I can't log in!

Forgot your password? Lost your two-step verification device?

You can regain access to your account using our account recovery tool.

As a security measure, there is a 24-hour waiting period on passwords reset through devices, browsers, or locations that are not recognized by the account. If you can, use the account recovery tool on the same device and the same browser, app, or email client you usually use to access your account. This can help make the recovery process faster and easier!

Forget your username?

If you can't remember your username, you can find it using our username recovery tool.

  1. Go to the Fastmail account recovery tool.
  2. Click Start recovery.
  3. Click I don't know my username.
  4. Select whether you'd like to send your username to a recovery email address or phone number, and enter the recovery email or phone number associated with your Fastmail account.
  5. Be sure to click Send username.

You should receive the username at your recovery email address or phone number.

Locked account

If your account has been locked by Fastmail, you will see a message letting you know when you try to log in. We must do this if someone manages to steal your username and password (usually through phishing or key-logging malware) and starts using your account to send spam.

If your account has been locked, you can unlock it using our account recovery tool. This will verify your identity as the real owner of the account and reset your password.

Once your account has been unlocked, please check your devices for malware—there's no use unlocking your account if it's going to be immediately stolen again! We also recommend that you enable two-step verification to make it much harder for your account to be compromised in the future.

Expired account

If your subscription expires, your account will not be deleted immediately. However, an unpaid account will soon have sending and receiving disabled, and if it remains unpaid we will suspend access to the account entirely. You will still be able to log in via the web to make a payment and reactivate your account for some time.

Please note, we do eventually delete the entire account if the subscription is not renewed. Once this occurs, we are unable to recover any data and you will need to sign up a new account if you wish to resume using Fastmail.

Connectivity problems

If you get a message saying "The page cannot be displayed" when you try to log in, you may be having network connectivity problems.

If you suspect Fastmail is down, the first place to go is our status dashboard, www.fastmailstatus.com. Our status dashboard is hosted externally, and we post all server status updates here as quickly as we can.

If there are no recent updates posted on the status dashboard, then the problem may be with internet connection between you and Fastmail, which is beyond our control. Your internet service provider may be having difficulty reaching us due to routing problems on their end.

Fastmail has a self monitoring system on every server that tests every service every 2 minutes. We check every externally accessible port (e.g. SMTP, IMAP, POP, HTTP, etc.) to see that it is accepting connections and responding as expected. If any tests fail, the system will page a developer to look into the problem immediately.

Diagnosing a connectivity issue

To check if Fastmail is generally down, or if it's just your computer, you can check our status on DownForEveryoneOrJustMe. This verifies whether Fastmail is available from elsewhere on the internet.

If you'd like to check where the problem is located between your computer and our server, you can try this from the command line:

  • For Mac OS X or Linux, open the Terminal application and type traceroute fastmail.com.
  • For Windows, click Start, type command prompt, click the pop-up that appears, and then type tracert fastmail.com.

At the point where congestion occurs, you will see one or more *s. It is out of our control unless this point is the very last hop, to Fastmail.

Note for Mac OS X or Linux users: If the traceroute does not show all *s in the last line, the following commands may also yield useful information:

  • For problems with web access: telnet fastmail.com 80
  • For problems sending mail through the SMTP server: telnet smtp.fastmail.com 587

If you are contacting our support team about a problem with connectivity, it is helpful to include the full results of all of these commands. To copy the output under Windows, drag your mouse over the output while holding down the button, and then press the Enter key to copy it. In an email, press Ctrl+V to paste it. It would also be useful if you could let us know:

  • If you are behind a firewall
  • If you are at work or school
  • If you are using a modem, cable modem, ADSL
  • Or any other information about your setup.

Having trouble logging in on a third-party app

All third-party applications require the creation of an app password. If you attempt to sign in to a third-party app with your Fastmail account's master password, you will receive an error message stating that your password is incorrect. You can generate new app passwords by following the steps on this page. You will only need to enter your app password into your third-party app once, so there is no need to memorize it. 

Was this article helpful?
845 out of 2227 found this helpful