Really though, the point of all this isn't to say they can't take our servers - of course they can, via legal and illegal means. The point is more to say that they can't do it _quietly_, which greatly raises the bar, because now you've got a PR shitstorm to deal with.
But really, it's not going to happen, because we have good legal processes in place. There are proper channels from most countries in the world to the appropriate Australian authorities, and from there to us, and once that request comes in we service it and that's that.
If you want reasonably secure and private email, and you're not doing really dodgy shit, we're probably a safer choice that many. But we're not selling a privacy service, just an email service. If privacy is 100% non-negotiable for you, then you'll need to look elsewhere.
Your Australian honesty, "not doing really dodgy shit" won me over. I'm going to move a few over and check your service out properly.
Nice to see another Australian company doing well :-)
I was recently working with the developer of the ASynK contact synchronisation tool ( http://asynk.io/ ) to track down an issue I was having synchronising contact details from Fastmail using CardDAV.
It turned out to be a Fastmail issue; one of their developers was quickly on the GitHub issue chatting to the ASynK maintainer about it, and they had a fix in a couple of weeks.
Impressively clueful support.
Hot damn you should put that on your front page. Ok maybe not but to people like me that is without a doubt the best way to phrase your sell.
When privacy is non-negotiable, I don't use SMTP email.
Well yeah, of course they aren't going to seize your server if you just give them everything they want. It is far easier and cheaper for them.
Drive encryption prevents offline data at rest, they keys will be in memory for a running server. If LEA is going to grab your servers, your keys are going to go with them.
That alone is worth paying the slight overhead on modern CPUs for full disk encryption of all user-data partitions (the OS isn't encrypted - it's Debian with some open source packages on it, and we throw it away anytime - http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/07/automated-installation/)
