Fastmail lets you choose: EU or US data region
Fastmail offers EU data region
Fastmail now offers an EU data region, with primary data stored on its own servers in Amsterdam. Users can choose their region at signup or switch in settings. The company emphasizes transparency about data replication, backups, and legal obligations, noting that while EU data is primarily in Europe, replicas and backups are still in the US, and some metadata is shared across all sites.
If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
- jacquesm
EU data regions are a reflexive action by companies that try to hold on to their EU customers (and more and more are leaving, surprisingly the larger ones seem to be leading here). Realize that as long as you are still hosted on US owned infrastructure or that if there are US (or: five-eyes) owned companies anywhere in the stack your data can still be forcibly pulled and often without you being aware that this happened. There are only very few such stacks that are 100% owned by EU entities.
- altairprime
EU folks, note the warnings threaded throughout this post: this is not currently any sort of panacea against US or AU data hosting risks, but it will make your data noticeably closer to home. Fastmail (Australia) merged with Pobox (Philadelphia) resulting in a complex tri-national law/risk surface when the EU is involved, so go in eyes wide open having read this in full. That everyone will overinterpret “EU data region” to mean “for privacy” here until reading the article is completely understandable; I empathize, having done the same.
- robin_reala
Posted on the previous submission for this: it’s a good start, but from the article:
If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
- tumdum_
Or you can just use any of the actual European companies (I’m using Tuta).
- igl
Australian company so: lol. Snowden triggered a few narrow real wins but the broader surveillance apparatus adapted, survived, and in some ways grew. Things were just legalised.
- cube2222
Nice, as a European customer, I appreciate this.
Side note, I moved to Fastmail a couple years ago, and so far I’ve been very happy with it! The Gmail migrator works great, too.
- user00005
The local government cannot get access to the servers in Amsterdam?
I use Fastmail but just consider it safe from third party advertisers. If I wanted safety from governments I would use something else, or at least encrypt my email contents.
- trocado
This may not have much practical consequence, but still there's some symbolic value which is welcomed in today's geopolitical climate.