(Why) is FastMail down? I want better answers.

[aminm]

I still don't understand why www.fastmail.fm was unavailable during NYC power outage. I expected fastmail servers to redirect the browsers to backup servers in Europe, for example. Why didn't this happen? So what's the good of having backup servers in different geographical locations?

[DarioMor]

Originally posted by aminm
I still don't understand why www.fastmail.fm was unavailable during NYC power outage. I expected fastmail servers to redirect the browsers to backup servers in Europe, for example. Why didn't this happen?

To this first part of your post, I have no answer, but there are tons os messagens and threads in this foruns trying to explain it.

I expected also that European servers ware to subst the fastmail.fm main servers to EVERYTHING, especially to aswer our http, pop and imap requests; but now I see that it was not their objectives...

So what's the good of having backup servers in different geographical locations?

Even if backup servers never will be used to handle http requests for fastmail.fm, there are other uses to them:

1- store an up-to-date back-up of all our folders and user configuration data (it is much more important for me than receive more than 99% of my messages, or to receive all of them in less than a minute - because I store too much important information in FastMail servers, and I have more than 100 rules, more than 70 folders, dozens of addresses in address book, etc etc)

2- maintain an alternate official commuication route to use in case of failure. For example, blog.fastmail.fm shoud be hosted in a different place of fastmail.fm. But, this forum is already very cool to this purpouse.

3- Receive all messages sent to us until the main severs do not came back (but this objective was not completely reached this week)

[akorvemaker]

Originally posted by DarioMor
For example, blog.fastmail.fm shoud be hosted in a different place of fastmail.fm.

It is. The blog was still up for quite a while after FM's main servers went down. I'm not sure what eventually caused the blog to start failing.

[tony_here]

My parents and I lived in a country (we were away from the USA because of my father's choice and business) where people were tortured almost daily. One day the police came into the school I was at and took a bunch of boys, me included, and we were tortured and were kept away from our families for a very long time.
I am sharing this as things happen which we are not able to imagine they are going to happen.
We need to be prepared, each one of us individually, so we can deal with situations coming into our lives.
The recent black out is one of these things.
I trust Rob and Jeremy, and I am sure they planned in case something like this was to happen, but it does not matter how much you plan, problems do arise and things do happen, prepared or not prepared.
I for one am happy with the way Fastmail.fm works, I am happy with the way things get solved when things come up, and I want to give the fastmail.fm team my support, this is why I am writing this here.
Tony

[pat_cav]

Originally posted by michaelj
Sorry guys, but this thread is a bit annoying to me. While you're all concerned about getting e mail I didn't have power until 9 PM last night. I lost my phone service at 11 AM yesterday, we lost our water by 4 PM, cell phones were skethy until the battery died, we had no food and I was relying on the water that dripped out of faucet and that I boiled. I even went to a Red Cross truck, something I never thought I'd ever have to do in my lifetime.

Let's keep things in perspective.

Michael

Michael, it sounds like you need to better prepare yourself for emergencies. Why do you not have any food or water stored in your house? It's pretty easy to fill up an empty juice bottle or soft drink bottle with water and stick it in the cupboard. Every time you go shopping, you can buy a few extra tins of baked beans or some other long-lasting food and stick it in the cupboard.

For example, I have a water tank here with about 3000 litres of water in it. I also have seven 20 litre water jerries full of water in the house. My pantry is full of food, including about fifty tins of baked beans. Fifty tins of baked beans cost me about $30. I just bought a few tins each time I went to the supermarket. I also have 20kg of rice, because it was on special, about $10 for a 10kg bag.

All of society could crumble around me, and I'd still have food and water for at least a couple of months. If all my food and water supplies ran out, I can go down to the nearby creek and catch some fish.

It's quite easy and cheap to do a bit of preparation to make sure you aren't caught out. But yeah, if society crumbles, I still won't be able to read my emails.

[michaelj]

Originally posted by pat_cav
Michael, it sounds like you need to better prepare yourself for emergencies. Why do you not have any food or water stored in your house?

When living in NYC space is a problem, and it's not possible to store that much of anything. That's the reality. I managed fine with liquids, I had a charged up CD player, an AA powered walkman, speakers, a shortwave radio, but the phone, water and electricity were beyond my control, as was the heat and humidity. My point was when dealing with a crisis such as this sometimes e mail loses its relevance. Even if Fastmail were to be up and running I still had no access. Anyone not near here who thinks this blackout only touched them through Fastmail is mistaken. The entire country is operating on a third world electrical grid. It can happen anywhere. That's the perspective I was attempting to display.

Michael

[pat_cav]

Originally posted by michaelj
When living in NYC space is a problem, and it's not possible to store that much of anything.

Michael

I know about living in squeezy spaces, because I lived in Tokyo for a few years. I understand that you can't store a few months food and water supply. But surely you can store a few days worth.

And if you want perspective, think about those poor buggers living in Iraq. They've had blackouts of the scale of the New York blackouts every day for the last four months. And it's really hot over there in the Arabian desert. Imagine being over there with no water, no electricity, no phones, no airconditioning, and so on.

[hadaso]

Originally posted by pat_cav

And if you want perspective, think about those poor buggers living in Iraq. They've had blackouts of the scale of the New York blackouts every day...

There are many people on this planet that don't have elctricity or running water at all... Iraq is a relatively modern country!

I recall a tourism column on one newspaper that recommended some place that can only be reached by a 5 day trek. They wrote: "when you finaly get there, don't be surprized when you see some local people surfing the web on notebooks with satelite connection..."

[elvey]

Oh my Word! I can't express how I feel about the people who who have blind, unfounded faith that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are reliable, despite tons of conclusive proof that they aren't. Not to mention the wild conjecture that they run off some massively redundant, super-reliable global infrastructure. They don't. The major search engines do, but not these services. They're less reliable than FM.

[oysterquartz]

Originally posted by elvey
Oh my Word! I can't express how I feel about the people who who have blind, unfounded faith that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are reliable, despite tons of conclusive proof that they aren't. Not to mention the wild conjecture that they run off some massively redundant, super-reliable global infrastructure. They don't. The major search engines do, but not these services. They're less reliable than FM.

Maybe I've been lucky, but over that past 7-8 years or so I can hardly remember more than 1 or 2 times when Y! or Hotmail was down. Surely, you aren't suggesting that FM has met or can meet those standards.

I'd like to see FM scale to tens of millions of users (not to mention 100's of millions) and maintain its claimed 99% + reliability.

I'm not saying that FM is not reliable, only that one has to give credit where it is due, and Y! for one does a pretty good job ...

[elvey]

Originally posted by Jeremy Howard
Actually, it was simply deferring connections when sender verification failed. See Rob's post I linked to above.

Thanks, and thanks for the pointer to rob's post! I'm pretty happy with the outage follow-up thus far.
Re #2:
I was referring to the errors posted here :
RCPT TO:<me@mydomain.com>
451 Could not complete sender verify callout
but
RCPT TO:<my_fm_username@fastmail.fm>
250 Accepted
Are you saying the success of the latter but not the former was random, and due to the high load?

I'm also curious about the backup server in Texas. At rackspace? I never saw it in play.

Get a refund from NYI, as they failed to provide service per their TOS?

PS http://www.powerworld.com/Java/Eastern/
was too cool, even if it was based on fake/old data.

[Shelded]

oysterquartz said: Maybe I've been lucky, but over that past 7-8 years or so I can hardly remember more than 1 or 2 times when Y! or Hotmail was down. Surely, you aren't suggesting that FM has met or can meet those standards.

It would be great to have some facts from which to discuss this since it comes
up all the time. It would be neat to have a digest of the news articles
announcing when Y! and Hotmail have been down. I can tell you that oysterquartz
may simply have been unaware of the outages but it's been more like 7-8 outages
over the past 1-2 years (ya got the numbers backwards). And those are the
*announced* ones. Don't raise the bar so high that NO mail
service can meet the expectation.

FM can scale simply by adding more servers; it doesn't slow things to add
users, that's something Jeremy has explained before. On the contrary,
the economy of scale that FM would have in that case would allow more
security to be paid for and might help in dealing with the blacklists.

Sure, Y! does a good job. If I could get FM's features and performance
with Y! reliability and cost, I would take it. But that's not the choice
I've been given. So I log in to Y! one time /month to keep it active
and clean the spam out of it. But my real mail goes through FM.

I only do wonder if J & R can continue to creatively manage the
feature growth when they spend so much time yakking on the board
here. I hope so.

[elvey]

Originally posted by shelded
It would be great to have some facts from which to discuss this since it comes
up all the time. ...

Yeah, surely keynote or someone tracks this sort of thing statistically? Wouldn't be too tough to do. But I'm off to burning man tomorrow. Y'all hold down the fort; see you in a couple weeks.

[bitequator]

That's STILL around??

EDITS: I meant Burning Man. Thought it would've died down since the 90's and 2000 era...

[sjk]

If you mean keynote, that brings back a few memories for me, too.