The search for email hosting (and why I'm currently staying put)

I’ve been weighing whether to move away from Fastmail, for reasons that are more about jurisdiction than the service itself. The short version: I’m staying put for now, keeping my eyes open for how things evolve. If I ever do decide to move, it should be painless - one of the beautiful things about having your own domain linked to an email provider that uses open standards is that it’s easy to pack up and leave.

Mail-hosting history

Over the years I’ve used GMX.net, Hotmail and Gmail - the latter still exists but is not actively used. In addition to Gmail, I also used Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

Unknown (2000 - 2005)

I bought my first domain in 2000, but I forgot where I had that hosted. It came with email, that I remember, which I accessed through Eudora and later KMail.

Lunarpages (2005 - 2008)

In 2005 I moved to Lunar Pages, and took my mail with me there. Your run-of-the-mill shared webhosting mail service. Used via KMail. If my memory serves me right they offered Squirrelmail and IMP as webmail interfaces.

Google Apps for My Domain (2008 - 2015)

In 2008 I moved my mail to Google Apps for My Domain, which had a free plan at the time. I also moved my calendar and contacts there, removing them from the free Google services that I had been using up to then.

With Google Apps for My Domain (now known as Google Workspace) you could use your own domain. The Google interfaces were amongst the best that I had come across; it was free, and Google did not put ads in the Google Apps variants (since they were geared towards paying customers).

Fastmail (2016)

As I was feeling less and less good about my over-reliance on Google products, I moved in 2016 to Fastmail for a year. I really enjoyed it, but the integration options into Android (my mobile platform of choice) weren’t that fantastic. 3rd party apps only got me so far.

Google Apps for My Domain (2017.. ish?)

2017 saw me moving back to Google Apps - as a paying customer this time since they had stopped their free plans - but that didn’t last long. After using Fastmail, the Gmail interface felt slow and clunky - and I was facing serious synchronisation issues with calendars from Microsoft O365. Often they would not sync at all.

I raised a ticket with support, but that did not end on a happy note:

As discussed I can confirm you’re affected by the known issue where Google Calendar experiences issues parsing a published ICS. Our engineering team are aware of this issue and have been working towards interoperability with Microsoft engineers but as of yet there is no ETA for a fix for this issue.

Under usual circumstances I would suggest installing Google Sync for Microsoft Outlook as a workaround to sync in real-time but I understand you’re unable to install applications on your machine. Please note I have added your domain to the list of affected users and will provide additional feedback to our engineering team regarding this issue.

Needless to say, I never heard back from them. I’m not sure if that issue even ever got fixed.

Fastmail (2017 - now)

That same year I migrated back to Fastmail, where I’ve been ever since.

About Fastmail

Fastmail is a fantastic email provider. They do great work in the open source world and are actively working with several international communities to make email better for everyone.

The web interface - which is the primary way I interact with their service - is functional, fast, beautiful, and gets out of the way. Keyboard navigation is a thing, and it works great.

Their support is amazing. Back in 2016, I had an issue syncing calendars from Microsoft O365 (duplicate entries would show up if individual items in a recurring meeting got modified), and I raised it with them. After some back and forth, this was the outcome:

As you can see, the “RECURRENCE-ID” field has a zero time component, but the DTSTART was T110000, so the RECURRENCE-ID doesn’t match any actual recurrence of the event. There’s been a ton of discussion about this case on the standards calls for CalConnect, and the conclusion was that we should be including any “unknown” recurrence as a separate instance - so you wind up with two instances of the event in our system.

It’s clearly a Microsoft bug, that recurrence ID should say T110000. I’m not even sure what we can do about it :(

Having said that - the behaviour when RECURRENCE-ID doesn’t match an expanded recurrence is undefined by the spec. We’re working on fixing that as part of the TC-API group at CalConnect - there will be a new standard which doesn’t have this problem. sigh

So meanwhile we’ve fixed our product to check for this particular case - where there’s no time on the RECURRENCE-ID field, but the recurrence must be at the same time each day - and it will modify the recurrences to be at the same time as the DTSTART of the first event.

You will notice that this has fixed the duplicates on display in your calendar. It will also modify the caldav events on next sync for synchronised calendars.

Regards,

Bron.

And it was fixed. At that time I wasn’t even aware who Bron was - he’s the CEO of Fastmail.

So why consider moving?

My current subscription ends in October, so this is a good moment to weigh things up. To be frank: I’d prefer staying with Fastmail - it works, and it works well - but here’s why:

I am not a lawyer. This is my own interpretation. Make of it what you will.

Fastmail is an Australian company, but their servers are exclusively hosted in the US - and data physically on US soil falls under US jurisdiction regardless of where the company is incorporated. FISA Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to collect communications of non-US persons from US-based servers without a warrant, and the CLOUD Act allows law enforcement to compel access through standard legal process.

Fastmail has addressed this concern back in 2013, arguing that as an Australian company with no US incorporation or staff, they aren’t directly bound by US court orders. This post predates the CLOUD Act by five years - a law written specifically to reach providers with “sufficient contacts” to the US, including serving US customers, regardless of where they’re incorporated.

None of this is specifically about Fastmail. My feelings about the US jurisdiction have shifted in recent years, for obvious reasons. I know international intelligence sharing agreements exist and that this concern doesn’t disappear by moving to European servers - but it still feels like a meaningful distinction to me.

Requirements

• The provider must use open standards - SMTP, IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV. JMAP is a nice-to-have. POP3 is not required.
• Multiple custom domains need to be supported.
• Email, contacts and calendars should all be part of the offering.
• Catchall addresses are a requirement.
• Since I mostly (always?) access my mail through webmail and I have not found a client that I like, their webmail should check the boxes listed in the previous blog post. And it really needs to be pleasant to use. Perhaps a strange requirement, but it is one for me.
• The provider or its parent company must not be incorporated in the US.
• The servers of the provider should not be solely located in the US. Not having them there at all is even better.
• Encryption at rest is non-negotiable, but I believe all reputable providers do that these days.
• End-to-end encryption is not a requirement for me. While it’s nice from a privacy point of view, it negates the possibility of using the aforementioned standards, and being realistic, 90% of the mail I send out probably ends up on either Gmail or Outlook.

Hosting providers

I had a look at a bunch of alternative hosting providers.

Proton & Tuta

Proton is hosted (for now) in Switzerland, Tuta in Germany.

These two providers are end-to-end encrypted and have (in my view) a lock-in problem: it’s not easy to get your data in or out. They both have a means for importing and exporting, but it’s a far cry from using an IMAP copy between mailboxes. The main reason I don’t want to use them.

For a long time neither of them had the option to share calendar links to 3rd parties outside of their ecosystem, which also negated them for me.

My threat model also does not require end-to-end encryption.

Eclipso

Hosted in Germany. The web interface is clean, but unfortunately no dark mode to be seen anywhere. It also had me searching how to change the language from German (default) to English… I understand some German but not enough to use it daily.

Runbox

Hosted in Norway. The interface feels of a mishmash between an older version and the latest iteration, and it’s not what I’d call snappy. No dark mode support.

Posteo

Hosted in Germany. Does not support custom domains, which is a dealbreaker.

Mailbox.org

Hosted in Germany, supports all the standards. Web interface is not great, but works. Unfortunately no support for dark-themed mails, and I had issues getting a rather large shared calendar to sync.

I contacted support about this. After a really long round-trip (nearly a week), the final conclusion was that I just have to sync it in my client of choice. Heh.

Infomaniak

Hosted in Switzerland. No dark-themed emails, and the interface is confusing. They have so many things that I don’t need or want in the K-Suite that it’s off-putting to use.

Migadu

Also hosted in Switzerland. Only mail, which is too limited.

Startmail

Hosted in The Netherlands. No calendar support, which I do require.

Mailfence

Hosted in Belgium. Supports mail, contacts, calendars. No dark themed emails, unfortunately. The interface needs to be improved to be really something I’d love to use on a daily basis.

Soverin

Hosted in The Netherlands. While they have all the parts, the interface feels old and not pleasant to use.

Update 2026/07/17: Fastmail will be adding email hosting in Amsterdam.

In a first phase, data will still be copied to the US as a backup — which, legally, changes very little. It does open up the possibility that in a future phase data won’t be sent to the US anymore, which would resolve my main issue.

Being realistic: international data sharing agreements exist, and Fastmail’s Australian incorporation means Australian law applies to the company regardless of where the data is hosted. But it would be a step in the right direction. Bron answered some questions in this Reddit thread - we’ll need to wait and see what happens.