Alternative IP addresses/hostnames in Singapore for accessing FastMail.

Please only make the hosts file changes listed below if you have the technical knowledge to figure out what you’re doing and are willing to remember that this is still quite experimental… (and if anything goes wrong, you’ll remember you made this change and remove it before complaining we’re broken…)

I’ve just purchased a VPS (virtual server) in Singapore with 4 IP addresses which is configured to connect via a VPN link to our servers in New York. This means so long as you have connectivity to Singapore and Singapore has connectivity to the U.S., you should be able to use these instead:

203.174.86.145 dav.messagingengine.com
203.174.86.144 www.fastmail.fm
203.174.86.143 web.messagingengine.com
203.174.86.138 mail.messagingengine.com

Alternatively, there are the additional names:

sg.dav.messagingengine.com
sg.www.fastmail.fm
sg.web.messagingengine.com
sg.mail.messagingengine.com

NOTE: you’ll get SSL certificate warnings if you try to do SSL to the names above.  You can check that the certificates themselves are valid and point to the same name without the sg. in front.

Our eventual plan is to respond to connectivity problems by serving these responses via DNS to the areas that we think will get better connectivity via Singapore.  In particular, this was set up to help the users in China who are having trouble connecting directly to the U.S. due to a cable failure.