> American company…
Then, noticing the critical error, the GP said:
> Fastmail is owned by Opera a Norwegian company.
Replying to the American company part.
> You said: Their servers are located in the US according to the article.
So, the servers location have nothing to do with whether the company is American or not. And while that might have a bearing on certain facets of the topic as a whole, it's meaningless in this context. Basically, what you said does not change anything.
As in, the actual point, which is that your e-mails are liable to be searched by the NSA.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if Fastmail moved servers outside the US, then it would be in a better position as a non-US company than if it was a US company with servers outside the US?
Despite what some might believe, where a company operates from is actually important, regardless of where the servers are hosted.
Believing that it being an American company or not is not important is silly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/29/facebook-opera_n_15...
People are operating on the equation of "hosted in America = possibly accessible via PRISM = compromised by the NSA," which is understandable given all the recent news. Perhaps you don't trust the assurances that the NSA's computers are only scanning metadata by default, only flagging suspicious keywords that then have to be processed by a human agent before they go ahead and actually start scanning your real email which of course they will usually only do with a warrant obtained in secret from a secret court that pretty much never turns down any warrant request!
Okay, but those very reassuring reassurances actually only apply to American servers. Communication going between servers in America and international servers is just as likely to be targeted and quite possibly more likely to be subject to deep scanning. We have to throw in "likely" and "possibly" because, as with all things NSA, we really don't know. But if you're concerned about data interception, it's very likely not relevant whether FastMail's servers are located in New York, Norway, Australia, or the Fortress of Solitude.