slow/non-delivery today?

[mlevin]

I'm noticing that things aren't showing up in my mailbox -- e-purchase receipts, test messages from another account, etc.

I can see that they are being accepted by smtp.us.messagingengine.com, but they're just not showing up in my inbox [yet].

Is there some delay within Fastmail today? Some backlog?

Thanks

[Jeremy Howard]

There is a backlog. We're working on it. Seems to be a combination of a web server bug that chewed up lots of CPU and there slowed delivery (now fixed) and a big joe job flooding the servers (ongoing).

[mlevin]

OK, thanks for the update. It looks like some of my messages are slowly trickling in now...

I didn't want to make a big deal of it, but I didn't see anything on the status page.

- m

[Brian11480]

The slow down is annoying. I am a tight deadline and just had to have someone e-mail me at backup address I rarely use. I wish I did not have the need for a backup address.

-Brian

[kander]

I know, I know.. but 'excrement' happens.

--K

[reuben]

Originally posted by Brian11480
The slow down is annoying. I am a tight deadline and just had to have someone e-mail me at backup address I rarely use. I wish I did not have the need for a backup address.

agreed.

'excrement' happens to all email providers. but they manage to deal because it's the only way, in the end, to keep customers. i use or have used all sizes, shapes, and contexts of email; and with a similar volume/throughput in each case. as far as being reliable in a professional context, FM does sometimes struggle.

fastmail still retains my business (and that of many of its current customers) for philosophical and feature-related reasons. however, i highly suggest to the FM staff that they prioritize development and financing of effective and redundant fallback strategies to curtail this trend of all-too-frequent latencies and downtimes. this would/will bring FM a LOT more business, and prevent the current users, who are being INCREDIBLY patient, from straying.

edit: made the wording a little less harsh

[pwb]

How does FM uptime compare to that of other providers? And how do periods of "go slow" compare to that of other providers? Does anyone know?

I got the impression that FM were actually pretty good, but I might be wrong.

I think though, that no matter how reliable your email service, it would be worth maintaining a backup address anyway. Eggs and baskets and all that.

[mlevin]

Originally posted by pwb
I got the impression that FM were actually pretty good, but I might be wrong.

They are good, and the fact that we have direct access to the developers, especially during a problem, is unheard of anywhere else. In that respect, Fastmail is phenomenally good.

My ongoing concern, which I've probably mentioned in posts before, is that because they're still adding features at such a rapid pace, things go wrong. For example, at least part of the cause of the slowdown, as Jeremy mentioned, was a webserver bug. This isn't the kind of thing that would happen with Hotmail or Yahoo. They roll things out slowly and they have elaborate testing environments to work out all the bugs before rollout. And they're not constantly fiddling with things -- constant fiddling with things is the one thing that makes me a little nervous. (Of course if one of the big guys did have a webserver bug, they'd never admit it, and you can be sure you wouldn't get to talk directly to the programmers.)

I'm not saying that what Fastmail is doing is a bad thing -- I think it is great that they are improving the product on an ongoing basis -- but I just keep that in mind when things like this happen. I don't rely on Fastmail for business -- just my personal mail -- so I don't get too upset when there is a problem. I'm not sure I'd run a business on Fastmail just yet (although the features are great), but I know that's how Fastmail would like to position themselves.

Anyway, just my $.02

- m

[kulin]

As of 2.04pm PST the fastmail service seems to be down.

[s a]

Originally posted by kulin
As of 2.04pm PST the fastmail service seems to be down.

seems ok.....

[kulin]

yeah its up now

[XB77]

I don't find service at Yahoo or Hotmail to be so wonderfully reliable. They each have their periods of slow or non-existant login. If I were looking for bullet proof reliability I wouldn't go there. For paid "professional" service without fail at a reasonable cost, who is worth mentioning?

[aha]

Originally posted by XB77
For paid "professional" service without fail at a reasonable cost, who is worth mentioning?

FastMail.FM

I am serious.

[Jeremy Howard]

We don't really tweak that much anymore. A year ago we used to be guilty of that. But in this case, the bug has been there since day 1, but was a very unusual edge case that had never been trigger before (one user's mailbox was in a state that is theoretically impossible!)

Our uptime is actually really good now - we had the occassional 5 min outage for a while because servers sometimes restarted themselves to clear up problems. But the problems that caused this are now resolved, so we don't see this any more.

The occassional mail queues are hopefully fixed as of today. Up until 10 days ago we did get a mail queue each time we got hit with a major joe job. We've been hit a number of times since then and have had no problems (until today) because we installed a dedicated inbound mail queue server tuned to handle this kind of load. Today's attack was particularly bad, and was made worse by the inability to deliver to final mail boxes while the web app bug was running wild. In order to clear the queue today, we've modified our configuration to offload spam and virus filtering to a separate machine.

As a result of this change we were able to not only handle the Joe Job, but also clear the queue. I think mail queues should stay under 1 second in the future, even if we get attacked by a Joe Job again.

[kulin]

Thanks for clarifying things. Getting this kind of information - first hand - is next to impossible from hotmail or other large providers. I have been impressed with the service from day one and a little downtime isn't gonna shake my faith.