The post is from April, I'm reposting this because it's even more relevant now, with Australia's data retention due to take effect next week.
As a founder of an Australian startup that facilitates communication it's interesting to hear that using international hosting seems to bypass the requirements. IANAL etc. As the post mentions this is a pretty good way to discourage investment in local tech infrastructure.
It's nice to see this blog post getting more traffic. Unlike our average blog post which we make up out of our own heads, this one had a bunch of legal research behind it by actual lawyers.
And yes, totally agree. It made us put our plans of an Australian datacentre on the shelf for the foreseeable future.
Data in Australia is already crazy expensive (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...) and we're working at the latency problem from the other direction (http://jmap.io) as well, so we're focusing more on making the location of the datacentres not matter so much. We're currently in Amsterdam, Los Angeles and New York.
> Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world
PSA: This is why you don't privatise public infrastructure
Wow that CloudFlare link is pretty damning. It's interesting contrasting that to both sides of politics trying to talk up the "innovation economy".
To your credit, I'm in Melbourne too and have always thought Fastmail was really snappy, which I assumed was due to Australian servers. So it looks like I was wrong, and your Jmap strategy is right.
I also switched from Google Apps / Gmail to FastMail and I can't go back even if I wanted to.
Biggest difference between Gmail and FastMail in how they handle email is tags vs classic IMAP folders. This can be a turn off for people, but for my personal email I discovered that I want folders. This is because my personal email also has the role of backing up my work email. I've lost work email in the past when switching jobs and I don't want that to happen again. And with FastMail I can simply download my work email in its own folder, so it doesn't have to pollute my personal email. FastMail is also very flexible in its settings. Setting up filters is easy in Gmail but limited compared with what you can do with those Sieve scripts in FastMail. Speaking of the interface, I now like FastMail's interface more, as it makes it easier to switch between folders, or back and forth between email, calendar, contacts or notes.
SPAM filtering in Gmail is said to be extremely good, however a certain class of spam has been reaching my Gmail Inbox for the past 2 years with me being unable to stop it - I made the mistake of giving away an email address on my blog and now I get emails related to SEO marketing and bullshit. In Gmail I cannot setup a filter that automatically marks an email as spam if it contains the word SEO. But in FastMail I can do just that.
FastMail does CalDAV for the calendar and CardDAV for their contacts. I can sync my Android phone and it works out great. IMAP is also very responsive and standards compliant. And personally I feel good about rewarding a smaller player that plays nice with others because monoculture are bad ;-)
Another thing I did after that was to create 2 Google accounts. I'm using one Google account for Google Play purchases and nothing else. This is because Google Play purchases are not transferable. So for example I have an old phone lying around that I gave to my son for playing. Restricted accounts only work on tablets, don't know why, so my son ended up having access to my email, which is not cool. Plus I'm all for paying for apps, but I should be able to share my purchases with my wife. Like if I buy a GPS device, we can both use it, but if I buy a maps app my wife can't borrow it without borrowing my account, along with my email. And I don't like this kind of lock-in.
There are some downsides. I could not find a good email client that can do IMAP Idle. FastMail's app works on Android but I don't like the UI. On the bright side that app is simply exposing their web interface, so FastMail works very well in a mobile browser, something that Gmail doesn't do and it matters when borrowing other people's devices.
All in all it's been a great transition for me and best of all is that I can now try out other Google services and products without feeling remorse or fear of lock-in ;-)
Hmm, I've found fastmail to be generally buggy. The latest incident is their calendar doesn't interoperate with outlook; fastmail was off by an hour from an exchange invite. (And while the exchange invite did look correct to me, if the bug is exchange's the problem is fastmail's given the relative market shares.)
CalDav is also shoddily implemented; for example, on android using fastmail's recommended 3rd party caldav sync, creating a meeting on your phone (calendar client using caldav to sync to fastmail calendar) will not send meeting invites. Surprise!
FastMail's message compose is also unusable on mobile firefox if there is quoted text in the compose area.
I use it because I'm removing google products from my life; you should just watch for the above bugs.
Off by 1 hour seems to me like a timezone issue. I interact with people from an organization that uses Exchange heavily and I haven't had problems on invites I received or have sent. Note that Outlook 2000 and Outlook XP/2002 have problems and email clients like Thunderbird can treat that. You should contact FastMail's support though.
You are right that FastMail doesn't send out invitations when using third-party clients. FastMail is mentioning it on their page [1] promising they'll implement it, however I think this should not be the job of FastMail, but that of the client. For example this works fine in Thunderbird because Thunderbird sends those invites by itself, all you need to do is to specify which email address is linked to which calendar. Thunderbird sends invitations by itself for regular CalDAV accounts, but with a Google Calendar it doesn't do that because it is Google's Calendar that it is special. In this case it is the CalDAV-Sync integration that should send the invite.
Mobile Firefox is new and it doesn't surprise me that FastMail's compose doesn't work in it, because it has weird behavior when I interact with text boxes. I also use Firefox on my Android, but not for mobile web apps. It's currently too unpolished for that. But I'm sure that some bug reports will help.
One thing I'm happy about with FastMail is that things improve. For example they weren't supporting CardDAV for family accounts before August. Now they do and I'm pleased with it, though I wouldn't mind some extra functionality.
But that's the thing we are missing in the consumer / producer relationship, the direct relationship between the parties involved, the feedback. With Google there's nobody I can talk to, because they are too big to listen to individuals like myself. Usage of Google, Apple or Microsoft products leads to much like what happens in agriculture ... the rise of monocultures, the end of diversity and ultimately we end up with disastrous consequences for our own health.
We're working on (by which I mean I am working on) the invitation support for clients. The standard allows either, and we didn't turn it on because it was buggy, then months of other things dragged us away.
It's really looking pretty nice now - the tricky part is safely processing incoming invitations, which I'm trying out a couple of different architectures to see what is most robust.
While I don't necessarily have the right to publish details from my email correspondence, the email I receive is my property, just as it would be by snail mail. If my employer has a problem with that, then I would be the one that switched jobs voluntarily.
Speaking on privacy concerns, the Nylas N1 client uses the Nylas web service for processing mail. So instead of the client using IMAP and SMTP to connect and fetch your email, you give Nylas the right to do that on their server side.
What this means is that in addition to trusting Gmail or FastMail with your data, you now have to trust a third-party as well. And that may be cool for others, but doesn't work for me.
This is old news (April this year) but it got picked up again because one of our politicians posted it as a guide to how the law is about to affect companies that have servers in Australia, vs those (like us) without infrastructure on-shore. It's a strange law!
When an Australian Senator is linking to a VPN how-to in order to circumvent the law, and ISPs are still in the dark as to what data actually needs to be retained, it's a useless law.
It may well be a useless law. But unless the senator is from the party that supported the law, politicians making the other party's laws look stupid might just be politics as usual :(
He most certianly isn't. Scott Ludlam is from the Greens party, which are a not-extreme-but-still-left left-wing party. They're the 3rd 'major' party in AU politics, but trail far behind the big two. The big two came together on this to pass it, so although many of the minor parties are up in arms about it, it got steamrolled through.
Additionally, Scott Ludlam is far more technologically adept than many of the old white law-educated guys in parliament. He's younger, he's very much of the IT era and is much more understanding of technology as a result. That's why he speaks out against this and other technology-related policies so often, because he gets the technological side of things.
Scott Ludlum may be the Greens Senator who detailed how to get around the law, but the then Communications Minister and our now current Prime Minister, said the following [1]:
“If you have a device, you know, a phone or a smartphone, and if I call you
through the mobile phone network there will be a record. Say my phone’s
with Telstra, there’ll be a record with Telstra that I’ve called your
number.
If on the other hand I communicate with you via Skype for a voice call or
Viber, send you a message on WhatsApp or Wickr or Threema or Signal or
Telegrammer — there’s a gazillion of them — or indeed if you make a
FaceTime call, then all that the telco can see, insofar as it can see
anything, is that my device has had a connection with the Skype server
or the WhatsApp server; it doesn’t see anything happening with you.”
I just wish Fastmail didn't have servers in the US. Not really quite sure what the benefit is there; email isn't latency sensitive.
If a Swiss company were to pop up with a competitive mail offering, I imagine they'd sweep up a lot of business easily eh? Not that it's much more secure, just harder to imagine Switzerland easily handing over records, whereas with folks like MS, they've shown they'll do it on even non-legal requests.
"It has been pointed out to us that since we have our servers in the US, we are under US jurisdiction. We do not believe this to be the case. We do not have a legal presence in the US, no company incorporated in the US, no staff in the US, and no one in the US with login access to any servers located in the US. Even if a US court were to serve us with a court order, subpoena or other instruction to hand over user data, Australian communications and privacy law explicitly forbids us from doing so."
"Australia does not have any equivalent to the US National Security Letter, so we cannot be forced to do something without being allowed to disclose it."
That's hilariously brilliant. Your infrastructure is in the US, so Australian law doesn't apply to it; but your staff are in Australia, so US law doesn't apply to them.
I'm glad jurisdictional conflict is being used for good.
Maybe. They'd have to issue that warrant to our datacentre operators though, not us, because there's nowhere to send the documentation. And then they can compel our datacentre not to talk about it, if they like, but they can't stop us talking about.
Really though, the point of all this isn't to say they can't take our servers - of course they can, via legal and illegal means. The point is more to say that they can't do it _quietly_, which greatly raises the bar, because now you've got a PR shitstorm to deal with.
But really, it's not going to happen, because we have good legal processes in place. There are proper channels from most countries in the world to the appropriate Australian authorities, and from there to us, and once that request comes in we service it and that's that.
If you want reasonably secure and private email, and you're not doing really dodgy shit, we're probably a safer choice that many. But we're not selling a privacy service, just an email service. If privacy is 100% non-negotiable for you, then you'll need to look elsewhere.
Sold. I've been on the fence about moving some of my most important addresses off of the cheap shared hosting Cpannel managed crap they are on at the moment. It's crap hosting but it's free.
Your Australian honesty, "not doing really dodgy shit" won me over. I'm going to move a few over and check your service out properly.
Nice to see another Australian company doing well :-)
Not only is their product good, but their service is first rate.
I was recently working with the developer of the ASynK contact synchronisation tool ( http://asynk.io/ ) to track down an issue I was having synchronising contact details from Fastmail using CardDAV.
It turned out to be a Fastmail issue; one of their developers was quickly on the GitHub issue chatting to the ASynK maintainer about it, and they had a fix in a couple of weeks.
> If you want reasonably secure and private email, and you're not doing really dodgy shit, we're probably a safer choice that many. But we're not selling a privacy service, just an email service. If privacy is 100% non-negotiable for you, then you'll need to look elsewhere.
Hot damn you should put that on your front page. Ok maybe not but to people like me that is without a doubt the best way to phrase your sell.
I use fastmail and I am happy with it, but you may never know if they access your servers and mirror them using the datacentre back end. Honestly, I would be surprised if they have not done so already, it's not like you are a low profile target.
Thank you for all of your and colleagues' replies in this thread. I'm sold. I've long been impressed with fm's engineering; just wasn't clear on what the US presence really meant.
When privacy is non-negotiable, I don't use SMTP email.
Those servers -- do they have Firewire Ports? USB3?
Other externally accessible DMA ports?
Drive encryption prevents offline data at rest, they keys will be in memory for a running server. If LEA is going to grab your servers, your keys are going to go with them.
Yeah, it's true - same for anyone. The main benefit of encrypting the drives (indeed, the only reason I was willing to do the tradeoff for something which is mostly theatre) is that we can RMA failed drives and discard old drives with no risk to customer data.
That alone is worth paying the slight overhead on modern CPUs for full disk encryption of all user-data partitions (the OS isn't encrypted - it's Debian with some open source packages on it, and we throw it away anytime - http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/07/automated-installation/)
you'd probably be looking for protonmail if your only criteria is jurisdiction. They seem competent enough from the outside - I have no insight into how they operate.
We (FastMail) have a far superior product in just about every other way though, so it comes down to what you consider important, and what tradeoffs you're willing to make.
In my opinion there is a very tiny gap between things for which a security agency is willing to take the PR hit of taking our servers out of the datacentre in New York (and dealing with the fact that the disks are encrypted and there are replicas in Amsterdam of all the data anyway) - and where they're willing to bribe/coerce a staff member or datacentre tech in Switzerland (or just quietly do a backroom deal with the government there). You would have to, as robn said - be doing some pretty shady stuff - stuff that's probably against our terms of service anyway - stuff that's probably going to get a lawful intercept done in any country. Speaking of which, Switzerland does lawful intercept too, and don't think that any service there will magically be immune from legal process. https://www.li.admin.ch/en/themes/procedure
tl;dr - we don't place ourselves above the law. We obey the laws of Australia, which has strong privacy protections still - despite this silly metadata retention business (which is totally knee jerk and poorly written and, our legal advice suggests, not relevant to us anyway). It's mostly so a handful agencies (actually fewer than before, it tightened that up) can get their hands on mobile phone tower records faster and with guaranteed timeframes of retention - local ISP email just got caught in the crossfire.
>you'd probably be looking for protonmail if your only criteria is jurisdiction. They seem competent enough from the outside - I have no insight into how they operate.
Yep, that's pretty much in agreement with what I said - the technical dance that they go through adds extra protections against one specific type of attack (a legal "hand over data" that doesn't come with a "change your system so you can obtain said data" rider), but it's still worthless in face of other attack vectors.
In short - the datacentres in the USA are insanely cheaper than Australia, they speak English (well enough, and you can learn the accent from TV), they have clueful staff, you can buy equipment cheaply in country and have it shipped to your datacentre quickly... lots of little things.
It's why we've moved the European datacentre to Amsterdam as well - it was that or London for price, language, availability of equipment.
Not sure I completely agree with that.. hasn't the swiss government and banking pretty much fallen in line with regards to those outlined in the USA PATRIOT act? My understanding is that they've been pretty cooperative here.
Amsterdam may be the safer bet, not safe, but safer.
Just being in Switzerland won't make a company safe. I know of a case where a European sys admin, at a medium size ISP, was blackmailed into installing monitoring/fiddling devices by an US agency.
I generally like Fastmail and the for pay model, but their Employee Access to Data section of their Privacy Policy seems to be a bit too cavalier. I may just be naive though.
Also, I feel they overstate the jurisdiction piece. Being in Australia is important, but it certainly doesn't make you a paragon of privacy or Australia a privacy
Eden. Company culture is great, but a five-eyes becoming more surveillance-heavy by the day doesn't make the technical aspects of maintaining private communication any easier. I'd be wary not to oversell.
In what way do you consider the privacy policy cavalier? What would you prefer it said?
I don't believe we made any claims that Australia is a "privacy Eden" or that we're "paragon of privacy". Indeed, we frequently say we're _not_ a privacy service, just an email service that cares about privacy among other things.
More specifics on both these points would help us discuss them properly.
I love that privacy policy - it feels real. None of this "Our employees can't access your data" where you know that they certainly can - since they can see it when they help troubleshoot things for you.
It's a very direct, honest policy; it's definitely not the usual CYA bullshit that's kept in legalese to reduce clarity.
Is FastMail an Australian company? I'm guessing maybe yes, since otherwise it seems such a post is unnecessary, but nowhere does it actually say anything like "You may think the law applies because we're an Australian company, but...". For all I know, this could be a law attempting to target any company, in any country, that does business with Australians.
While it's important to get legal advice, there are two things to bear in mind.
First, the meaning of a law can only be settled in the courts, strictly speaking. A legal opinion is a best effort, but it is an opinion, not a judgement.
Second, Parliament can amend any law it passes at will. And it has the power -- rarely but sometimes exercised -- to make its legislation retroactively effective.
I've been a Fastmail customer for almost two years now, its been working really great. The best thing with Fastmail is that it shows there is a future for a Internet with choices, choices beyond the 4 or 5 global cooperation that tries to dominate every aspect of our life.
I fail to see how this helps their users in any way, seeing as the data will be intercepted by NSA, GCHQ, or indeed ASD, retained wholesale (not just scraps of headers a.k.a. metadata) forever, and shared with whoever asks nicely?
As a founder of an Australian startup that facilitates communication it's interesting to hear that using international hosting seems to bypass the requirements. IANAL etc. As the post mentions this is a pretty good way to discourage investment in local tech infrastructure.
Previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345935