Fastmail has been a benchmark for independent email for a long time. It’s fast, it’s built on open standards, and it doesn’t run on advertising. If you’re happy with it, this article probably won’t change your mind, and it shouldn’t.
People who do look elsewhere usually have a specific reason, and it’s most often where their data sits. Details below are from Fastmail’s own pages in November 2026, so check them before you decide.
What Fastmail does well
- Open standards. Fastmail supports IMAP and SMTP, and it helped create JMAP, the modern mail protocol that Lettio also uses.
- Search and speed. Search indexes run on Fastmail’s servers, so search is quick across your whole mailbox.
- A clear position on AI. Fastmail says it has not integrated AI into the product, and that it doesn’t train models on customer data.
- An official MCP server. It offers read, write and send as separate levels on the consent screen, and we’ve written up how to connect the Fastmail MCP server. That’s a good design, and we recommend looking for it in any email MCP server.
Where the differences are
Jurisdiction and data residency. This is the big one for European businesses. Fastmail is an Australian company. You can choose an EU region, but according to its data residency documentation, the primary copy goes to Amsterdam while a replica sits in the US, and backups and logs are US-based. That’s clearly documented, which is to Fastmail’s credit. Whether it works for you depends on your compliance requirements, so ask your data protection lead.
End-to-end encryption. Neither Fastmail nor Lettio is zero-access. Both can read mail on the server, which is what makes server-side search possible. If you need your provider to be unable to read your mail, look at Proton or Tuta instead.
Built-in AI. Fastmail leaves AI entirely to the client you connect. That’s a clean position. Lettio’s in-product assistant is still on our roadmap; today, our agents work through MCP, the same way Fastmail’s do.
Moving in. Fastmail provides tools for importing your mail yourself. At Lettio, a person handles the migration for you. If you’re moving a team, that may matter more than any feature here.
What about other alternatives?
mailbox.org is a Berlin company with servers in Germany, and IMAP and SMTP on every plan. It’s a strong option if you want German hosting, though we found no official MCP server.
Proton and Tuta give up server-side features for zero-access encryption. That’s a different product category, so compare them on that basis.
Lettio keeps the same model as Fastmail: a real mailbox on open standards, with MCP on top. The difference is where it runs. Your mail lives on servers we operate in the EU, including backups, under the GDPR. It’s priced from €2 per mailbox, and sending through our email MCP server is limited to your own address.
We’re also newer and smaller than Fastmail, and it’s fair to weigh that. Ask how long a provider has been around, and how easy it would be to leave. Because we use the same open standards, leaving Lettio works the same way as leaving Fastmail: you take your domain and your mail with you.
How to decide
Stay with Fastmail if its data residency meets your requirements. You’d be moving for little reason otherwise.
Move if your requirements say all copies of your mail must stay in the EU, including backups and logs, or if you want a person to handle the migration. In that case, compare the same things for every provider you consider: where backups sit, where logs sit, and which legal entity holds your contract.
Since both services use your own domain, the move itself is smaller than it sounds. Your address stays the same, and the change is where the mail is delivered.