Fastmail now stores your mail in Amsterdam, with a US-shaped asterisk
The EU region is real: primary mail storage on company-owned servers in Amsterdam, no surcharge. So is the fine print: encrypted backups, a replica, and the logs stay in the US.
Your mail can live in Amsterdam now. The backups and the logs still fly home to Philadelphia.
Fastmail announced an EU data region on August 3: pick it and your live mail and files sit on company-owned servers in a newly built Amsterdam datacenter, at no extra charge, selectable at signup or in settings with automatic migration. Then comes the part most vendors would have buried, stated plainly in Fastmail's own post: encrypted backups live in Philadelphia, a geographically separate replica stays in the US, some metadata replicates to all sites, and logs for all users consolidate in the US.
What EU region actually means here
The honest version of the offering: your primary copy gets EU jurisdiction and EU physical residency, your redundancy does not. For a lot of compliance conversations that distinction is the entire conversation. 'Data stored in the EU' and 'data exists only in the EU' are different claims, and Fastmail is explicitly making the first one. Encryption at rest covers the US copies, and security standards are identical across regions, per the announcement.
Why they published the asterisk
Fastmail says the region exists because customers kept asking, citing local law, keeping data close to home, and compliance. Publishing the caveats up front is the credible way to ship this: an auditor will find the backup topology anyway, and a vendor that documents it first is a vendor whose other claims you can price. The 496-point Hacker News thread on the launch spent much of its time on exactly this fine print, which is the fine print doing its job.
Why a build studio cares
Clients ask us where their data lives, and EU residency requests have gone from occasional to standard in our briefs. This launch is a useful reference for how to answer honestly: name the primary region, then name every place a copy exists, including logs, because logs are where residency claims quietly go to die. When we spec hosting for a client with residency requirements, the question we now ask every vendor is Fastmail's asterisk: where are the backups, and where are the logs?
Next step: read Fastmail's announcement and the Hacker News thread picking it apart. If you are choosing infrastructure under a data residency requirement, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com and we will map where every copy of your data would live.