robmueller

It's not just WebDAV that's an abomination (returning HTTP status codes and messages in XML, WTF were they thinking), but vCard and iCal as well.

The vCard "group construct" (see rfc6350) is one of the dumbest things ever added to a spec. It seems a trivial thing to add, but completely screws up your internal storage and manipulation formats. It's horrible, on top of all the other horribleness that is vCard.

Of course, I'm biased, given we're trying to push alternatives to IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV - http://jmap.io/ - but please do check it out. Having actually worked on IMAP servers and clients, CalDAV servers and clients and CardDAV servers and clients, we've learned a lot about creating a saner alternative.

There's actually not that much to write about. It's a regular company with share holders, the share holders just happen to be some of the staff.

Fortunately the owners all get on very well, have similar beliefs in which technical, financial and marketing directions we want to head in, and love what we do. The result is that everything just runs pretty smoothly, so far at least :)

I think I mentioned in the interview though, the difference in vibe between being owned by Opera and being owned by the staff isn't as big as you'd think. Much more important is just actually loving what you do, the things you create, and the people you work with. All of those are absolutely great, both as they were under Opera and now back under staff ownership IMHO. I wonder if other FastMail staff will have their own thoughts :)

Have you tried FastMail.fm? It's not free, but has a fast web UI, excellent IMAP support, customer service, etc. Search other HN threads to see what others think of it. (disclaimer: I co-own it with some of the other staff)

SSE is great. We wrote about it in quite a bit of detail a while back.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/01/09/building-the-new-ajax-mai...

There's a couple of annoying caveats

1. The "retry" nature of the connection isn't quite as reliable as suggested. See the blog post above for more details

2. NAT timeouts. Make sure you have some sort of "ping" either at application or TCP level.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/05/28/push-events-nat-tcp-conne... http://blog.fastmail.fm/2011/06/28/http-keep-alive-connectio...

3. Each SSE connection is regarded as a regular site connection. So if people open up 6 tabs to your site, you might suddenly find your site is unresponsive to users because every available connection is used by an SSE connection. You might need to implement some inter-tab communication system instead.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/11/26/inter-tab-communication-u...

Yep. But that's why we've unified the family plan levels to be the same as the personal ones.

So the only difference now is it's $5/y extra to have the family "container", which lets you create accounts in your own domain rather than having an @fastmail.fm account and aliases. Having that container then also lets you setup multiple accounts, manage them, share folders between users, etc. If you only have 1 account, then yes, it's a bit annoying, but I don't think $5/y is too onerous.

Stick to IRC for the internal chats guys.

Wait, I meant email... ;)

I really wish companies would get SSL vs TLS vs STARTTLS right. I wrote about this on our blog a while back and ended up turning it into a help page because people still seem to get confused.

https://www.fastmail.fm/help/technology_ssl_vs_tls_starttls....

Similar approach to what we took.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/02/20/building-the-new-ajax-mai...

Used the CSS syntax to easily set class/id on a newly created tag.

Benchmarks included to show it's just as fast as innerHTML on modern browsers.

So you're still saying that maybe they didn't start that way, but right now they are bad people, who have lost their way morally.

I think that's an incredibly harsh accusation for people that are doing an awful lot of work collecting evidence and fighting real spammers on the internet (http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso), and again, I totally disagree with you.

> though you have to admit that running a blacklist might tend to attract a certain type of person

I think you could tar so many people in so many industries with broad brush stroke sterotypes like that, it seems an unhelpful generalisation to make.

From the article you link:

> As of this writing, any filter relying on the SBL is now marking email with the url "paulgraham.com" as spam.

The SBL is an IP based RBL, nothing to do with domains, so the above statement is patently false. And if anyone was doing IP lookups of URI's in emails and using the SBL for that (which I've never even heard of), that's clearly a misuse of the SBL anyway, because that's not what the SBL is supposed to be used for.

As the policy clearly says:

--- http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/policy.html

The Spamhaus Block List ("SBL") Advisory is a database of IP addresses which do not meet Spamhaus's policy for acceptance of inbound email and therefore from which Spamhaus does not recommend the acceptance of electronic mail. ---

So it should only be used to block machines sending email, nothing about the content thereof.

There's RHSBLs (like SURBL and URIBL) that are related to dealing with URI's in emails, that's nothing to do with IP RBLs like SBL.

> Why? Because the guys at the SBL want to pressure Yahoo, where paulgraham.com is hosted, to delete the site of a company they believe is spamming

What's that got to do with the SBL again? The SBL is purely about what IP addresses "from which Spamhaus does not recommend the acceptance of electronic mail", nothing about websites. So that whole accusation feels wrong. Mixing up email sending servers and websites, domains and IPs, and absolutely no evidence for it at all.

> The Spamhaus people are bad guys. I gradually realized that during the time I worked on spam filters. They presumably started out with good intentions, but the position they're in has corrupted them.

That's a very attacking statement to call people "bad guys". Not just "they're not doing a good job", but actually "bad people". Ouch.

Worse, I think it's totally wrong.

While I do agree with the problem of "power corrupts", I believe that Spamhaus have been highly successful at avoiding that.

I've dealt with and spoken with people at Spamhaus regularly, and they're smart people fighting the good fight. They know what they're doing, and take their responsibilities seriously. They don't blindly attack people or use threats or accuse them of misdeads. They gather evidence about bad behaviour and act on it.

The proof is in the pudding. 100's of RBLs have come and gone over the years, either run as temporary projects that the owner gave up on one day, or gone the "power corrupts" option and just ended up listing so many IPs they've generated too many false positives (e.g. SPEWS).

Spamhaus RBLs are still being run today, and being done so very successfully. Virtually every small/medium email server I know uses them in one form or another (blocking or scoring). They generally have very high block rates, and very low false positive rates.

From a time when Al Iverson was still keeping stats on the various RBLs out there, you can see the Spamhaus zen RBL on it's own generally caught 75% of spam with 0% false positives.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080703181952/http://stats.dnsbl...

Certainly some listings are controversial (eg google docs), but it's always been for a good reason, and forced the provider of the service to come to terms with the fact their spam policies were lax or their service was being seriously abused by spammers. They were thus forced to take action, something they should have been doing anyway.

Without Spamhaus, the internet would be a way worse place, with way more spam/junk emails and websites.

I'm one of the main developers and was one of the (now previous) owners of Fastmail.

Fastmail has always been a small company, there are just 3-4 main developers (myself, Bron, Richard and recently in the last year, Kurian), and a couple of support staff scattered around world. For that small size, I think we've managed to build a pretty great product with lots of niche and power features, loyal users, and apart from a small disaster in 2006 (2-3 day outage for a big chunk of users), we've also been incredibly reliable, especially in recent years.

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/lzdx4pr0pdhk/ http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html

Fastmail was nicely profitable, but not spectacularly so. We're basically all geeks, and we don't have a marketing or sales department that can grow our customer base significantly (we tried, but it didn't work out, and we probably should have put more effort in, but didn't... because we probably preferred to spend time just building neat stuff, or fixing that edge case bug, or doing that fun thing... like I said, geeks).

I think we had to face facts a bit, we were a small fish with limited resources in a market that has become severely more competitive in recent years. We needed to invest a bunch of time and money in updating our interface, and adding new features (especially better mobile syncing).

And coincidentally, it's around that time that Opera came along and started talking to us. Despite being half a world apart, there's a lot of fit between the companies. They use a lot of perl, we do to. They're a company run by technology people, creating a product that's loved by geeks, is highly customisable, has a loyal fan base, and despite it's small size, punches above it's weight. I think that describes us pretty much as well.

So the timing was right, and Opera have an interest in picking up email as a core competency, and a bunch of ideas on what they want to improve, what they want to build. The other Fastmail guys were also interested in new opportunities, and we're all becoming Opera staff and are committed to working there for a few years at least. There's already plans for some staff to move to Norway to work, a change of life after 5 years of just 3 of us in a single office (apparently the Norwegian lessons are paying off... Jeg vil gjerne et øl til)

So it'll be an interesting change, and something new I'm looking forward to. I've been working for Fastmail for 10 years now. It's been a great time. I've loved building the product and the company. Like anything, there's been ups (it's fun developing a site that customers really love and tell you about) and downs (some people are addicted to being able to access their email, and running a 24/7 email service means that if people can't get to their email for even just 1 minute, you'll start hearing about it). After 10 years, it'll be strange having a boss again. I've met a bunch of the Opera people, and it'll be really great working with them. I know the other staff are looking forward to it as well.

It'll also be great to have Neil on board as well. He worked for us over a couple of summers, and basically designed the entire "new" web interface, all the HTML, CSS and JS. We've already got 80% of a whole new AJAX interface done (remember in programming though, the first 80% takes 80% of the time, the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the time), and I'm looking forward to completely finishing that off, and working on a bunch of new stuff.

Hmmm, this story went on longer than I expected. Hope it's interesting to someone...

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

Hmmm yes, we don't really have any screenshots do we, we should probably fix that!

Hopefully even without a screenshot, we can convince people it's worth trying us out (there is the free Guest account, minimal storage, but you can at least look around the interface, and then upgrade if you like it)

Quick links to the two biggest things people want to know, features and reliability.

http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

For people that are concerned about lock in, I highly recommend this as well. Get your own domain, and then you're not tied to any one service. We have 10,000's of domains hosted at FastMail.

(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)

1. Just add addresses to your address book to whitelist. Also make sure you use Report Spam/Report non-spam on enough emails (200 of each) to activate your personal bayes db (see the Options -> Spam/Virus Protection near the bottom to see how many of each you've already learned)

2. At the moment, you do have to explicitly add body: to a term to do a body search. The first time might be slow as it indexes your email, after that it should be faster.

http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhance...