Connection issues

If you are not able to connect to Fastmail, or your connection is very slow, there are a few things to check in order to work out where the problem is occurring.

Connections between your devices and our servers pass through a few networks and systems along the way, and any of these may be causing issues.

1. Find out our status

If we have detected an issue on our end, we will post to our status dashboard with details and updates as we have them.

If there is no information in this page, the problem may exist elsewhere.

2. Testing your browser

Sometimes problems connecting may be caused by a single program, like your usual browser or your email client. If you are seeing connection problems in your email client, try going to our homepage at fastmail.com with your browser.

If you normally use a browser, and it is not working, try loading a different browser and going to our home page from there.

If this works, the problem is likely in your usual email client or browser.

If you still can't load our page, try going to other websites. If you can't load any pages at all, there may be a problem with your home network. If you can load other pages, but not Fastmail, your internet provider might be having trouble reaching us.

3. Testing your ISP

If you are able to reach all websites except for one, it may seem like the website you can't reach must be having problems.

We often see problems with specific internet providers' routing to Fastmail causing the website to appear to be offline. This issue is outside of our control, but can be very frustrating and confusing for users.

When this happens, your browser will send your internet provider a request to load fastmail.com. Routing issues happen when the internet provider is sending traffic for fastmail.com to the wrong IP address, which means your request is not reaching us at all.

To test whether this is the case, try connecting to a different internet provider, like your mobile data, or the internet connection at a workplace. If you can load Fastmail from these networks, the problem is probably with your internet provider.

4. Contacting us

If you have gone through all these steps and are still not able to load Fastmail, contact our support team for further assistance.

It will greatly speed up the resolution of your issue if you let our support team know what you have already tried to fix the problem. It will also speed up resolution if you include a traceroute of the connection between your computer and Fastmail.

To get a traceroute to send to our support team:

Windows

  1. Click the Start button and begin typing command prompt. When Command Prompt appears as a program, click it to open it.
  2. Copy and paste the following into Command Prompt: tracert fastmail.com
  3. Copy and paste the output and send it to our support team.

Mac or Linux

  1. Open the Terminal application. To find this application on Mac, open Launchpad and begin typing terminal.
  2. Copy and paste the following into Terminal: traceroute fastmail.com
  3. Copy and paste the output and send it to our support team.
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