So here's what I know about Fastmail that I want to know about any provider I host with:
- I know Fastmail will refuse any requests from the US govt to access data because they're Australian and legally the request has to come from an Australian court
- I know Fastmail's servers use encrypted storage
- I know the specs of Fastmail's servers (they post them on their Help/FAQ)
- I know Fastmail's actually trying to make email better, obvious by their invention of the JMAP protocol
- I trust Fastmail to be able to recover from any serious issues because they actually have on staff developers of Cyrus, the open source IMAP software they use. This means their admins have actual recourse when Bad Things^TM happen, vs the usual when an admin runs out of options, eg, "let's just post on mailing lists and hope we can find an answer"
- I know the fine details of how their spam filtering works, because it's publicly documented. (and it's quite well integrated with some tricks I couldn't employ at my last ISP job as I didn't have developers to assist)
- I know their infrastructure is primarily hosted in NYI with the backup in Iceland.
- I know they are serious about security, as they've been proponents of full SSL/TLS vs STARTTLS which could be MITM and downgraded (yes, many MTAs will let you require STARTTLS, but there are always possibilities of client bugs that could be exploited when you let an attacker intercept plaintext and inject data before the upgrade to a validated TLS session)
- I know how their backups work, because it's documented and I also have the ability to undelete emails which almost no provider gives the end user.
- I know their support is responsive and competent, as they've actually fixed Webmail bugs and put them into production for me within 48 hours
- Fastmail does PUSH email on iOS, while GMail, Rackspace, and most other providers don't offer this because it requires custom integration with Apple's Push Notifications service.
tl;dr yeah, the average provider might promise the moon but can they actually deliver when the shit hits the fan? will they actually strive to please their users and make the internet a better place? probably not.
