At that point, why bother? We'd have to run two EU datacentres to have data only in EU, and we'd still be under the same actual legal jurisdiction (Australia) either way, so it would be security theater rather than an actual change in risk. We haven't ever given data to US authorities directly, we point every single request from anyone to the Mutual Assistance Treaty with Australia, and that would be the same regardless of where servers are.
In summary, having servers in the EU is 99% security theater, and the other 1% is pointless unless we had two datacenters who were as reliable as NYI have been for us. We haven't found such partners.
The EU is outside the jurisdiction of FISA courts, whereas New York is not. I am definitely not an expert or lawyer, but I would think this is not just security theater.
I was always hoping that Fastmail offer hosting that is fully in the EU. To me being affected by the Australian, EU, and US jurisdictions is worse than just the Australian and EU jurisdictions. Of course, I would prefer EU-only.
I am extremely happy with Fastmail. But if there was an EU e-mail provider with feature parity, I would probably switch. Not that I expect that that'll happen anytime soon (subdomain addressing and iPhone push notifications are killer features).
The financials of running up two full EU-only datacentres don't make sense for us at the moment given the demographic distribution of our customers. And we haven't had any run-ins with the FISA courts in the nearly 20 years we've been operating.
Of course the past isn't a 100% predictor of the future, but US authorities have always been happy (or at least willing) to accept that our data is under Australian jurisdiction.
Would it be possible to explain them (or link me to a document explaining them)?