Whoa. I hadn't heard anything about Fastmail's backdoor concerns [0]. Thanks for bringing it up!

[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/fastmail-australian-encryption-law...

Yikes. I hadn't heard of this either. Reconsidering my email host right now, and that's a shame because I really liked Fastmail.

This is the only reason why I did not go with fastmail. I am still looking for an alternative to gmail though...

Making your decision based on that doesn't make sense, because it doesn't affect FastMail at all. They're not an end-to-end encrypted service. They can already access all of your data without a backdoor (and need to be able to, to provide features like search).

More info in this blog post, specifically under "The AABill doesn’t change your privacy or data security with FastMail": https://fastmail.blog/2018/12/21/advocating-for-privacy-aabi...

I've been using posteo.de. I haven't heard anything negative about them, they're not terribly expensive, they support IMAP (unlike protonmail), and support is excellent (had issues syncing contacts to a BBOS10 device they solved immediately)

Fastmail could always have been compelled to give up the contents of their servers, just like any other company anywhere else. The new laws only change anything for end-to-end encrypted services where the servers never see the plaintext.

> The new laws only change anything for end-to-end encrypted services where the servers never see the plaintext.

That doesn’t sound like a small thing. “Nobody can read your private data, not even us” is a big selling point these days. Sounds like Australian companies can no longer do that, putting them at a disadvantage.

And let’s not forget there’s no such thing as “a backdoor for law enforcement”. A backdoor is a backdoor, and it will be exploited by malicious actors. And they’re mandatory? Black hats everywhere must be getting dehydrated from salivating so much.

> That doesn’t sound like a small thing. “Nobody can read your private data, not even us” is a big selling point these days. Sounds like Australian companies can no longer do that, putting them at a disadvantage.

It is a big selling point. So is being accessible via any standards-compliant MUA, as opposed to e.g. Proton Mail and Tutanota. I'd love for there to be a secure email service with my privacy protected both by law and cryptography which also has me in full control of my data; until then it's a hard choice but I'd prefer to stay out of the walled garden. FWIW I'm not worried about Fastmail acting against my best interest.

> And let’s not forget there’s no such thing as “a backdoor for law enforcement”. A backdoor is a backdoor, and it will be exploited by malicious actors. And they’re mandatory? Black hats everywhere must be getting dehydrated from salivating so much.

I'm aware there's no such thing as a secure backdoor. Also to my knowledge the law doesn't mandate them, only access to the requested data. Said access could require manual action.

I don't agree with the law, but again the law does not change anything wrt Fastmail's obligations; anything the government might ask of them now, the government could have asked of them before.

It's a shit world requiring shit tradeoffs and Fastmail is one of few companies that are working towards keeping the internet open and (somewhat) decentralized. Their reward? The implication that they are somehow worse than any other non-e2e email service in any other country.

“Nobody can read your private data” doesn’t really work with email though if you want search and if the emails are delivered in plain text anyway. If you want total security you’d have to use client side encryption anyway and all partners of the email conversation would need to do that.

Yes it is. Backdoors are guaranteed.

Is there any country left in the world where you could roll out a service like this without backdoors and with freedom of speech?