This is the fourteenth post in the 2016 FastMail Advent Calendar. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow. What is Cyrus? If youʼve been reading our Advent series blog posts, you might have noticed we make a significant contribution to Cyrus IMAP, the email, contacts and calendar server used by FastMail. As with any development work, […]
Yesterday the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a new website for their STARTTLS Everywhere project. The STARTTLS Everywhere project has actually been going on for a number of years, but yesterday’s reboot got a new website, new logos and a renewed marketing push, so it’s been getting a lot of press. The aim of the campaign […]

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 […]
The web platform is a steadily-evolving beast, and anyone who works on the web must pay attention to the state of things, or else be left behind. In the past couple of years, the web platform has been surging forwards with lots of nice new toys—some that make it easier for us to do our […]
What is Sieve? Using rules to organise your mail as it arrives is a reasonably well understood concept. What is less well known is that the engine which runs the rules is called Sieve. A sieve script consists of a number of tests which are applied to incoming mail: if a mail matches a test, […]