Fastmail

Don't miss hearing about the importance of keeping skilled people as we continue in this age of data centre growth. Our very own CEO, Bron Gondwana, shared his own thoughts in this Techerati article linked below: “Data centres might be out of sight for most people, but they underpin far more of our everyday lives than we realise,” stated Bron Gondwana, CEO at Fastmail. For Gondwana, “the people keeping this infrastructure running matter enormously”. “When something goes wrong, skilled operators can make the difference between a tiny blip most of us never notice and a multiple-hour outage which ruins your entire day,” he added. Gondwana said that “ensuring organisations continue to develop and retain hands-on technical expertise” is vital. “You can build more data centres, add more computing power and invest in new technology, but resilient digital infrastructure ultimately depends on having people who understand how it works when something goes wrong,” he stressed. #skills #datacentre #Fastmail #careerdevelopment #systemsengineering #infrastructure #loveyourjob #betteremail #makebetteremail

Data resilience at Fastmail comes down to a principle our CEO, Bron Gondwana, wrote down over ten years ago. The primary copy is gold. Back it up, replicate it — everything you can to ensure it's never lost. Principles rarely change. The "three types of data" in that post still describes how we work. In April, it got tested. 8 Fastmail accounts lost entire mailboxes to a bug. In every case that included the Inbox, so the account wouldn't open at all. Two changes to Cyrus replication, both sensible on their own, interacted badly with a username that had been created, renamed, then created again. The move system accessed the wrong account and wiped the folders on every copy at the destination. Backups brought everything back. We back up every account every few hours, and again immediately before and after moving one between servers. One account was still short 5 sent emails, so we pulled identical copies from temporary submission files in Cyrus using some custom tooling. No email was lost. The backup system that did the work is now part of the open source Cyrus IMAP project. The fix ships with a test case that reproduces the exact pattern, so we'll catch it if we write something similar again. Worth a read if you look after other people's data. https://lnkd.in/gJ7VUDbQ #Fastmail #BetterEmail #Backups #Cyrus

We’re hiring! 🎉 Join the Fastmail support team and help make email better for people all over the world. If you love solving tricky technical problems, writing, and helping others, we'd love to hear from you.

Many of you have been telling us that where your email is stored matters to you. Today we did something about it: our new Amsterdam servers are live, and you can now make the EU the primary home for your Fastmail data. You pick your region at signup, and if you're already with us, you can switch in your settings. Our CEO, Bron Gondwana, wrote up the announcement. It walks through exactly what lives where and what's replicated, so you can make the call yourself. This new location is built to the same high standards as our existing infrastructure: our own hardware, set up by our own engineers, specified down to the exact disk model in each machine. Nothing rented from a big cloud provider, the same way we've run things in the US for more than 25 years. If your billing address is in or near Europe, an encrypted copy of your data was staged in Amsterdam ahead of the announcement, ready to become your primary copy. We thought about charging extra for the EU option and decided that felt wrong. The choice should just be yours. Worth a read if where your email lives matters to you. https://lnkd.in/g7ksbrpU #Fastmail #EmailMadeBetter #DataResidency #EU

🎉 Today is the 27th annual SysAdmin Appreciation Day, and our Platform Team Lead, Luke Erlacher, wrote about the team you hopefully never notice. The bit we like most is how invisible the work is. Platform engineers don't answer support tickets and don't build the features you see. But if you've ever written in because email from one particular provider stopped arriving, and it was fixed in hours rather than days, that was them. We run our own servers, networks, and DNS precisely so that when something breaks, nobody at Fastmail is waiting on hold with a vendor. Someone just walks over and fixes it. Luke has spent nearly three years at Fastmail, and he's the kind of engineer who lists digging into legacy infrastructure as something he enjoys. Not tolerates. Enjoys. That's exactly who you want running the systems your email lives on. Read Luke's post: https://lnkd.in/gQqrTnsJ Go thank a sysadmin today. They won't know what to do with the attention, but do it anyway. #SysAdminDay #ITSupport #Fastmail #BetterEmail

Our CEO, Bron Gondwana got interviewed, and it's a great read. The email standards work, that he has been involved in for many years, is a great read, but the bit I liked the most was the description of his day: a work call, loading a pallet of servers onto a truck, fixing a customer's broken calendar, and then sitting down for the interview. That isn't out of the ordinary of what a normal day looks like for him, and it tells you more about how Fastmail is run than any of the strategy talk does. He also mentions he'd rather be poorer than lose his ethics over it. I've been in enough conversations with Bron to know that isn't just something he said for this piece! It's worth a read. https://lnkd.in/gM6hF2c7 #Fastmail #Betteremail #Leadership #CIO #CEO #Greatleaders #Leadingothers

To close out #NationalEmailWeek, we wanted to pause and share a thought about the part of email almost no one ever sees. We talk a lot about the inbox getting smarter. AI assistants are starting to read, summarise and even action our email for us, and that is genuinely useful. It also quietly changes the most important question we ask of any message. For most of email's history that question was "did it arrive?" Increasingly it is "can we actually verify where it came from?" A careful human reader can spot the signs of a spoofed email: a domain with an extra character, an odd turn of phrase, a sense of urgency that does not quite fit. An AI assistant scanning your inbox for things to action may not slow down to notice any of that. It reads the content, registers the urgency, and acts accordingly. That is why email authentication, the SPF, DKIM and DMARC standards most people have never had reason to think about, is quietly becoming the trust layer the future of email depends on. It is following the same path HTTPS took on the web: best practice, then expectation, then simply infrastructure you assume is there. Authentication is not a complete answer on its own. It confirms identity, not intent. But it raises the cost and complexity of impersonation, and that matters more with every step we take towards a more automated inbox. One of our fantastic Tier 2 Support Agents, Aric Archebelle-Smith has written a clear, refreshingly non-alarmist piece on where this is heading and why it matters. Well worth a read if you care about email staying something we can actually trust. https://lnkd.in/gWddEuBX #NationalEmailWeek #EmailSecurity #Privacy #Fastmail #Betteremail #Phishing #Cybersecurity #Besafeonline #Emailforever