I just signed up for FastMail and it died, should I be concerned?

[WormholeLawyer]

Originally Posted by BritTim

For customers where email is a critical part of their business, I do ensure that there is a backup email service. Thus, I am somewhat is sympathy with your viewpoint. That said, one advantage of using an email service, such as Fastmail, rather than running your own mail server, should be that the mail service provider ensures sufficient redundancy for the class of users it claims to support. If Fastmail considers itself a premium mail service for business users, their customers ought not to be required to arrange email backup themselves.

This. Of course I have a backup of my Mail via IMAP which is the backed up locally via a NAS. But I shouldn't have to create tertiary redundancy for a service I pay for. I think the real issue is not back up (aka losing your email forever). It's losing email sent to your addy for a small period of time, like when FM goes down as it did this week. That guy claiming to have lost a few days worth of mail would NOT be served by a back up solution unless he was forwarding/rerouting MX, which I shouldn't have to do with a service like FM.

[danieldk]

Originally Posted by WormholeLawyer

And having to forward email to a freemail account defeats the purpose of the beneficial privacy (aka you aren't the product you are the consumer) of Fastmail. Just my two-cents.

I agree. But for other reasons as well: (1) I want to backup my sent mail folder as well; and (2) I want my backup to reflect my actual IMAP folders, including moves, deletions, and archiving.

And I agree completely with those saying that you should backup your e-mail. Even if you use a provider which is too big to go bankrupt (e.g. Google), there could be many other causes for e-mail loss:

- Your account is accidentally closed (by you or the provider).
- Your account in intentionally closed (because your provider believes that you violated their terms).
- Some server-side bug or event (hack, server corruption) causes data loss.
- Some local bug causes data loss (e.g. your e-mail client deletes an e-mail permanently).
- You accidentally removed e-mails.
- Your provider (unlikely to happen with fastmail ) disables IMAP and POP retrieval.

If your e-mail is too important too you, make additional backups, there are simply too many ways that your data could be corrupted!

Personally, I:

- Make a local copy of my IMAP storage via offlineimap.
- This copy is backed up via Time Machine.
- I make offsite incremental encrypted backups of this copy via tarsnap.

The last two backups ensure that I can retrieve the state of my e-mail of nearly any point in time.