An interesting service, and very competitively priced. But for me, my email is fairly mission-critical. It's not something I'm prepared to endow in a one-man shop. I don't mean to offend, but it looks like something that might be used as something of a novelty. Were I to use it, I'd be backing up my email locally.
I've been using purelymail for multiple domains (with low traffic granted) for about ten years. I've never experienced an outage so far. Support has never failed to respond in the under 5 times I needed it.
I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you. Fastmail is particularly good in that respect, since it takes periodic backups for you, allowing deleted items to be accessed.
To put things in perspective, I dare say that many large commercial organisations who rely on Office 365 are not backing up emails locally. They do likely have fancy retention holds preventing nefarious actors who compromise access to the account nuking things. I think Fastmail's backup is limited to 7 days. Outside that is a risk; it's one I'll take.
Maybe we have different perceptions of risk. But I think one can reasonably take the view it is unnecessary to have an independent copy in this scenario.
As miles pointed out, the risk is not that they lose your data. The risk is that you lose your account.
They don’t owe you a data download if they decide to terminate the business relationship which they can do at any time without notice or cause. You agree to this when you sign up.
Not having backups of important data in your own possession is just plain stupid. You’re paying them to be online 24/7 and speak IMAP/SMTP, not to archive your data in perpetuity.
This is such a remote possibility, at least with Fastmail, that I do not consider it reasonable to implement my own backup solution. If they are going to shut down, it isn't going to occur imminently and without any warning.
It's an easy statement to make: "just take a backup". But that requires me to dedicate time to implementing a secure and automated solution (and of course, routinely testing restoring it). I'm not doing that, because I pay the service to do that for me. If I'm going to that effort, I may as well self-host.
It's possible your definition of mission critical just doesn't match up to that of those responding to your comment.
If the loss of a set of data would threaten the existence of the company, that's mission critical. While having a sophisticated niche tech partner handle day to day operations of that data is one part of managing the risk of data loss, if one put all their eggs in only that one basket, that would possibly indicate one has a lack of experience with tech vendors and hasn't read anything about managing risk.
Every business should have at least one routinely tested, independent path for mission critical data recovery.
I think you're right. But I also do not think Purelymail falls in the same camp that Fastmail or Office 365 do, so far as expectations of reliability and business continuity are concerned.
The broader question of whether it is appropriate to independently back up your own data in large scale cloud services need not be answered. It is simply sufficient to recognise the risks are far greater when dealing with a one man operation.
Why would I lose access to my Fastmail account? That risk is a remote one. I have 2FA, they take backups and provide support, and they are a reliable company (at least, not a one-person operation).
