As for using social media to take issue reports: What will you do when you need PII or have to reassign the issue or reassign part of the issue and those people need to be able to contact the user?
"Why place the initial burden on a paying customer?" Because it creates a better service for everyone to have a known way of doing things.
Is this snippet from their Twitter bio clear?
"If you need assistance, please submit a ticket: http://fastmail.com/support"
But for the past year they’ve been nitpicking their GUIs and UX and it’s maddening. They take away or move intuitive and accessible features with no replacement, or end up making you do more clicking/tapping to get there.
I have sent feedback to support many times. Sometimes they revert changes within a week, and sometimes it’s just the canned “we strive to always enhance our customer experience” copy.
Either way, it’s disruptive and unwelcome. Their 2021 era UI was perfect. When they started announcing partnerships with other companies I think they also ended up with more users that are consumers and that creates tension with prosumers and professionals.
Fastmail used to be a haven for people who cared about email and privacy, and many of us chose them based on our own professional experiences running email infrastructure. But now it’s quickly “consumerizing” and their designers clearly have the “to enhance is to remove” mentality.
And as a reseller — don’t get me started on their new billing system and model, which is less reliable than what came before, less flexible, and was launched with no real supporting documentation.
/rant.
The service is still fantastic though in terms of speed, infrastructure, etc. I trust their technology a lot. Their UX/UI people need a time out. Whoever replaced their “Moonpig” billing system with Paddle did the users a disservice.
I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing to do, but I understand it.
This is an interesting point. There is some satisfaction from the likes, the comments, and the assurance that _someone_ is seeing your frustration even if the company does nothing.
I admit my second message was terse, but the correct social media response for a critical outage is "we're looking into it". Not "if you want support, go here".
Like I said, I do not have time to hunt for whatever support channels exist and file a ticket. I pay $50 a year so they can deliver a working product, including triaging their own issues.
I strongly disagree.
For those reading who may not be on X, here's Fastmail's response:
> Hello Andrew! Can you please contact our support team so we can look into this for you? http://fastmail.com/support
That seems entirely appropriate to me, for several reasons:
- it's extremely unlikely that the person managing their social media profiles is a technical expert
- their contact page likely feeds into a ticketing system, which means they can track the issue and actually make sure to respond to you
- it's entirely possible that response was automatedTheir messaging probably could have been better here to say "we're looking into this. If you have time, please file a support request".
On Fastmail.com, the support request is two clicks away, under the big ? button in the upper right and "Contact Support". I'm not sure how much time you have but it took me less than 1 minute to find this button and submit from my logged in account.
This time, I was on the support ticket window, but the penny dropped and I realised it was a service outage / degradation. So I decided to hold back for a bit before filing a ticket.
Based on experience with their service, I trust that their people know what they are doing, and are already on the job.
And following FastMail's reply
> Hello Andrew! Can you please contact our support team so we can look into this for you? fastmail.com/support
They say:
> Don't have time. Consider my tweet the bug report.
Sorry but this asshole behavior. Bugs happen. No need to do public shaming and being rude to the company for that.
Personally I don't really use their web interface, but I tried it now and it all works just fine (on both prod and beta).
There is far too much assholery in the world. It's never OK.
There's no amount of money you can pay to make this behavior not shitty. Shitty behavior is never a good look, but sometimes it's understandable. If you refrain from being shitty, you won't have to worry about whether or not it's understandable.
Also, the only reason that someone can be shitty and get results is because other people aren't. (In this case, "submitting" a bug report via Twitter and still getting a resolution is possible because other people reported it through the proper channels.)
"Things Happen", in production, to the best of us (and FM's pretty damned good at their job). Pretty sure someone's pager duty has been going off like mad.
A little over half an hour ago, the mail UI broke for me on Android, and then I panicked and went to desktop web and it broke there too. Also on different networks.
As far as I can tell, stuff from their CDN is 404-ing, and a JSON api POST request appears to be going in infinite loop with 200 OKs.
The webmail piece seems to be borked... Calendar, Files, Notes etc. are at least rendering.
Back to business as usual.
detritus•2h ago
As soon as I realised that both my webmail and my phone app were buggered, it was probably not just a Me Problem.
antongribok•2h ago
It started out as not being able to search, but the situation is quickly deteriorating and now I'm unable to open pretty much any email message.
Some content seems to briefly show up and then it quickly disappears and after that, it's as if cache has been invalidated and you can't get back into it.
detritus•2h ago
toomuchtodo•2h ago
mistertrotsky•2h ago
aaviator42•2h ago
Edit: apparently "hybrid apps" using webviews are allowed as long as they're not "thin wrappers" for websites and provide meaningful functionality. See also: the capacitor framework.