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.
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 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 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.
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.
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!
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.