Mailfence Secure Email Service

Right away we noticed that Mailfence is a strong advocate for online privacy rights while also donating to the cause:

…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.

If you want a fully-featured alternative to Gmail with more security and privacy, then Mailfence may be the perfect fit. Now let’s examine the details.

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 many 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. The period of retention remains 12 months as before.

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, click the blue Sign me up button and follow the steps.

As you go through the process, you’ll need to feed Mailfence an 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 some services (Fastmail, for example).

The look and feel of Mailfence

I’ve had a Mailfence test account for about two years. The new and updated layout is a big improvement over the previous version. It feels cleaner and more intuitive than previous versions. In particular, the design makes it simple to move from section to section by clicking one of the four icons at the top center of the window.

Messages

As you can see in the following screenshot, we’re looking at the Messages (email) section right now:

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:

1. Click your icon at the top right of the interface.
2. In the shortcut menu that appears, select Settings.
3. In the menu that appears on the left side of the window, select Encryption (it is under the Messages heading).
4. 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

Composing messages with Mailfence is straightforward and easy. Click the New button in the Messages section to open up a New Message window.

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.

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, go to this blog post.

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.

Does Mailfence store emails encrypted at rest?

By default, Mailfence does not store your emails encrypted at rest, which is a drawback when compared to some other secure email providers. The only exceptions to this are messages and attachments that have been encrypted using PGP. These will remain encrypted in your inbox when stored on Mailfence servers. You can also use a third-party local client for encryption.

I also asked Mailfence staff for additional clarification on inbox encryption. This was their reply:

All end-to-end encrypted emails are encrypted, including attachments. However, this indeed does not cover emails that are being sent/received in plain-text and we do plan to work on encrypted folders that would potentially cover this case. This is scheduled for Q1/Q2 next year.

As a work around, for users with higher threat models, or who simply don’t want to trust our strong internal ACLs and other security measures, can use any OpenPGP capable local client of their choice to store their entire mailbox encrypted. Thanks to our ‘as-is’ OpenPGP implementation which makes it easier by not forcing any extra program to be installed for SMTP-IMAP/POP3 or ActiveSync connections.

While this is a major drawback for anyone wanting full encryption of their inbox, Mailfence is working on a solution that should be ready sometime in 2021. (We’ll update this Mailfence review when that solution goes live.)

Here are a few email providers we’ve reviewed that offer full encryption of your stored emails:

1. Tutanota (automatic)
2. ProtonMail (automatic)
3. Mailbox.org (can be enabled in settings)
4. Posteo (can be enabled in settings)

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 or mobile apps. Instead, they offer integration with third-party desktop email clients and a reduced version of their website for mobile devices.

The reduced site looks like this:

Because the mobile “client” is a web page, whether you can use it or not depends on which mobile browser you have and how it’s configured. Using my smartphone, I was able to log in to the site through my browser without any issues.

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.

The Mailfence Knowledge Base is a good addition to their Support system. It provides useful information on a wide range of topics and will likely continue to grow over time.

Mailfence plans and prices

Mailfence offers four pricing plans in total: Free, Entry, Pro and Ultra.  are designed for individuals.

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:

1. Do you want to use built-in encryption or to manage your own?
2. 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 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 alternatives

Mailfence is a powerful secure email suite, but it may not be what you want. If that’s the case, 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 investigate Tutanota.

If you like that Mailfence supports PGP and integrates with other apps, but don’t want all the complexity of the Mailfence suite, you might find ProtonMail more to your liking.

Mailfence review conclusion

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 risk-free by going here.

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Alternatives to Mailfence

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