Remote file access

WebDAV and FTP

WebDAV is a protocol for remotely managing files over the internet. FTP is an earlier and less fully featured tool for the same thing, but more programs support it. You can read more about WebDAV at http://www.webdav.org/.

How to set up WebDAV

To access your stored files through WebDAV, you need to log in with your full FastMail username. You must use the username you used to sign up for your account. Aliases will not allow you access.

Some software may have difficulty with the @ symbol. In these cases, you can other symbols in its place:

• username@your.domain
• username#your.domain
• username/your.domain
• username=your.domain

Connect to https://dav.messagingengine.com/ using your DAV client. You will see all folders available to you, including shared folders from other users, and also special temporary files/folders. Because of that, to see your actual files, you have to navigate into the username.domain.tld folder, and then the files folder within that. To avoid having to navigate into these folders everytime, you can use the special hostname myfiles.messagingengine.com instead of dav.messagingengine.com. This works exactly the same as dav.messagingengine.com, but is rooted directly at the top of your files directory.

DAV Clients

There are a lot of clients out there to help with WebDAV but here's a shortlist of some better-made products:

FTP

Connect to ftp.messagingengine.com with your username and password (note that Lite and legacy Guest/Member accounts do not have FTP access). Your {My Files} directory will be in /username.your.domain/files/.

CuteFTP and WS-FTP seem popular for Windows. You can download free versions of both. Vista users can follow these instructions.

For Mac OS X, Transmit is excellent, although not free. Cyberduck is a reasonable free alternative.

Any Linux system will have heaps of ftp clients available: "gftp" seems good if you want a graphical interface, and "ncftp" is insanely powerful as a command line tool.

We've had a couple of users doing reasonable things which just happen to hit pathological cases in our filesystem implementation. To stop this happening, we've had to restrict the FTP server to one connection per user. Hopefully we can remove this limitation again soon, but for now it's needed to ensure that the service keeps working smoothly for everyone else.