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Email provider Fastmail will bring its European data centre in Amsterdam online in August 2026. Customers will be able to keep their email and associated data within the EU, rather than on the servers the company operates in the United States. Fastmail announced this on 13 July 2026.
Until now, Fastmail hosted all accounts by default in the US, with servers in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The Amsterdam data centre will join these as a third location. European customers will have the option to move their data to the new location.
Fastmail is an independent, paid email service, founded in 1999 in Melbourne, Australia. The company does not offer a free plan and says it has never raised external capital. It serves hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.
Existing customers with a European billing address will be automatically migrated to the Amsterdam location. Those who prefer otherwise can adjust this through their account settings, where they can also select their preferred data region. New customers signing up from Europe will be able to select the European location from the outset.
The primary copy of European customers' data will reside in the EU. For redundancy purposes, Fastmail also replicates that data to the US. The company states that this arrangement complies with the GDPR, but users who want their data to remain exclusively within the EU should be aware that this replication takes place.
Fastmail operates its own hardware in the Amsterdam data centre, as it does in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The company does not use external cloud services such as AWS or Azure. This approach applies across all its locations, giving it direct control over the physical infrastructure.
There is little certainty about exact revenue figures; estimates vary widely, from $9.5 million to nearly $166 million per year, depending on how the calculation is made and which source is consulted. Fastmail is profitable enough to operate independently, although investor Otello Corporation has held a stake in the company in the past.
Fastmail charges €3 per month for its cheapest plan (Basic, 2 GB storage). The Standard plan costs €5 per month and offers 30 GB of storage; the Professional plan costs €9 per month with 100 GB of storage. There is no free tier.
Emails are stored encrypted on Fastmail's servers and are transmitted encrypted, but the company does not offer end-to-end encryption. This means Fastmail can in principle access stored messages. The company integrates with password managers such as 1Password and Bitwarden, and also provides an API for creating masked email addresses. In addition to its email service, Fastmail also operates Topicbox, a mailing list service, and Pobox, an email forwarding service it acquired in 2015.
Fastmail's move fits into a broader trend of email services offering European storage options in response to demand for GDPR-compliant alternatives to American cloud services. Providers such as Proton Mail and Tutanota have always positioned European hosting as a core proposition; Fastmail is now entering that segment, albeit without the end-to-end encryption that those competitors offer as standard.
For European founders and businesses seeking a business email solution with EU data residency, this brings the range of paid, independent providers a step closer. The choice of Amsterdam as a location aligns with the role the Netherlands already plays as a hub for European internet infrastructure, partly due to the presence of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange.
This article draws in part on the following sources.
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