Fastmail Advent 2024

Hello everyone, and welcome to Fastmail’s Advent blog post series for 2024!

After an experiment with Mastodon posts last year, we’re back to our own platform, where we can do longer posts with multiple links again.

This is a special year for us: 10 years since our very first Advent blog post series, and 25 years since the founding of Fastmail. More importantly, it’s my own 20 year anniversary; I started with FastMail (as we spelled it back then) as a sysadmin/programmer in October 2004!

In this series, you’ll see some throwbacks to posts we made 10 years ago, discussing what’s changed and what’s still the same. You’ll meet some of our newer staff members. You’ll see some of the documents that describe what we do and, more importantly, why we do it. What makes Fastmail special and why after all this time we’re still doing email and still passionate about making email better for everyone.

So pop our RSS feed into your reader, follow us on the socials, or just come back and visit our blog every day between your coffee and your wordle — or whatever guilty pleasure you prefer. Let’s get started:

• Dec 1: Mission statement
• Dec 2: Throwback: security — confidentiality, integrity, and availability
• Dec 3: On moving house — bringing a new data centre online
• Dec 4: Meet the team — Bek
• Dec 5: MySQL InnoDB innodb_trx is cached
• Dec 6: Twoskip and more
• Dec 7: Revision of the Core Email Specifications
• Dec 8: Guiding principles
• Dec 9: Building a blog
• Dec 10: Sunsetting Pobox
• Dec 11: Meet the team—Marc
• Dec 12: Following the Sun