FastMail’s servers are in the US – what this means for you
> There are of course other avenues available to obtain your data. Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers. Network capturing devices could be installed. And in the worst case an attacker could simply force their way into the datacentre and physically remove our servers.> These are not things we can protect against directly but again, we can make it extremely difficult for these things to occur by using strong encryption and careful systems monitoring. Were anything like this ever to happen we would be talking about it very publically. Such an action would not remain secret for long.> Ultimately though, our opinion is that these kinds of attacks are no different to any other hacking attempt. We can and will do everything in our power to make getting unauthorised access to your data as difficult and expensive as possible, but no online service provider can guarantee that it will never happen.This kind of frank disclosure should be highly rewarded. I provided similar frank disclosure text (elsewhere) only to have it whitewashed.When everyone is underplaying the real limitations it's impossible for people to choose alternative tradeoffs— "Why should I use this slightly harder to use crypto thing when foo is already secure?"—  because the risks have been misrepresented. Underplaying the limitations also removes the incentives to invent better protection— "Doesn't foo already have perfect security?".