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Just a reminder to everybody that Fastmail is an Australian company, and is therefore subject to Australia's TOLA / Assistance And Access. I avoid them like th

Just a reminder to everybody that Fastmail is an Australian company, and is therefore subject to Australia's TOLA / Assistance And Access. I avoid them like the plague for this reason. Having your e-mail provider compelled to work against your interests is no joke and you may not want to be in that situation.

dewey 5y ago
Maybe it's just me but I don't have "Australia going to force my email provider to hand over my data" in my threat model. It's probably worth thinking about that too before hastily switching email providers. Fastmail is a solid provider, with great support and I never had a real issue with them. I give them money, they provide me a good and stable email service.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  2028 headline: "Australian intelligence services decline to comment on massive data breach."
- krageon 5y ago
  You should have "my mail data should not be shared with third parties" as a general rule for mail providers. If that's not you, cool - but I'd wager most folks don't want their mail read :)
  - dewey 5y ago
    If you don't want your mail shared with third parties you just have to encrypt your email and then it doesn't matter who your provider is. There's a difference between "don't want their mail read" and "someone will be able to read my emails if there's a court order and they are interested in the content of my specific inbox".
- akshaybhalotia 5y ago
  And then some version of Russia-Ukraine happens with Australia where you are locked out of your email accounts and all bets are off
  - dewey 5y ago
    This could happen to any country and is also precisely the reason why you use your own domain. You'd just point it to a new mail provider and you'll be up and running in an hour. If you use a local mail client that stores your email locally you'll also have access to all these.
cytzol 5y ago
> Just a reminder to everybody that Fastmail is an Australian company, and is therefore subject to Australia's TOLA / Assistance And Access. [...] Having your e-mail provider compelled to work against your interests is no joke and you may not want to be in that situation. This is not quite true. The TOLA bill does allow the Australian government to compel an employee to break their product's encryption — which, yes, is dumb as hell. But Fastmail does not offer end-to-end encryption. As an Australian company, they already have had to comply with a court warrant asking them to surrender data; in other words, law enforcement does not need them to install a backdoor when they already have a front door. Your comment implies that TOLA made Fastmail less secure somehow, but this has been the case long before TOLA; the existence of that bill changes nothing. I feel like it's important to point this out, not for the sake of pedantry, but to say that if you want truly secure encrypted e-mail, you must be in control of the encryption and decryption step, rather that having a company do that for you — you can't assume you'll be safe just because your provider isn't based in Australia. It's been a while since I've looked, but I think it would be very hard to find an e-mail provider that explicitly says it won't hand over data when presented with a valid warrant.

dewey 5y ago

Maybe it's just me but I don't have "Australia going to force my email provider to hand over my data" in my threat model. It's probably worth thinking about that too before hastily switching email providers. Fastmail is a solid provider, with great support and I never had a real issue with them. I give them money, they provide me a good and stable email service.

whatshisface 5y ago
2028 headline: "Australian intelligence services decline to comment on massive data breach."
krageon 5y ago
You should have "my mail data should not be shared with third parties" as a general rule for mail providers. If that's not you, cool - but I'd wager most folks don't want their mail read :)
- dewey 5y ago
  If you don't want your mail shared with third parties you just have to encrypt your email and then it doesn't matter who your provider is. There's a difference between "don't want their mail read" and "someone will be able to read my emails if there's a court order and they are interested in the content of my specific inbox".
akshaybhalotia 5y ago
And then some version of Russia-Ukraine happens with Australia where you are locked out of your email accounts and all bets are off
- dewey 5y ago
  This could happen to any country and is also precisely the reason why you use your own domain. You'd just point it to a new mail provider and you'll be up and running in an hour. If you use a local mail client that stores your email locally you'll also have access to all these.

cytzol 5y ago

> Just a reminder to everybody that Fastmail is an Australian company, and is therefore subject to Australia's TOLA / Assistance And Access. [...] Having your e-mail provider compelled to work against your interests is no joke and you may not want to be in that situation. This is not quite true. The TOLA bill does allow the Australian government to compel an employee to break their product's encryption — which, yes, is dumb as hell. But Fastmail does not offer end-to-end encryption. As an Australian company, they already have had to comply with a court warrant asking them to surrender data; in other words, law enforcement does not need them to install a backdoor when they already have a front door. Your comment implies that TOLA made Fastmail less secure somehow, but this has been the case long before TOLA; the existence of that bill changes nothing. I feel like it's important to point this out, not for the sake of pedantry, but to say that if you want truly secure encrypted e-mail, you must be in control of the encryption and decryption step, rather that having a company do that for you — you can't assume you'll be safe just because your provider isn't based in Australia. It's been a while since I've looked, but I think it would be very hard to find an e-mail provider that explicitly says it won't hand over data when presented with a valid warrant.