
Why CardDAV took so long - masnick
https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/12/01/a-tangled-path-of-workarounds/
======
sz4kerto
"Only this one user had problem. But he had pretty bad problems, and I wanted
to fix this properly."

That's why I'm a Fastmail customer.

~~~
Khao
I submitted a bug report once and it was fixed the next day, I was invited to
try it out on their beta version of the website and it was rolled out on all
the servers a couple days later. These guys are truly providing a fantastic
service.

~~~
feld
Similar experience. Fix with inability to respond to some crazy github-
generated email addresses rolled out publicly in less than 48 hours. It helps
that I was able to tell them "I am pretty sure it's your regex on valid email
addresses because I can reproduce it with other emails like $this"

I also recall they fixed an issue where "\--" at the top of an email I was
replying to was making the whole thing look like a signature and when I tried
to send it was warning me about an empty message.

------
tiffanyh
I'm going to repost an earlier question I had about FastMail ...

It seems like everyone I read loves using FastMail for personal
email/calendar/contacts.

What I haven't found is many Businesses using FastMail for corporate
email/calendar/contacts.

Can someone compare FastMail (for business usage) to Office 365 and/or Google
Apps?

Original question,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10511000)

~~~
zachlatta
We tried using FastMail for our (small) company, but switched after ~8 months
because we started running into deliverability issues and countless issues
with shared calendars being unshared (or sometimes losing events).

We also couldn't use any of the nice sales tools that integrate with Google
Apps (or any of the tools that make managing calendars easier, like
[https://claralabs.com/](https://claralabs.com/) or
[http://boomerangcalendar.com/](http://boomerangcalendar.com/)). We're now on
Google Apps and very happy.

~~~
bad_user
I've seen a couple of nice tools integrated with Gmail and its web UI. The
ones you mention are like that. However my problem with such tools are that
they are not operating on standards. For one I wouldn't want to be locked into
Gmail. But more importantly, tools depending on proprietary platforms usually
have a short life. For example people loved Mailbox from Dropbox, while I was
the one complaining that it only works with Gmail and iCloud. And I was right,
Mailbox is dying.

And also these tools get access to all of your email, which is a privacy
concern. And in the context of a company, that can mean industrial espionage.
Personally I cannot understand how people can trust things like IFTTT, but
whatever.

~~~
zachlatta
100% agree with you, especially on the privacy concerns. But you have to pick
your battles and, when we were looking into these tools, our battle was not
the privacy of our company email or calendar.

~~~
JupiterMoon
I guess it depends how much of your companies IP is sent around in internal
emails...

~~~
zachlatta
Yeah, that's a good point. Nearly all of our work is open source, so we
weren't too concerned about losing IP.

------
brongondwana
I didn't even get into the remaining compatible with the existing contacts
system. CalDAV was green field, but CardDAV had to integrate with the web,
with spam scanning (whitelist/score bonus for known users), with mailing list
address book groups, ...

~~~
tombrossman
The only feature I miss with your CardDAV implementation is contact photos.
Everything else works very well so I leave email and calendaring to FastMail
but I'm back to self-hosted contacts for now. Really hope this can be added
soon.

~~~
robn_fastmail
They do work, but only if you upload them via CardDAV - we don't have any UI
for them in the web client yet.

~~~
tombrossman
Interesting, I'll have to try again. When I first used the beta I imported a
VCF exported from ownCloud (which I think stored the images as data URIs).
I'll try to figure out how to upload them via CardDAV now, thanks.

------
hedgehog
Miserable, this kind of stuff is why I don't run my own mail server any more.
Happy Fastmail customer since 2006.

~~~
oever
It's really hard to run you own mail server. Much harder than a web server.
This is bad for freedom on the internet.

[http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html](http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html)

~~~
danieltillett
It is not that hard to run your own email server, what is hard is to get your
mail into recipients mailboxes. The big players in this market have basically
decided to block (at random) all mail that doesn't come out of a known email
service.

I have just given up running my own mail server after more than 15 years
because of this problem. Five years ago I had no problems, but these last 12
months have made me decide to give up and just pay.

~~~
tankenmate
It's true it is harder; definitely much harder if you're not a sysadmin by
trade. These days to get mail to deliver you not only need to support SMTP,
but also TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC at a minimum. You also need to make sure that
you aren't inadvertently a source for relaying, or non delivery report (NDR) /
delivery status notification (DSN) bounce source (vis a vis spam with faked
return paths etc).

In short if you don't / won't / can't do the above you are indeed much better
paying someone else to do it (preferably at scale with attention to detail
like fastmail).

~~~
danieltillett
I used to do all these things (not that I am a sysadmin by trade, but after 15
years you get to know the job). Even doing all this the big email players
(Microsoft in particular, but Yahoo and Google are also guilty) will just
ditch your emails without rhyme or reason if it is not coming out of a known
email service.

This didn’t used to happen, but it looks like they have now outsourced their
spam filtering to the email service providers who now act as the gatekeepers
to email ecosystem - email from a known service == good, email from business
that has been around for more than a decade == spam.

~~~
bad_user
The irony is that nowadays most spam I get is from @gmail or @yahoo addresses,
so all they've accomplished is lock-in.

------
eridius
> _In future we plan to have a third separate addressbook for automatically
> added email addresses._

I just want to say that this is something I really want. I don't even care if
it's exposed over CardDAV, I just want to get automatically-added addresses
out of my normal user addressbook. A couple of weeks ago I realized that my
addressbook had a bunch of contacts in it I didn't recognize, so I cleared
them all out. Today I checked and there's 3 more unwanted contacts.

It actually feels very broken to me that FastMail is automatically adding
things to my address book without asking me, and without any obvious way to
turn it off. I don't mind it recording this stuff in a separate addressbook to
use for spam filtering and for auto-filling during message composing, but it
should not be part of my normal addressbook and should not be coming down over
CardDAV for my user addressbook.

The reason this is a problem is because I use my FastMail CardDAV addressbook
as a shared addressbook for me and my wife (she doesn't use FastMail herself
but I do), since we use iCloud for our normal address books but iCloud doesn't
have a way to share addressbooks. It occurs to me now that since I'm actually
using a Family account (for a single user, so I can have a custom domain
without having the more expensive plan), I have a Shared address book
available and I should just switch over to that (since I assume nothing ever
auto-adds there). But it was still a rude surprise to find a bunch of unknown
contacts appearing in my Contacts app on iOS.

~~~
nmjenkins
You can turn this off in Settings -> Preferences -> Auto-save contacts.

~~~
eridius
Good to know, thanks. I'm still looking forward to being able to have auto-
saved contacts in a separate addressbook though, as I do like being able to
autocomplete addresses when composing messages even if I don't want that
address in my contacts list.

------
darrmit
Fastmail is fantastic and their policies and pricing are fantastic as well.
Really happy with them, and moreso after this story and the recent DDoS
troubles they went through.

------
josteink
> Even if we reported a bug to Apple right now, it would still take months at
> a minimum before a fix is in the field and on all devices. So we need to get
> this working for everyone so we can move CardDAV out of beta.

Basically make a hacky workaround, and leave the situation as is for everyone
else.

This is not meant directly as criticism, but one thing I really appreciate
about the OpenBSD team is how they refuse to "fix" things by creating bad code
as a workaround to other broken code.

They always submit patches upstream, and everyone gets to benefit.

If more people had that attitude towards code quality, we might not be in such
a buggy universe as we are now.

------
zenpusher
I've had some deliverability issues with Fastmail, and the search feature is
horrible. Other than that, I've been a satisfied customer for over a year now.

~~~
masnick
I've actually found the search in the web interface to be very fast and pretty
good in terms of finding what I'm looking for with >70k messages.

When I switched from Gmail a few years ago
([https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/](https://masnick.org/2013/07/19/fastmail/)),
one of the most striking changes was how fast FastMail's interface was
compared to Gmail. FastMail did a huge update to their search code just as I
switched, and I haven't looked back.

------
johntash
Can you use multiple domains with fastmail? And do they allow wildcard
addresses/forwarders?

It's probably on the website, but I haven't found it yet.

~~~
toast0
Yes and yes. I'm using those features since I migrated my mail there from
personally hosting an all forwarding config.

~~~
johntash
Cool, thank you for the response! I'll probably give it a shot for my non-
gmail.com emails and see how it goes.

------
treve
Well done guys!

