OkCupid's Email Validation Fiasco: A Security Nightmare

2025-03-22
OkCupid's Email Validation Fiasco: A Security Nightmare

Fastmail experienced a significant email validation vulnerability exploited by OkCupid, resulting in a deluge of spam emails to their official addresses, including a never-used junk address. Attackers used the vulnerability to register multiple accounts, sending fake 'someone likes you' messages and even impersonating users to modify profiles. OkCupid's customer support response was merely to block the email addresses, failing to address the root issue, exposing their disregard for user data security. This incident highlights the importance of robust email verification mechanisms and the lack of responsibility from companies regarding user data security. Fastmail recommends users employ different email addresses for different services to mitigate risks.

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JMAP Turns 10: A Decade of Open Email Protocol

2024-12-23
JMAP Turns 10: A Decade of Open Email Protocol

Fastmail celebrates the 10th anniversary of JMAP, its open-source email protocol. Over the past decade, JMAP has evolved from initial concept to a mature standard, incorporating email, contacts, and calendar functionalities, through industry workshops, collaborations with developers, and IETF standardization. Looking ahead, Fastmail plans to enhance the Cyrus IMAP server and continue promoting JMAP adoption to improve user experience and make it the industry standard for email.

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Fastmail: Why We Stick With Our Own Hardware

2024-12-22
Fastmail: Why We Stick With Our Own Hardware

Fastmail, with 25 years of experience running its own hardware, details why they choose this approach over cloud services. Through careful hardware planning, in-house operational expertise, and maximizing hardware lifespan, they achieve significant cost optimization. From initial SAS and SATA drives to current NVMe SSDs and the ZFS filesystem, Fastmail continually upgrades, leveraging Zstandard compression for increased efficiency and reliability. A cost comparison of cloud storage, HDD upgrades, and building NVMe SSD servers led them to choose the latter for superior reliability, performance, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to fully utilize their internal network.

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