Fastmail is hosted by NYI.net in Lower Manhattan, a major FreeBSD shop. The site lists Opera as one of their customers.
The very nature of e-mail leads me to conclude that it really doesn't matter where an e-mail provider is located, because it will always be intercepted at some point. One can use another e-mail service, but if the people you talk to still use gmail, then does it really matter?
Perhaps it's time to talk about new messaging systems, with encryption by default, and a new address and routing system coupled with Tor.
We've had anonymous remailers for about a decade. Maybe people will start caring.
Bitmessage is up and coming, but needs a lot more development.
You could use OTR with servers for offline support and contact management (jabber, etc), but this isn't as convenient as email.
OTR (instead of PGP) over email is a theoretically possible, but the problem is still the same: No money in open source encryption == No easy to use interface.
The very nature of e-mail leads me to conclude that it really doesn't matter where an e-mail provider is located, because it will always be intercepted at some point. One can use another e-mail service, but if the people you talk to still use gmail, then does it really matter?
Perhaps it's time to talk about new messaging systems, with encryption by default, and a new address and routing system coupled with Tor.