FastMail Advent 2014

Welcome to the inaugural FastMail Advent Blog. One post per day for the next 24 days.

The idea came from a reponse I made to a question on reddit about physical locations of servers and their impact on security.

I wrote that up in more detail, with links to blog posts about what FastMail does to address various categories of security risk, and suddenly found myself with something much too long for a single blog post. I wanted to split it up into separate posts, and then started thinking about frequency - and meanwhile my daughters were asking about advent calendars for the year, and it clicked.

We’ve been promising to blog more about some of our technology, and also about some of the less-well-known features - here was a perfect opportunity. You won’t just be hearing from me, I’m going to try to get everyone to write up something about their areas of expertise.

There’s a fine internet tradition in what we’re doing here, check out the perl advent calendar for example. They’ve been doing it for years.

All the days are now complete. Here are links to the individual posts:

1. Email Search System
2. Security - Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability
3. Push it real good
4. Standalone Mail Servers
5. Security - Integrity
6. User authentication
7. Automated installation
8. Squire: FastMail’s rich text editor
9. Email Authentication
10. Security - Availability
11. FastMail Support
12. FastMail’s MySQL Replication: Multi-Master, Fault Tollerance, Performance. Pick Any Three
13. FastMail DNS hosting
14. On Duty!
15. Putting the fast in FastMail: Loading your mailbox quickly
16. Security - Confidentiality
17. Testing
18. Billing and Payments — a potted history
19. Mailr
20. Open-sourcing OvertureJS – the JS lib that powers FastMail
21. File Storage
22. CardDAV Beta Release
23. JMAP — A better way to email
24. Working at FastMail