Fastmail has announced the availability of a European Union data region, allowing users to choose whether their email is stored primarily in the EU or the US. According to the company, this addresses user requests regarding data location for compliance, local law, and keeping data geographically closer to home.
The new EU infrastructure uses Fastmail’s own servers co-located in a secure facility in Amsterdam, built and managed by the company’s engineering team. According to the announcement, these servers meet the same standards as Fastmail’s existing infrastructure in Philadelphia and St Louis, with the company specifying hardware down to disk models. The company states it has maintained this approach to infrastructure management for more than 25 years, installing its own hardware and software rather than renting computing services from major cloud providers.
Under the EU region option, users’ primary email copies will be stored on Fastmail’s Amsterdam servers, with incoming mail directed to EU servers when using Fastmail’s own domain or nameservers. Desktop, web, and mobile apps will connect to EU servers for day-to-day access, falling back to US locations if Amsterdam servers become unavailable. A geographically separate replica copy will remain on US servers for now, as Fastmail currently operates only one European location.
For users who remain in the US region, primary and replica data copies stay on servers in Philadelphia or St Louis, with similar fallback arrangements.
Fastmail pre-selected users with European billing addresses for the EU region and transferred encrypted copies of their data in advance. These users can change their region setting to return to the US. New users can opt into the migration queue, though Fastmail notes such transfers will be slower because data must sync across the ocean rather than moving an existing copy.
The company acknowledged limitations in its approach. Emergency backups for all users remain in Philadelphia. Some user metadata, website storage, and third-party service details are replicated to both regions. System logs are consolidated in the US for monitoring and support purposes. Fastmail stated it does not guarantee data remains exclusively in the EU and emphasized it will respond to lawful requests from authorities regardless of storage location, subject to Australian law and international legal-cooperation treaties.
Users can switch their data region through Settings → Users & Sharing → Team Settings, viewing the migration status from queued through completion without service interruption.
Key facts
- Fastmail now offers EU data storage with primary copies on company-owned servers in Amsterdam
- EU region users can switch back to US storage at any time through account settings
- Emergency backups, user metadata, and system logs remain in the US for all users
- The company built its own infrastructure rather than renting from cloud providers
- Data migration to EU is automatic for pre-selected European users; others can join a queue