apologies for being off topic, but: I am a long time Fastmail customer, but the law passed in Australia yesterday has me somewhat concerned. Fastmail is an Australian company. Anyone else concerned?
As far as I can tell, it changes nothing, assuming that your email was sent as plain text. Although Fastmail stores your email on encrypted disks [1], it of course has the encryption keys for these disks. Even before the new law, they would have been subject to any Australian search warrant requiring that they hand over your email, and would not have had any technical reason for not complying.
In general, unless you and your correspondents are using PGP or some such, your email is readable by anyone who can obtain a search warrant in the country where your email provider resides. (Protonmail may or may not be an exception [2]).
Australian here. The law passed on Thursday is a massive concern, but in the case of an email provider there isn't as much of a change from what they could already do (TCNs aren't necessary -- they fundamentally already have collection capability unless you are using PGP for everything).
However there are some other worrying changes like the fact that TANs and TARs are secret and have no judicial review. Warrants (even the new computer access warrants that were passed in the same bill) have judicial review. But at the end of the day, they'd be serving a warrant to fastmail, not you.
Personally I use mailbox.org, and one of the really nice features is that you can give them a PGP public key and they'll encrypt everything you receive. So in the case of a warrant (though Germany has different laws on that matter) they could, at most, get the contents of new emails.
Author here, I had completely missed that news. It is a bit concerning, you are totally right. I have edited the article to mention it and alternatives, thank you.
At least of the last time I looked around (within the past year), it's the only major cloud-based option that isn't ad-supported, but does offer all the extra goodies like calendars.
Take a look at posteo.de for ad-free email with a strong focus on privacy. It’s also way cheaper than the lowest plan that Fastmail has. Posteo is a private company, doesn’t take investor funding and has been profitable.
There are a couple of things I don’t like about Posteo (as a customer):
1. It recycles deleted addresses/aliases after six months and makes them avaiufor someone else to claim and use. Ideally, this should be never done to protect customers. Fastmail also recycles deleted addresses/emails within a few months (sooner than Posteo does, IIRC).
2. It provides only two aliases in the base pricing and additional aliases (if many are required) will increase the cost. Fastmail provides 600 aliases in every plan! So if you’re heavy on aliases, Fastmail would be cheaper.
Other providers similar to this that I haven’t subscribed to, but you can read up on or try, are mailfence (has a free plan as well), runbox and mailbox.org. All of them have been around for quite sometime and also provide IMAP access (which is important if you want to migrate email content from one provider to another).
Author here, thank you for the alternatives suggestions! I have edited the post and included them. I did not want the article to look like an ad for Fastmail by any means
Author here, really sorry if it felt like an ad, it is not! I have edited the app to include links to competitors. My point is to encourage people to resist Google's hegemony