nov 2012, 11:09 AM	#12
montmorencyfm Member Join Date: Nov 2012 Posts: 48	To Kijinbear: I agree wholeheartedly and 100 percentagely with your post here.... ....all except that highly regrettable, threadworn and outdated "cheese" analogy of course.