Yes, though not routinely... but if you need help with something and we need to see your data for that, our support team will ask for your permission and then take a look for you.<p>Also: if we have credible evidence that your account has been misbehaving (e.g. spams, scams, etc with the headers that show they originated from your authenticated connection) then we'll investigate to see if you're a bad actor breaking our terms of service or just some poor soul who had their credentials stolen.<p>And if your account is the subject of an Australian warrant, and a judge has been convinced that there's cause to access your individual data, then we don't place ourselves above the law. We consider ourselves good citizens of the world, and that includes working with law enforcement where they have a warrant.<p>What we don't do is sell your data or profile you in order to allow you to be targeted by those wishing to exert undue influence based on knowledge gleaned from your private communications. That's the privacy that's being bought and sold by many in the current world, and leading to poor consequences. We stand firm against the sale and manipulation of people's private electronic memory.<p>We don't snoop on you, but we'll help you fix your account if you mess it up, and we'll get your access back if you forget your password (a friend of mine lost her entire email history when she forgot her password while using one of the heavy encryption services... oops. Security is about availability and integrity as well).<p>Our support team is on your side, because we only have one paymaster, and that's our customer.
For all their policies, they're still subject to Australia's "NSL" equivalent that requires they disclose data to law enforcement without notifying you, and in the case of certain agencies, without a warrant.<p>Their servers are also located in the US, so they're accessible to three-letter agencies as well.<p>I recently switched to a German service. Data can still be silently disclosed but only if there's imminent danger or a judge issues a warrant. Of course the service is covered by GDPR and European regulators as well.
Fastmail has a fair Australian presence; my limited understanding is that Australian law forbids secure-by-design encryption pipelines - so someone in Fastmail can read your email.<p>Whether or not that person works in support is an interesting but somewhat minor detail. It would be advisable not to use an Australian provider for your data if that is important to you.
It's obvious that someone who has to process your stuff in plain, unencrypted form (e.g. for spam filtering) can also access it when debugging etc.<p>Apparently they have strict policies in place to first ask users for consent first whenever they need to, seems good to me (happy customer of pobox since 1997 / fastmail since 2013).
To me, Fastmail is the option if you want inexpensive, reliable email where there will be ZERO reading of your email by bots to build a marketing profile of you to be sold to whomever wants to buy it. Anyone presenting a legitimate warrant is going to get access to your content and I'm not trying to hide from those people.
Support asked me to authorize their access by replying "OK" to an email of them. I asked to know more about this and they said that only trained engineer will access my data, and that they would wait for me to reply OK to their email before to do so...