US or EU? Your choice

Many of you have been telling us that where your email is stored matters to you. There are various reasons for this, like local law, keeping your data close to home, or compliance.

You can now make the European Union the primary home for your Fastmail data, on our own secure servers in Amsterdam. Previously, all accounts were stored entirely in the US. Now you have more choice.

Built by us, not rented from someone else

We’ve installed our own servers, co-located in a secure facility in Amsterdam, set up by our own engineers. This new location is built to the same high standards as our existing infrastructure in Philadelphia and St Louis, with our own hardware and our own software — specified right down to the exact model of disks in each machine.

In all our locations, data is stored encrypted at rest inside locked racks, and managed by our in-house team. We don’t rent computing or management services from a big cloud provider and pass on their assurances. That’s how we’ve approached privacy, reliability, and performance for more than 25 years.

For many years, we have kept at least two copies of everybody’s email on separate servers in their primary location, and at least one more in a geographically separate location to ensure data safety.

Here’s the detail about where your data will flow based on your regional choice.

If your account is in the EU region:

• Your primary copy of data will live in the EU. The main, live copy of your mail and files will sit on our own servers in Amsterdam.
• Incoming mail will go to EU servers by preference if you are using your own domain and Fastmail’s nameservers, or an address at one of Fastmail’s EU-region domains.
• Our desktop, web, and mobile apps will connect to EU servers.  Day to day, our apps will talk directly to our Amsterdam infrastructure. If those servers are ever unavailable, connections fall back to one of our US locations so you can still reach your mail.
• Resilient replicas of your data will live in the US (for now). As we only have one location in Europe so far, the geographically separate copy will remain on servers in one of our US locations.

If your account is in the US region:

• Most of your data lives in the US. Both the primary and replica locations of your mail and files will sit on our own servers in Philadelphia or St Louis.
• Incoming mail goes to US servers by preference if you are using your own domain and Fastmail’s nameservers, or an address at one of Fastmail’s US-region domains.
• Our desktop, web, and mobile apps will connect to US servers.  Day to day, our apps will talk directly to whichever US location contains your primary data copy. If those servers are ever unavailable, connections fall back to our other US location so you can still reach your mail.

What applies to everyone:

• We favour availability, so if your home location is down, you will temporarily connect to another of our locations so you can continue to access your data.
• If you are using one of Fastmail’s generic non-regional domains then your mail may go in or out via either location.
• Emergency backups for everybody are stored in our Philadelphia location. As well as the live replicas of your data, we also keep a separate set of encrypted backups taken every few hours for every account. These are in Philadelphia for all users at the moment.
• Some data is replicated to all sites, so parts of everyone’s data are in both Europe and America. This includes email addresses and other user/customer metadata, storage for websites and the standalone Files feature, and the details of any third party services you have linked.
• Logs are in the US. All system logs are consolidated into a single place for monitoring system health and to assist with customer support.
• Third party services are shared. The third parties we use for debugging, billing, and support are linked to your account in the same way regardless of your region.
• Your email client config (IMAP/POP3) does not have to change. The generic hostnames will proxy internally to your active server. We’re working on making those terminate at the closest network location. However, we also offer regional server names for each protocol to give you more control over where you connect.
• We’re an Australian company, subject to Australian law including legal-cooperation treaties between Australia and other countries. Wherever your data is stored, we will respond the same way to lawful requests from relevant authorities (see our transparency report).

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.

We made a prediction, but you can change it

We pre-selected all the users with billing addresses in or near Europe for the EU region. If you are one of these, an encrypted copy of your data was transferred to Europe in advance of this announcement, and will shortly become your primary copy. You can change region to the US and your data will migrate back.

Conversely, if we didn’t identify you for our initial group, you can put yourself in the queue to be migrated. Moves this way will be a little slower because there’s no copy of the data already in the region, so we have to sync every email across the ocean! For those moving back, there’s already a copy in the US, so only a small amount of data needs to be synchronised to fully reconcile your mailbox.

This blog post is all about giving you the facts and the tools to make the trade-off that’s right for you. Most providers decide for you and tell you as little as they can get away with. We’d rather show our work — what’s replicated, what isn’t, who can compel what — and let you choose with your eyes open.

How it works

When you sign up, you choose your region, and the primary copy of your data is placed on our secure servers in that region, with a copy also replicated to a geographically separate location. Regardless of your choice, all copies of your data are encrypted at rest. Choosing a region changes where your primary copy lives, not how well it’s protected.

If you were with us when we selected the users to transfer, we’ve pre-set your region based on your billing address. If you signed up more recently, you’ll have been allocated to the US. Either way, if you’d prefer a different region, you can switch it in your settings.

Switching region

Go to Settings → Users & Sharing → Team Settings, then look below GDPR for the Data residency section. Pick your location and we’ll move your primary copy for you. You’ll see it go from queued, to transferring, to done, and your account keeps working the whole time. You can change your mind and move back, though we may place reasonable limits on how frequently you can change region!

Your data, your call

We’re really excited to have another location, and to be able to offer this option to you. Setting this up was a significant investment. We considered a surcharge for choosing the EU, but we don’t believe that’s right. We proudly charge a fair rate for an exceptional service, and this choice should be yours. Select the region that is right for you.