Brad Barrish - Email problems

If you don’t get excited about MX records, DNS propagation or technical explanations you might want to sit this one out. About four years ago I signed up for Fastmail.fm and moved all of my email. My domain is parked with GoDaddy and they don’t offer IMAP email access, so I had to find something else. Many people raved about Fastmail.fm and I’ve had very few complaints about them over the past few years. Until yesterday morning. I wasn’t receiving emails and when I went onto the status page, this is what I read:

Server3 died about 1/2 hour ago. I am looking at it now.
Bron.

UPDATE: it was a filesystem bug, most frustrating. I needed to reboot the server, which takes about 8 minutes - so probably another 20 minutes down all together while I check and start everything

UPDATE 2: seems that the filesystem will need a full check, which will take a couple of hours.

I could deal with a couple of hours. I was pissed, but there wasn't anything pressing going on. A couple of hours went by and then the status page basically said it would take a full day to get things back up. At this point I was pissed and a little freaked out considering I had 1.5 gigs of email on their server, most of which is backed up locally. I woke up this morning and the outage was still happening. At this point, emails were starting to bounce and after giving it some thought, I decided it was time to change the MX records for my personal domain, even if it was temporary. So now my email is being hosted on DreamHost and is working perfectly. Looks like DNS has propagated because of all the spam, something I'm not used to dealing with. SpamSieve is now installed to use with Apple Mail.

I don’t know if I’ll leave Fastmail.FM for good or not. I suspect that I’m not going to have much of a choice. 24 hours of downtime is unacceptable for a service I pay for. The latest is that it will be an additional 24 hours, which will probably make this outage over 72 hours. You know what? Now that I’m typing this, I’m getting more pissed off about it. They are a really great company that grew to fast and it may be to their demise. Too bad.

I feel especially sorry for those people who aren’t as technically inclined and wouldn’t know how to change their MX record. If any of you happen to be reading this, please email me with questions and I will do my best to help you out.