[brongondwana]

Basically the problem was datacentre network reliability, power reliability, and the pointlessness of having one EU datacentre which isn't reliable enough to run production out of. We'd still need to replicate to a second datacentre for multi-site safety.

At that point, why bother? We'd have to run two EU datacentres to have data only in EU, and we'd still be under the same actual legal jurisdiction (Australia) either way, so it would be security theater rather than an actual change in risk. We haven't ever given data to US authorities directly, we point every single request from anyone to the Mutual Assistance Treaty with Australia, and that would be the same regardless of where servers are.

In summary, having servers in the EU is 99% security theater, and the other 1% is pointless unless we had two datacenters who were as reliable as NYI have been for us. We haven't found such partners.

[microtonal]

We haven't ever given data to US authorities directly, we point every single request from anyone to the Mutual Assistance Treaty with Australia, and that would be the same regardless of where servers are.

The EU is outside the jurisdiction of FISA courts, whereas New York is not. I am definitely not an expert or lawyer, but I would think this is not just security theater.

I was always hoping that Fastmail offer hosting that is fully in the EU. To me being affected by the Australian, EU, and US jurisdictions is worse than just the Australian and EU jurisdictions. Of course, I would prefer EU-only.

I am extremely happy with Fastmail. But if there was an EU e-mail provider with feature parity, I would probably switch. Not that I expect that that'll happen anytime soon (subdomain addressing and iPhone push notifications are killer features).

[brongondwana]

For sure if we had two separate EU datacentres and no US datacentre contained a copy of the emails that would be not security theater. While there's copies in both jurisdictions, having a copy be outside the US really is security theater though.

The financials of running up two full EU-only datacentres don't make sense for us at the moment given the demographic distribution of our customers. And we haven't had any run-ins with the FISA courts in the nearly 20 years we've been operating.

Of course the past isn't a 100% predictor of the future, but US authorities have always been happy (or at least willing) to accept that our data is under Australian jurisdiction.

[bluGill]

But fastmail and the admins are under Australia law. This makes all attempts to do anything an international incident. FISA cannot do anything directly, they need to contact Australia for help. FISA can order NYI to put in a wiretap - but why bother when we already know there are wiretaps in all the major peering points on the internet.