Blog / Rob N ★
Operations

Monitoring Fastmail with Prometheus
21 Dec 2017 Advanced

Monitoring is a critical part of any complex system. If you’re not monitoring your system properly, you can’t be sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and it’s hard to figure out what’s going on when there is a problem. For most of FastMail’s life, it’s been monitored by a set of scripts […]

12 Feb 2016 Advanced

From around 5am on the morning of Sunday 7 February (6pm 6 Feb UTC, 1pm 6 Feb US East), FastMail was unavailable for almost two hours. In this post we’ll take a look at what happened, why it happened and what we’re doing to restore our reputation as one of the most reliable email providers […]

How to Stop a DDoS Attack
08 Dec 2015 Advanced

Last month, we were hit by a DDoS attack. Over the course of that week we learned a lot about this style of attack and how to protect against it.

03 Dec 2015 Advanced

This is the third post in the FastMail 2015 Advent Calendar. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow. A few months ago we happened to be looking at graphs of CPU load on some of our backend mail servers, and we noticed that over time our servers have gotten busier. As you may remember, our servers […]

12 Jul 2015 Company

Next week three members of the FastMail team – Bron, Neil and myself (Rob N) – will be heading to the US to spread the good word about FastMail. The primary reason for the trip is to attend OSCON in Portland. OSCON is one of the biggest open source conferences in the world and attracts over […]

As you may be aware, there have been many reports recently of secret data mining programs conducted by the US government. These reports have included mention of secret network interception and "backdoor" access to private email accounts. While we have no position on the veracity of these claims, we have had many queries about what, […]