We've still got Confidentiality and Availability to go in the security series :)
(I've got a couple more to write myself as well - but while I've managed to get other people writing, I'm going to sit on mine for a bit and save them for a day when I don't have anything else to use. It's a surprisingly large amount of work putting together a detailed blog post every day, and I really only even thought of doing it a couple of days before we had to start)
Question for brongondwana: was there a discussion about how much to reveal about Fastmail's inner workings? That is, when do articles moves from discussing best practices (and already open source code) and into revealing trade secrets of running a top-quality email service?
My response was this: Honestly, there's not that much that is a trade secret about how we operate. We're not running at such high margins that there's a big opportunity for somebody to take what they learn from these blog posts and build a cheaper service to undercut us.
I'm still on the train on the way to work - my wife starts work earlier than I do, so I have to get the kids to school first. I pinged the rest of the team over IRC, and they added:
"we don't have any trade secrets. email isn't unknown, just complex. if you have a team of appropriately skilled people you can do it too, but if you have a team of appropriately skilled people you're probably going to do something less painful"
The thing is, it is actually pretty hard. I got paged in the middle of the night a couple of days ago when our forwarding IP got listed on ips.backscatterers.org. We watch a ton of blocklists to make sure our outbound IPs are clean, so legitimate email doesn't get blocked. In this case it was a forwarding account, and they said "check your logs at this timestamp plus or minus a minute, it will be obvoious which email caused you to get listed". Yeah, right. There were thousands of emails within those couple of minutes - it's OK if you send 5 emails per day. The only option would be to lock the user who was the cause of the report through innocently reporting an email that was forwarded through a FastMail alias. So we had to stop checking that blocklist.
We deal with stolen accounts _every_day_. We deal with hacking attempts, DOS attacks, weird crap like Optus/Vodafone mobile networks in Australia being unable to access us for a few hours because of a fault in Singtel's network for packets going _back_ from New York. Nothing we, or even our datacentre could fix - but of course most of our customers don't know, they just want their email, and it's not working. Most of the other sites those customers access are in Australia or at least US West Coast, so it looks like it's just us that's down.
So yeah, if somebody reads our blog posts and decides that running an email service is for them, good luck to them I say. I welcome their contributions to the Open Source projects I work on :)
Thank you! That's great to see it laid out that way. Wonderful (at least from the point of view of someone not having to solve all these situations) to see email described as a problem which requires such continual and skilled care. I guess it's still a problem which scales (witness all the FastMail subscribers, myself included), but may not be the model YC-style business, at least as it currently stands?
They already have a data center in Iceland. But that's an extra replica, they do not provide an option to store your mail only there.
On the other hand, I am not sure it is overly naive to assume that if your data is not in the US, it's safe. The primary rational motive would be to show with your wallet that hoarding data is not appreciated.
