[Prognathous]

Originally posted by Shelded
Maybe we should wait for it to end before we score it.

As it is, this is already the worst outage I've ever personally encountered.

Meanwhile, how will we measure the start time?

I'll take Fastmail's own timing: November 10, 2005 at 6:09 PM New York time

I had mail all day yesterday, when others apparently didn't.

Yes, apparently we didn't ...and still don't.

Anyway, I think it's pointless because as far as I know Hotmail holds the record anyway, there have been people locked out for a week.

Linkage?

BTW I'm leaving this in the misc forum because it seems to be trying to talk about other providers more than Fastmail. Am I right?

Yes, I think you are right. This isn't intended to be a Fastmail-centric discussion.

Originally posted by David
Prog: Fastmail did not go down, consider that only 5 % of Fastmail's userbase was affected.

I'd be happy to see where you took this 5% figure from, but even if it *is* only that, we're still dealing with (at least) 15,000 paying users. If you wish, I can rephrase the question to "what was longest ever outage by a major mail service that affected at least 15,000 users?"

How many times have a small percentage of Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail users been unable to connect? When that happens they don't post here.

Do you have *any* proof that these services were actually unavailable for that long for *any* user?

Originally posted by Trip
Maybe not, prog. There must have been times in the mid to late 90s when the first major freemail players simply went offline for days at a time to fix glitches or upgrade servers.

So I take it that there wasn't anything like this outage in the last 5 or so years?

....but then who's counting, really....

You are

They're paying whatever it is per year, $10...$30...6 cups of coffee at Starbucks...a half a month's cellular bill, whatever it means to you.....and they're complaining as if they're anticipating a refund from a company who's just performed below their SLA.....well, at this point they're just p|ssing in the wind, they haven't paid for anything of the sort....

The thing is, free services have better availability. When people are paying for something that's normally available for free (such as email), they expect it to be at least as good in essentials such uptime. Any other features are of secondary importance when you can't even access your mail. For my $40 a year, I'm first and foremost expecting uptime, security and backup policy to be as good as major free services. Only then do additional features come into play.

In light of the level of most budgets I see around here (including myself), who said you can't just make your own redudancy with a Yahoo or Gmail or whatever account, in combination with the one your pay for?

A free IMAP service with large quota and without any widespread privacy concerns? I don't think Yahoo or Gmail fit the bill. Any other recommendations?

Thanks,

Prog.