Fastmail opens an EU data region on its own servers in Amsterdam

Email provider Fastmail has introduced an EU data region, letting customers choose the European Union as the primary home for their mail and files. Until now, all accounts were stored entirely in the United States. The new location runs on the company's own servers, co-located in a secure facility in Amsterdam and set up by its own engineers.

Own hardware, not rented capacity

Fastmail says the Amsterdam site is built to the same standards as its existing infrastructure in Philadelphia and St Louis, with its own hardware and software, "specified right down to the exact model of disks in each machine". Data is stored encrypted at rest inside locked racks and managed by the in-house team; the company does not rent computing or management services from a big cloud provider. For years, it adds, it has kept at least two copies of every mailbox on separate servers in the primary location and at least one more copy in a geographically separate site.

What changes for EU accounts

For accounts in the EU region, the live copy of mail and files sits in Amsterdam, incoming mail goes to EU servers by preference, and the desktop, web and mobile apps connect to EU infrastructure, falling back to a US location if those servers are unavailable. Geographically separate replicas still live in the US for now, because Amsterdam is the company's only European site. US-region accounts keep both their primary copy and replica in Philadelphia or St Louis. For everyone, emergency encrypted backups taken every few hours are stored in Philadelphia, logs are consolidated in the US, and some data — addresses, customer metadata, website and Files storage — is replicated to all sites.

No EU-only guarantee, and how to switch

Fastmail states plainly that it cannot guarantee that data stays only in the EU: it is an Australian company, subject to Australian law including legal-cooperation treaties. IMAP and POP3 settings do not have to change, and regional server names are available for those who want them. Users with billing addresses in or near Europe were pre-selected for the EU region and have already had an encrypted copy transferred in advance; others can queue for migration. The region can be changed in Settings → Users & Sharing → Team Settings, under the GDPR section, while the account keeps working. Fastmail says it considered a surcharge for the EU option but decided against it.