As Fastmail, we also recommend that people get their own domain. Being able to move is prudent regardless of how good any one host is! Own your own namespace :) We would rather keep people because we're good, not because they're locked in.
I really don't understand the criticism. Fastmail have said that they will obey the law (all of it, not just this bit). The likelihood of them a) being required to assist under this particular law, or b) be able to provide the particular assistances required under this law are minimal.
The mail is encrypted at rest to protect against illegal access, not legal access. Fastmail are transparent on what they will or won't do. Where's the problem?
I'd be more worried about a programmer working on the bowels of OpenSSL or LibreSSL etc and being seconded by ASIO/ASIS/DSD than about companies.
I'm a long time (and very happy) fastmail customer and I have no problem with their position. Not because "I've got nothing to hide", but because if I did, I'd know not to use their service.
I depply despise the telecommunications assistance act. I think it's badly written and comes from an inherently uninformed and impractical idea that you can legislate against people keeping secrets. I hope that the reviews in Parliament right now, and, hopefully, the changes to be made under a new Labor government, will remove a lot of the stupidity.
I guessing people are concerned about the width and breadth of the potential searches.
We've seen at least the US government have some fairly expansive requests in order to track down one single person, and they never delete the data once they obtain it. So a copy of those records will forever be outside of your control, potentially without you ever knowing it.
People built up unreasonable expectations about the security of the service, and the legal changes attracted attention.
End of the day, if you have a scenario where a third party is the custodian of your information, that custodian has control of it and will follow whatever legal framework that they are obliged to follow.
Another happy customer here! Incidentally this does not worry me as I don't use email for any secure or private communications and I don't think anyone ever should. At best any warrants will get a list of crap I've bought on Amazon and Aliexpress.
I get that email was not originally designed to be secure, but do you really not want to keep your amazon account, with your credit card number and home address, secure and private?
Me too. Custom domain on FastMail. I'm not (too much) worried about AU's search warrants. My original move from gmail was because I got annoyed by the Google approach to everything. This said, if you happen to move the servers in a more privacy-friendly country I'd not complain.
I have a domain for my family with Fastmail. I miss the old family plan. The parents and children in our family have wildly different levels of email usage. A family plan would allow us to share pool resources instead of paying full price for barely-used children's account.
We are on a grandfathered plan now and are putting off upgrading to a current plan as long as possible because it's a huge price jump to start paying for my kids to have 25 GB of storage which they are barely using.
Just wanted to say Thanks for the good service. I'm a happy customer and I'm not planning to move. In particular I really liked recent iOS app updates. Good job!
