They need to backdoor every session to comply with Australian rules, and every Australian is forced legally to comply, even if in an international company.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-security-data-i...
An attacker having shell access or a government getting plaintext dumps of whatever email conversations they want (when users don't expect it) are perfect examples of backdoors. AT&T giving the NSA a secret room for them to suck up all comms, encrypted are not, is also a classic example.
Every time the Coalition say the magic words "national security" Labor jump without even stopping to ask "how high".
The protocol itself prevents email from being safe privacy-wise. It feels weird to single out Fastmail for that.
Fastmail is not an end-to-end encrypted service. There is no requirement to backdoor it, like nearly every other non-E2E service, the Australian government can just... send a legal request. Like they always could. Or like they can do with nearly every other email service.
Email contents are not private from any five eyes state, no matter the provider (maaaaybe one protonmail to another protonmail account, but I doubt it).
Separately "just use <public key encription>" implies it's easy to do. Even if we ignore the fact that software support is generally terrible, there's the much bigger problem of convincing the people you email with to use it too. If you're not doing super secret or illegal stuff that's generally not a thing that's going to happen.
The bridge on Desktop is OK, and their mobile app is better than every mobile open source android client I have seen.
I'm currently using k9 for third party accounts, and its good.
The proton app is great, it just needs conversation view.
However, if you don't like fastmail, who would you recommend instead?
All I want is an email provider somewhere that will actually force someone to show up in person with a subpoena rather than turn over all my emails to a random bureaucrat who waggles some electrons suggestively.
No, they need a warrant
The sad thing is that it's probably inevitable that someday an MBA will decide to burn that goodwill for some quick cash. Maybe not for a long time, but eventually it will happen. That's the society we've built and live in.
Can you elaborate what happened in the Opera era or are you under an NDA?
Fastmail is bootstrapped and profitable. They aren't beholden to outside investors trying to 10x their money. Fastmail also just doesn't have that sort of culture. (Source: I have friends there). They aren't looking to be a unicorn. They seem very happy to have a profitable business that they can nurture for decades.
Culturally, they're growing a garden, not launching a rocket ship.
Eventually the company will change hands. Knowing some of the people involved, I trust that when that happens, they'll find good stewards.
They pick up the phone and answer your questions.
They don't have you wait in a queue for 45min and affirm that your call is important to them.
They don't give new customers better prices than loyal ones.
If they update local bandwidth, you get that for the same price you paid before, without asking.
That's it.
I gladly pay less than $20 a month extra for all this peace of mind.
- must work well
- must be a paid service with proper support from a vendor focused on email (i.e. not consumer gmail)
- must allow custom domains (so I can regain control over my email if the provider goes under by updating MX records)
- must be the cheapest in the absence of compelling benefits (ruled out GSuite or protonmail)
Fastmail fitted the bill and seems to be working as I would expect.
PM cut off access to my account for 4 days as the issue was being resolved with them. Like, yeah I get it shitty situation and they probably have to deal with a bunch of scammers but I think it was way too extreme of a response given I explained what happened and have been a long term customer.
I'm thinking about going back to Gmail now.... any ideas how to defend against this? For example, have a tested procedure to change MX records of the custom domain to another provider or even self hosted in order to restore email access while an issue is being resolved?
Now if only I could generate a mobile number (msisdn aliasing?) for each entity I interact with, so that I can know who sells my number to spam callers.
But some have noted that FM is an Australian service with some interesting issues around privacy and five-eyes surveillance.
For me, in the end, I had to pay that price (as well as the sensible prices of the service itself), because I really needed my business mails to arrive in people's inboxes.
Since then the best news about Fastmail is that their is no news: they just freaking work. Everything is stable and predictable and that's what I want from an email provider. I'm sure that GSuite and O365 have more features for collaboration and I still recommend that customers sign up for O365 since that's what everyone is most used to. But I'll say for personal email, nothing beats Fastmail.
But by far the killer feature that they offer is domain aliases. With filtering and aliases, I'm able to run something like 5 domains and 20 distinct email addresses out of one inbox.
I really like the integration they did with iwantmyname domain name registrar. They make it very easy to setup a custom domain name with the service. Also I have had great experiences with the import tools and security features. The admin interface for managing my customer's accounts is great, its built right into the normal settings interface, and they have good privacy features with the relationship between the reseller and the end user.
[1] with the domain managed by Cloudflare
If they protected data by hosting in pro-privacy jurisdictions, I would be back in a heartbeat. As it stands, any claim about privacy is aspirational and completely unrealistic.
Practically for email there is no need or reason to back door anything to do this though.
If asked they’d just pull the content straight from the server, same as Google/MS assuredly do for the US government. So I don’t think the threat model or risk of back doors is increased.
I’d disagree with this for my case and likely for anyone who has two or three or four people at home who need their own mailboxes (not aliases). Fastmail is quite expensive for such cases. Of course, this applies to services like ProtonMail too. But there are services that are far cheaper that have been operating for years and hosted in Europe (the latter is for those who want to avoid hosting in FiveEyes jurisdictions).
disclaimer: FM customer.