[TenFour]

That referenced thread is about new Australian laws that might impact Fastmail customers. But, what email provider doesn't follow local laws, and would you really want to use such an outlaw provider? I suspect every country has laws that allow law enforcement to get warrants that require email providers to provide them with information. The only protection against this is to analyze the laws in various countries to determine which ones you most agree with, and then how they will impact you if you are not a citizen of the country where the email service is based. That is not easy to do! The reality is that nothing we do on the Internet is all that private and if state-level authorities want to access that information they can and will no matter what service you use and no matter what country it is located in. Sure, some people are willing to roll their own email servers with end-to-end encryption and then only communicate with people doing the same, but most of us would not be able to do that and wouldn't find it very useful either. I suspect in many cases there are backdoors that allow even encrypted commercial providers to provide significant amounts of information to the authorities. It's not really very different from the good old days when criminals would communicate by passing letters from hand to hand instead of using the postal service, or they might resort to coded letters that sounded innocent. The rest of us knew there was a possibility that any mail we sent might be read by authorities, but it was too useful not to use. I have read that even today one of the most likely avenues for identity theft is that thieves simply steal your mail from your mailbox or trash. Think of all the new credit cards, bank statements, government documents, etc. that still arrive via snail mail. Here in the USA there are some agencies that will only send incredibly important documents via snail mail, like hospitals and the IRS for example. I helped my father set up automatic payment of his taxes and it required the mailing of a PIN code to him from the IRS--no other way to obtain the code.