A quick follow-up to my previous post on ditching FastMail: After telling tech support that I had scheduled my account for deletion — FastMail doesn’t allow instant deletion, reasonably enough — I did hear from someone higher up the chain who looked into what happened. The suggestion from the engineers at FastMail was that, while using their web client, I went into my Archive folder, accidentally selected a message, then accidentally command-selected another message 68,000 conversations further down (which selected all the intervening messages), then accidentally issued the delete command. Later, when (after installing iOS 11) I opened Mail in iPad, either I accidentally emptied the trash of the 68,000 conversations (comprised of 95,000 messages) or the app did it for me.
This does not strike me as a plausible sequence of events.
Now, as I’ve noted, I could restore the deleted items — either from my own backups or (if I caught the problem within a week) from FastMail’s own restore option — and indeed the last person I talked with encouraged me to keep my account open and let them look into the matter further. But at that point I was spooked, and had already moved my mail elsewhere. Maybe if I had gotten a more constructive response early in the process I would have given it another try, and devoted the time to trying to figure out what happened. But I only got that kind of involvement after I had moved my mail and asked them to delete my account.
I truly do appreciate the willingness of the last person I talked to at FastMail to address the problem. But that didn’t make me change my mind about moving on, and I think that’s because our communications technologies today are dependent on trust — trust, above all, that the data you’ve put somewhere will remain where you’ve put it. And because we rely so much on these technologies to get essential work done, when you lose that trust you tend to get anxious, and who needs more anxiety? When I put on my Objectivity Hat, I don’t think that FastMail is any less secure and reliable than other email services I do or might use. But it now feels insecure to me, and that is enough to take me elsewhere.
