Fastmail Co-Founder, Rob Mueller, explains what data breaches are, what Fastmail does to protect our customers, and what you can do if you find out you’ve been involved in a data breach.
This post could have been titled: "Why SELECT ... FOR UPDATE doesn’t work on non-existent rows like you might think it does". FastMail has been a long term user of the MySQL database server, and in particular the InnoDB storage engine. InnoDB provides many core database features (ACID, transactions, row-level locking, etc). One thing that […]
Yesterday we talked about how we don’t like the idea of security theatre. Instead we develop measures which meaningfully improve the confidentiality, availability and/or integrity of our customer’s data. Today we’re going to look at a great example of this: when we re-did our password, 2FA and account recovery systems. Our original password system with […]
Quick, where did this email come from and who was it sent to? From: PayPal <[email protected]> To: Rob Mueller <[email protected]> Subject: Receipt for your donation to Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Actually, these headers tell you nothing at all about where the email really came from or went to. There are two separate parts to the main […]
We don’t have any particular timeline for supporting DNSSEC or DANE. To be clear, these two features are fairly interconnected for us; the main reason for supporting DNSSEC would be to support DANE. DANE provides a way for a domain to specify that it requires an encrypted connection and the SSL/TLS certificate that should be […]
In its earliest days, email was an entirely text based affair. There was no bold or italic, no headings, no fonts; just text. Even more than that, the text itself had particular constraints. The email standard says that lines should be no longer than 78 characters, though things like quoted printable do allow logical lines […]
This is the seventeenth post in the FastMail 2015 Advent Calendar. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow. For the last 20 years, spam has been a continuous issue for any email system administrator, and when they make it through any spam filtering system, ultimately a problem for email users as well. During that time, the […]
Oct 7, 2015 Welcome new readers arriving from Senator Scott Ludlam’s recent Facebook post or Tweet. FastMail is a paid service, which means that you pay money in exchange for us running the service purely for you, the customer, rather than for advertisers. While we don’t provide a free service, we do offer a free […]
I was recently interviewed by two separate sites. Since these interviews cover some of the history of FastMail, the purchase by Opera and re-sale back to the staff, and our recent acquisition of fastmail.com, I thought it might be interesting to some of our users. Why You Should Charge from Day One http://rocketship.fm/episodes/ep-79-rob-mueller/ After 15 […]
Since we rolled out our new fastmail.com domain last week, we’ve had 10,000’s of users use the domain to rename, signup and create aliases. We decided to have a quick look through our logs and find the first customer to use fastmail.com and ask them a few questions about themselves and FastMail. Thanks for taking […]
On Thursday, 23rd October 2014, we are moving the main FastMail website from fastmail.fm to fastmail.com. We intend to make the transition as seamless as possible, but we wanted to give you advance warning. Below are some more details for users regarding this change: Email client users (e.g. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, etc) If you […]
After the recent sale of FastMail back to the developers, we decided it was a good time to review and update our privacy policy. We hope this makes it clear that we strongly value our users privacy and will continue to do so in the future. The new policy is available at https://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_privacy.html and is […]
