Based in | Belgium |
Storage | 5-50 GB |
Price | €2.50/mo. |
Free Tier | Up to 500 MB |
Website | Mailfence.com |
Mailfence is a privacy-oriented office suite offering secure email, contacts, storage, and more. It is aimed at privacy-conscious individuals, businesses, and universities. We have been a fan of Mailfence ever since we first tested it a few years ago and it continues to grow in popularity. According to the company,
We are happy to share with you that the interest in our service is booming. Signups to Mailfence are more than double the numbers of last year and keep on increasing. We are thrilled to see so many new users coming in, joining the fight for online privacy.
Today I revisit the service to see what’s new since last time around. For this Mailfence review update, I created a new account and started testing, with a focus on the email side of things. My goal was to see how Mailfence compares to other secure email providers.
Note: While reviewing the entire suite of tools provided by Mailfence was not the purpose of this review, from what I saw of it, Mailfence might work as a replacement for Google’s entire G Suite. We already rank it among the best alternatives to Gmail, with many features for all types of users.
Mailfence is also a strong advocate for online privacy, as they note on their website:
…we will lose our right to online privacy if we don’t fight for it. Therefore we pledge to donate 15% of all income of the Pro plan to foundations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the European Digital Rights Foundation that fight for the defence of our rights in the digital world.
Mailfence, along with Tutanota and several other European tech companies, published an open letter to the European Parliament on April 15, 2021. The letter warned against the banning of encryption in order to, “fight against child abuse.” The letter lays out a number of grievous problems with the proposed initiative, which will be used to further spy on people around the world.
According to the letter, this initiative would require all private chat messages, and apparently all end-to-end encrypted content, to be automatically screened for illegal content. This would require everything to be decrypted so that the automated systems could read them. The EU would go from being a global model for personal data protection to a global model for mass surveillance. We also see this unfolding in Australia, as we discussed in our guide on the best VPNs for Australia.
Here is an overview of the Pros and Cons we discovered in this Mailfence review:
+ Pros
- Offers end-to-end encryption and digital signatures
- Mobile and web apps
- Data is stored on Belgian servers
- Offers OpenPGP encryption
- Messages, Documents, Calendar, Contacts, and Groups
- SMTP, POP, and IMAP support
- Can synchronize with other email clients
- Supports password-protected messages with expiration time
- Removes IP addresses from mail headers
- OpenPGP user keystore
- Great user interface (recently updated)
- Cryptocurrency payment options
– Cons
- Logging of IP address and some other data
- Code is not open source
https://Mailfence.com
Mailfence features overview
Mailfence provides a full suite of services, Messaging, Contacts, Calendars, Groups, and Document storage. They use industry-standard OpenPGP encryption and digital signatures to protect your data and authenticate your messages. With support for messaging protocols like SMTP, POP, and IMAP, Mailfence can synchronize with many popular desktop and mobile email clients.
Interesting features of Mailfence include:
- A built-in Keystore to manage your OpenPGP encryption keys
- The ability to send encrypted messages to users who don’t use PGP
- Ability to digitally sign emails using OpenPGP
- Easy integration with Thunderbird and other email services and clients
- SMTP, POP, IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, ActiveSync support
- A heavily-customizable business version
Mailfence company information
Mailfence is a secure email suite that offers end-to-end encryption (through PGP support) and the ability to work with different email clients. It is offered by ContactOffice Group SA, a Belgian company founded in 1999. The founders launched Mailfence in November of 2013. Your data is stored on Mailfence’s own servers in Belgium, which has pros and cons.
Being based in Belgium is good because the country is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and does not use National Security Letters (NSLs), gag orders, or other techniques to secretly gather data about users. Mailfence maintains a Transparency Report and Warrant Canary so users can see what legal requests for information it has received in any six-month period.
Being based in Belgium also has drawbacks, however, as a member of the Fourteen Eyes intelligence alliance. In 2016, the Belgian government imposed new data retention rules. These rules force companies to keep track of every transaction within their systems for a period of 12 months in case the authorities want it.
But not any more
On April 22, 2021 the Constitutional Court of Belgium declared the data retention law unconstitutional. Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of the story. Federal justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne and others inside the government are already hard at work coming up with a new law to track digital communications.
How this will affect services like Mailfence isn’t clear yet. We’ll let you know once we hear more.
Mailfence technical specifications
Mailfence uses strong encryption algorithms to ensure that your messages cannot be read or tampered with. These include:
- OpenPGP for digital signatures and for encrypting your data (PGP-MIME and inline-PGP)
- SSL/TLS, Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), MTA-STS and HSTS for protecting your data while in motion
Other supported protocols include SMTP, IMAP, POP, ActiveSync, WebDAV, CalDAV, and LDAP.
Buypass AS is the certificate authority for Mailfence, as explained here.
Mailfence hands-on testing
I created a free account to test out the service for this Mailfence review. The free version gives you all the basic features, while reserving synchronization ability and business-related features (like custom domains) for the paid versions. I suggest you begin your Mailfence experience with the free version since you can easily upgrade when/if you need to.
Let’s get started.
Signing up for Mailfence
Signing up for Mailfence is quick and easy. Go here and click the “Sign up” directly on the homepage.
You’ll need to give Mailfence an existing email address so they can send you an authentication message. This is annoying, but it is far better than being required to cough up a telephone number like you are with some services (Fastmail, for example). Besides, you can use a disposable email account if you don’t want to give them one of your regular addresses.
Once you get here you’ll select your email address from among the options the service provides. And once you get through this, you’ll find yourself at a temporary introductory page. You’ll get all sorts of information about the service to help you get off to a fast start. At the top of the page, you will see icons for email, documents, calendar, and contacts. We’ll start with email:
The look and feel of Mailfence
I’ve had a Mailfence test account for about three years now. The current layout is a nice improvement over the previous versions. The design makes it simple to switch tasks, draft emails, upload documents, manage contacts, and more.
Messages
The design uses the standard 3-column layout for Messages, with the folders you’ll want on the left and the commands you are most likely to need right at the top. And unlike some web-based interfaces I’ve seen, the controls stay at the top of the window as if this were a standard app rather than a browser-based interface.
Creating and managing encryption keys
Before you go any further with Messages, I suggest you set up your encryption keys. You’ll need these before you can send or receive encrypted messages with Mailfence.
Follow these steps in the webmail app:
- Click your icon at the top right of the interface.
- In the shortcut menu that appears, select Settings.
- In the menu that appears on the left side of the window, select Encryption (it is under the Messages heading).
- From here you can Generate a new personal key or Import a key.
To complete the process, follow the steps in the wizard that appears. I won’t go through the complete process of creating, sharing, and using encryption keys here. If you want to see the details, you can see the instructions on the Mailfence website.
Sending and receiving messages
You can create a plain text message with the defaults, or you can click More to see a menu of options, including the ability to use Rich Text Formatting while writing your message.
Once you are done writing your message, you’ll need to decide how you want to send it. You can send the message either encrypted or “in the clear” (with no encryption), and either signed or unsigned.
Click Encryption and a wizard appears that walks you through sending the message either protected by a Password or by OpenPGP encryption.
Click Sign & Send to digitally sign your message before you send it. You can also click the down arrow in that button to send the message without signing it.
Note: If you would like more information on encrypting and signing messages, you can find it here. And we also have a guide on the topic of encrypted email here.
Receiving a message is also easy and works as expected.
Contacts
As any good email program should, Mailfence offers an integrated Contacts feature.
Happily, you don’t need to worry about each contact’s encryption keys here, since they are all managed in the Keystore.
Groups
Once you’ve entered your Contacts, you can create Groups. After setting up a Group, you can add both users and the data they need into that group, making it easy to collaborate.
To create and work with Groups, follow the instructions on this page.
Calendars
Mailfence supports one personal Calendar per user. You also have access to the Calendars associated with any Groups you belong to, as well as external Calendars from other services.
The Mailfence Calendar has a huge range of capabilities. To see what it can do, you can learn more on their website.
Documents
Not surprisingly, Documents is a place where you can upload documents/files so you can access them from any web browser or share them with other Mailfence users.
You can learn more about Documents, including how to use group-oriented features like managing permissions, on the Mailfence website.
Mobile and desktop apps
This is one area where Mailfence lags behind other secure email competitors. Unlike services such as Tutanota, Mailfence does not offer desktop apps. For desktop, the only option is to log in to the webmail portal.
However, for mobile devices, Mailfence now has a dedicated app. This is a progressive web app (PWA), which works on Android and iOS devices with certain browsers. Here is what you can do with the Mailfence mobile app:
- Access all of the Mailfence components: Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Documents.
- Send & receive encrypted emails
- Access private & group workspaces
Because the mobile “app” is a web page, whether you can use it or not depends on which mobile browser you have and how it’s configured. Right now, you can not use the mobile PWA with Firefox, DuckDuckGo, or Brave browsers. It currently works with Chrome and Safari browsers.
Mailfence business features
Describing Mailfence for Business is a bit tough. That’s because, as they describe it,
With Mailfence for Business you get a customized version of the Mailfence secure and private email solution in order to adapt it to the specific security and usage needs of your organization or business.
In other words, their team will work with you to make Mailfence the perfect fit for your business needs. Here is a partial list of the customizations you can request:
- The graphic presentation including your logo and the look of your login page
- Storage space based on your organization’s specific needs
- Integration with external services
- A custom control panel for managing accounts
- And of course your own custom email domain names
The Mailfence for Business API allows you to automate many tasks and integrate with LDAP, Active Directory, and CAS.
Contact Mailfence Support for the latest specification or request specific features.
Support
Like other reviewers and users, I’ve found Mailfence Support to be great if you need any assistance. They are quick to respond and give quality answers to your questions. Of course, users with the higher-level plans (Pro and Ultra) will get faster service than those Free plan users.
The Mailfence Knowledge Base is a good addition to their Support system. It provides useful information on a wide range of topics including tutorials and step-by-step instructions. You can also find regular documentation on most any aspect of the product.
Mailfence plans and prices
Mailfence offers four pricing plans in total: Free, Entry, Pro and Ultra. While you would probably find the Free plan too limited to use as your main email account, it is sufficient to get a feel for Mailfence before committing to a subscription.
Mailfence supports all major payment options. For situations where you require additional privacy, you can pay for your subscription using the Bitcoin and Litecoin cryptocurrencies. Registering for the service with an anonymous email account (for the recovery address) and paying with cryptocurrency will give you an additional layer of privacy on top of what’s already provided by Mailfence.
Should you consider Mailfence?
While many secure email services are somewhat restrictive with features, Mailfence is a fully-featured alternative to Gmail.
Whether you are a regular privacy-conscious user or managing a business team, Mailfence can cater to your needs. Aside from basics like the price and whether it offers all the features you need, there are two other things to consider with Mailfence:
- Do you want to use built-in encryption or manage your own?
- Does the Mailfence threat model match your needs?
Let’s examine each of these questions.
1. Do you want to use built-in encryption or to manage your own?
As you’ve seen in this review, Mailfence uses PGP encryption (via the OpenPGP standard) and a built-in Keystore to give you complete control over the encryption of your data. Once you’ve got your encryption keys set up and shared properly, working with encrypted messages is easy. But as you’ve also seen, there can be a significant amount of work required to create and manage keys so that you can use PGP encryption with others.
Other end-to-end encrypted services like Tutanota handle all that encryption setup and management in the background. But with a solution like this, you lose some of the control you might want to have. You also have to trust the email service to not do anything sneaky in the background. It is up to you to decide which way you want to handle your encryption.
2. Does the Mailfence threat model match your needs?
To know if a secure email service will meet your needs, you have to understand the kinds of threats you want to protect against. Once you know that, you can evaluate whether or not any given service can meet those needs.
One of the nice things about Mailfence is that they have long published their threat model. Here is a summary of their model:
Mailfence protects against:
- Eavesdropping on your connection
- Mass surveillance
- Message forgery / tampering attacks
- Compromised account
- Data theft
Mailfence does NOT protect against:
- A compromised device
- A compromised or forgotten passphrase
- Sophisticated Man-in-the-Middle attacks
- Attacks by powerful state adversaries (NSA and similar heavy hitters)
The Mailfence website has more info on these topics if you want to learn more.
Mailfence FAQ
Here are some frequently asked questions about Mailfence.
Does Mailfence store emails encrypted at rest?
Mailfence has been promising to add an option for full encryption at rest of the entire inbox and all emails. However, as of now, this is not an option and your inbox is not stored encrypted at rest.
Does Mailfence have an app?
Mailfence does not have a desktop app. They do have mobile apps, in the form of a Progressive Web Application (PWA). To find out more about what that actually means, visit this Mailfence blog page.
What are some Mailfence alternatives?
Mailfence is a powerful secure email suite, but it may not be what you want. Fortunately, you have a few different options to consider.
If you like the secure nature of Mailfence and its additional features, such as Calendar and Documents, but don’t want to manage encryption keys, you might want to read our Tutanota review.
Do you like that Mailfence supports PGP and integrates with other apps, but don’t want all the complexity of the Mailfence suite? Then check out our ProtonMail review.
Mailfence review conclusion
This concludes our Mailfence review. To recap, if a secure email suite with full PGP control and interoperability is what you seek, Mailfence could be the solution. It has all the features and options that you are likely to need, whether you are looking to manage the mail for an entire organization, or just want a great service for personal use.
With 500 MB of free account storage, you can test drive Mailfence for free here >>
https://mailfence.com/
Alternatives to Mailfence
If you want to check out some other secure email services, see the reviews below:
ProtonMail Review
Tutanota Review
Mailbox.org Review
Hushmail Review
Posteo Review
Fastmail Review
Runbox Review
CTemplar Review
This Mailfence review was last updated January 3, 2023.
AFAIK, Tutanota can’t access your inbox even if a German court tells them to.
AFAIK, ProtonMail can’t access your inbox even if a Swiss court tells them to.
I like Mailfence’s UI. But I can’t find if they can access your inbox if a Belgian court tells them to….
Dear,
As explained in our transparancy report we do collaborate with legal authorities only when receiving an injunction from a belgian judge. Information request we obtain is for meta data. https://blog.mailfence.com/transparency-report-and-warrant-canary/
I was less than pleased to find that Mailfence has at least one undocumented limitation. I signed up for the Entry plan and began happily adding external email accounts for POP retrieval and storage in Mailfence. When I tried to add my sixth external POP account, it displayed a message that an upgrade is required to add more. I searched their help and marketing pages to see if this limitation was documented. I didn’t find it, so I submitted a ticket. The response was that only 5 external POP email addresses are allowed with the Entry plan. They also said that they would inform someone responsible for documentation about the omission. Yeah, right. Upgrading to the next higher subscription plan is TRIPLE the cost of the Entry plan. Totally not worth it to be able to add a few more external POP email addresses. Time to move on, I guess. Buyer beware.
Dear Tinker,
We are sorry for the bad surprise. In our experience, 5 Pop accounts covers the needs of regular users. This is the first time in the more than 20 years of operations of our company that someone hits the limit on number of mail accounts that can be downloaded in Pop towards our account. That’s why it is not advertised as one of the main limits in our documentation.
Regards,
Mailfence Team
I’ve spend the last 3 days trying to get a business account set up with Mailfence. They require an alternate email to both verify you and to make contact should you lose your email. They have completely violated my privacy by sending my name, my business name, my email address at Mailfence… Privacy be damned. I just sent them another email politely requesting them to stop sending email to alternate email. I’m not feeling too polite to say the least. It’s entirely screwy how Mailfence doesn’t offer a straighforward way to sign up for a paid account from the get go. Oddly enough, I wrote to support from my Mailfence email but they wrote back at both my email addresses exposing personal info to the alternate carrier. Grrr. No idea why they would do such an egregious thing but I’m none too happy about it. The whole purpose of Mailfence was for privacy. That’s shot now.
Dear Soapbox,
We exchanged about this issue via the support and apologize for the inconvenience caused. The alternative emailaddress is used among other for password recovery and in order to notify users that get blocked out of their account because of payment issues.
We forwarded your issue internally
Respectfully
Mailfence Support
I tried contacting support, but got no answer. Sven, do you know if Mailfence allows users to use 3rd party spam tools like SpamHero.com to filter email prior to arriving at Mailfence?
Thanks,
Don
Hi Don, I’m not sure on that one, but I’d think that their support would get back to you.
Sven does Mailfence encrypt Subject lines?
No, it relies on PGP, which does not support encrypted subject lines. If you want encrypted subject lines, check out Tutanota. But note that this will only work sending an encrypted email from one Tutanota account to another Tutanota account (need to stay within the Tutanota ecosystem).
One thing that might be of use to some is to create the account with some obscure, non-obvious username and use it only for logging in. Then create an alternate e-mail address on the account to use for actual e-mail. If someone targets your account, they can try to log in with the e-mail address you use and they will never get anywhere at all. For example, use zenzizenzizenzic3.14159265@protonmail.com for your login and john.doe@protonmail.com for your e-mail address.
I didn’t think of this until after I created and started using my ProtonMail account. I no longer try to use my login e-mail address to send e-mail. All anyone sees is the alternate addresses so that might help.
I also use +aliases pretty heavily. Whenever I sign up anything, I’ll add a +form to make it simpler to filter e-mail into the correct tag and folder. ProtonMail handles this well, but not all services do. Interestingly enough, the e-mail provider we use for our company e-mail uses a ‘-‘ instead of a ‘+’ for this. This can be very useful for entering an e-mail address in a web page since many reject e-mails with a ‘+’ as being invalid.
According to [https://medium.com/swlh/mailfence-end-to-end-encryption-fee40f3965c9]
Mailfence does not really provide end-to-end confidential email service.
Even PGP-encrypted messages are stored in plain on their servers, and who knows where else.
I hadn’t noticed that before.
I have a mailfence account that I’ve been trying out with the idea of moving my company’s e-mail to it. I just sent an encryped test message from my mailfence account to my protonmail account. You are right — it was sent encrypted, but as the “View Source” shows on the message I sent, it is not stored encrypted! I never would have thought about checking this.
On the other hand, the e-mail that does arrive encrypted naturally remains encrypted on the server.
Hi Sven – Thanks so much for this valuable insight as I am currently researching a secure alternative to my existing email. I was just wondering if you have any comments, research, or insight into the “Sekur” Swiss based email and secure messenger service?
We have not tested Sekur yet, but perhaps later this year.
Sven,
You’re doing a really good job here, don’t spoil it by providing in your reviews information that is not substantiated. Mailfence without a doubt is a solid, reliable service provider, but they don’t offer encryption at rest as of now. Their model offers the possibility of E2E, but this is in a manner similar to that GPG provides if you encrypt your messages by yourself. Encryption at rest is, as you of course know, something slightly different. And to back it up with their own statements from a few days ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Mailfence/comments/ribo3j/encryption_at_rest/]
Cheers.
Thanks I’ll be looking into this more and updating the review.
Encryption at rest is at the top of our priorities and is presently is testing phase. It will be included in the coming months
I’ve been using mailfence for a while now. I tried other providers before but didn’t like them that much. The free plan is cool but I switched to the entry and it’s totally worth it. Feel so good to know my emails are kept private!
Dear Greta,
We thank you for this feedback
Where is the announcement of encryption at rest?
Question about implementation was posted in their Reddit forum a month ago. No reply, they’re just ignoring it.
I do like some aspects of their service. But cannot ignore such a glaring flaw.
> Besides, you can use a disposable email account if you don’t want to give them one of your regular addresses.
You can’t. They block disposable e-mail address. Two weeks ago it showed error message saying they need regular e-mail address for sign-up.
Does Mailfence have the same privacy problem as Tutnota, in that nonencrypted messages that are received into one’s inbox can be intercepted and turned over to authorities in those brief seconds between the time those messages arrive in one’s inbox and the time Mailfence encrypts them for storage? (Because both are located in a 14 eyes country). This was described in your Tutanota review as being able to occur when a message is received into Tutanota from a user that is not also a Tutanota sender. So I am wondering if the same principle applies to Mailfence. Thank you.
You keep commenting about this case here and elsewhere. This only happened with Tutanota because they were specifically forced to do this against a specific individual who was the subject of a criminal court case in Germany. You need to remember that to put the situation into context. If you are not a criminal working in Germany, I would think the chances of this happening to you are essentially zero.
To your question, no, it is different with Mailfence because they support PGP encryption, while Tutanota uses their own encryption system that is not compatible with other email providers. So with Mailfence, emails with PGP encryption are fully encrypted, and those without PGP encryption are not fully encrypted. If you don’t understand this, then read our guide on encrypted email.
> “I’m very happy to report that Mailfence now stores emails encrypted at rest. As promised, they have implemented end-to-end (E2E) encryption, meaning messages remain encrypted from the time they leave your device until they are decrypted at their destination.”
Could you share a source about that ? I have found no official Mailfence information announcing that eagerly expected upgrade — nor any other information from other sources, for that matter.
Note that just offering end-to-end encryption (which I believe they always did) does not count. Of course if you send email end-to-end encrypted, it will be encrypted at rest while it’s on Mailfence server. That’s not the point. The point of encryption at rest is to encrypt even non end-to-end encrypted email, incoming or outgoing, while they are on the server.
It also needs to be zero access. If the emails are encrypted, but Mailfence can decrypt them, it does not count either.
Something odd and disturbing about MAILFENCE’s website: mailfence goes out of its way to prove that you can trust that its website is actually legit by publishing its certificate information: https://blog.mailfence.com/mailfence-ssl-tls-certificate/
It specifies near the bottom of the page that the info published applies to *.mailfence.com IOW all its subdomains.
But I followed the steps given on that page (ie blog.mailfence.com) and on kb.mailfence.com and the certificates do not match (and are each different). First of all, they are issued by the CA Gandi, which is not even a non-American company, which they claim was a goal. But on their homepage https://mailfence.com the certificate does match. WTF??
Later, I found this helpful info, but it still doesn’t explain the weirdness of mailfence’s certificate PASSING the test on the homepage but not on the subdomain WHERE THE CERT INFO WAS PUBLISHED! Again, WTF?? https://kb.mailbox.org/display/MBOKBEN/Fingerprints+of+our+SSL+Certificates
Mailfence blog (https://blog.mailfence.com/mailfence-launches-new-blog-new-ssl-certificate/) and KB SSL/TLS certificates are excepted from Mailfence site certificate (https://blog.mailfence.com/mailfence-ssl-tls-certificate/). Concerned blogpost is now updated to reflect this better.
Nice people clever but not honest. I opened an account and find their page is closed to the USA Contacted them them they made me an account. Went to login page closed to US. They respond yes its closed so send me a link. They link is not direct and operational must be hand typed. Than I dumped the idea of their email. Any idea if mail.com is any good Ive used mail.com for years but yijes they scare me like everyone sees my email. Strange stuff happens when I send emails. I noticed yot didnt list them.
I have a free private e-mailaccount of Mailfence for about 7 years and I am still very happy with that account. Long live Mailfence!
I made a free account on Mailfence; Then I realised my username was to easy- you need it for login- so I wanted to change it but in vain, so I got in contact with the support service. I got 3 different employees in 3 days! The first stated that there was one account non active but she activated it and said that username and password could always be changed . No result. The second support told me to re-install the password. But how could I do it as I got no mailadress for one username?? No result again. The third support man kept focussing on the pasword even when I told him the full history of the problem. Most of the time I was advised to the FAQ database, no personal advice was given. So no result either. At last I figured it out myself : a username can’t be changed, two user(name)s on the same free mailadress is impossible! The contact stopt suddenly after I told them it.
Later I discovered how limited this free account iss not only in MB but also the features who are common in others as F.I. Tutanota and Protonmail . In most reviews about privacy-protecting mailproviders Mailfence has a low ranking. So my decision was made up fast.
Addition: More information about the change of my username: As I could not change it I made up a second account with the same mailadress but other username after having deleted the first account. But by accident the first account was not removed from their server so my second trail got in conflict with the still active account. So I needed help and support.
I have been using Mailfence for over a year. I have had a few little issues where the site is down or i can’t access my email account but yesterday and today I have had issues where any email i send shows sent but never reaches it’s destination.
Now my email account can send email but all of the emails i sent this morning are still showing sent but none of them were ever received. I reached out to support who were very friendly until they ran out of suggestions and then I also got ghosted and no more replies. I will be switching to protonmail for sure after this.
I recommend you avoid this company. Before paying I asked if a certain feature was available on their pro plan and their support said yes. After buying a 6-month subscription (the minimum) I find it was a lie, so I either need a workaround or a refund. It’s been almost a week and I haven’t been able to get them to handle it. Now it’s like they’re ghosting me – no replies to my support requests on twitter or email.
Don’t you mind sharing what feature was that?