Spacemail is down, and I blame them, but mostly myself

A few months ago I ditched Google Workspace and Google Mail entirely. I moved everything to iCloud Mail (custom domains), plus Spaceship for the rest. Spacemail rarely gave me trouble. Today, it's a different story.

From what I can piece together, an entire data center is under emergency. That's taken down WordPress hosting, payment systems, email, and probably a few other things I haven't discovered yet.

Some of the noise going around says a planned maintenance window went completely sideways.

Luckily, I moved off WordPress a while back and custom-code every blog and site I run, so that part doesn't touch me. But email does. And of all the days this could happen, it happens on the one I need it most.

Read also: Leaving WordPress After Twenty Years, in About a Day

A single point of failure

I should never have put my entire email flow, work email included, on one platform. That's a mistake, plain and simple, and today is showing me exactly how much of a single point of failure that really is.

Right when I need to test things, log in to multiple platforms, or respond to people who've found my micro-SaaS products, I can't respond to any of them.

I noticed something was off before I even understood why. The notification icon in my custom dashboard, the one that shows unread email counts, just went blank. That's when it clicked: Spacemail wasn't slow; it was completely fucking broken.

I blame them, but I also blame myself

In 43 years, I've never had an email provider go down like this. Not once. Every other service I've used had some fallback or contingency plan running quietly in the background. I assumed Spaceship had the same. Today it doesn't look that way.

I still trust Spaceship overall. They're a subsidiary of Namecheap, and Namecheap is one of the most established domain registrars around. But this took a real chunk out of that trust.

Most of the blame is still on me, though. Keeping "casual inboxes" on Spacemail is one thing. Keeping the critical ones there is another.

Now I'm staring down two options I don't love: crawling back to Google Workspace, or finding something else entirely. But I would HATE going back to Google Workspace.

The complaints are piling up

I'm not the only one feeling this. Spaceship's own status account on X has been posting update after update, and the replies underneath are not kind. The fixes mentioned so far are about payments and BTC transactions, which do nothing for the people just trying to get their inbox or website back.

I don't know how deep this goes on their end, or how much of their infrastructure is genuinely on fire right now. But it's not looking good. And it stings a little, because up until today, I thought Spacemail was a genuinely solid service.

I'm not going to just wait this out. I'm reassessing where my single points of failure are, starting with email, and moving my most critical inboxes off Spacemail.

Not all of them, just the ones that matter. Today made that decision for me.