To respond to both of you above. Setting up two of these at once would have increased both the up-front cost (hardware for something like this is well north of

To respond to both of you above. Setting up two of these at once would have increased both the up-front cost (hardware for something like this is well north of a million USD) and the complexity and associated risks. Yes, it's partly a "people want it for their own reasons and we should offer it if it's viable" and partly a "it's good to have service in multiple jurisdictions and experience with them in advance of any further balkanization of the internet". Re-launching might be costly, but dropping millions more on a second location and splitting our systems more would hav been much riskier (note: many of our customers with 'fastmail.com' addresses have chosen the EU region, we can't segment MX records at a tighter boundary than domain level). So we do what we can - when you login with username and password, the password is only sent to your region's server (based on a lookup from the username which MUST be global, so it works regardless of which of our servers you hit). If you send a username which doesn't exist, we distribute you to a random region in the same percentage, so you can't use it as an existence oracle.