Mailbox.org – Privacy made in Germany

Let me give an example. A government entity sends a subpoena to receive all data on an email account. If the service provider is legally mandated to respond with data or face prosecution, what happens? In this case, Google might actually be better for "privacy" because they at least have the economic capability to push back against Doe subpoenas. A small provider won't have the resources to defend against a frivolous subpoena and will hand over everything.

Something to keep in mind when considering this stuff. I really think the only way to at least control the option to defend your privacy is to run your own servers.

Mailbox.org seems decent from what I've heard but products advertised like this are mostly sheer bullshit. I don't know why transferring a “quality” label from (oldschool) engineering products to IT even works.

I just wish we could use an unlimited number of aliases in our own domain, it doesn't make sense to me otherwise..

They do have some interesting features, such as mailbox encryption as well as calendar/contacts encryption. It's client-side encryption, though it's in the browser.

An alternative to mailbox.org is mailfence.com.

I like the product it supports open standards, imap, caldav, carddav. If you want you can lock down pretty much everything with pgp. Data is in Germany/EU and the pricing is really fair stars with 1€/month with 3 mail aliases and 2 GB.

The guys behind it seem to be IT people with Linux/open source mindset and good ethics as far as I can judge.

I feel very comfortable with mailbox.org

[0]: https://protonmail.com

If running my own mail server was not so laborious and headache-inducing, i'd love to move away from google for apps/domain. I have no functional complaints of google; i am happy with their performance without a doubt. Its just that, as every day passes, I keep getting creeped out; its the "ick" factor. And for me it started well before the Snowden disclosures.

>> When e-mails go unnoticed because of being redirected to a spam folder that you never check, you are in fact still legally liable for such e-mails – as you cannot disprove having knowledge of them. This is a danger that our users can safely ignore: We check for spam and viruses before the e-mails are accepted and reject anything that looks suspicious. This way, you always know exactly what e-mails you have received and read.

How does that even work when they GPG encrypt content. Are they escrowing the private keys?

what a timing of this post. Just as I was ranting about this old 30C3 talk[0] and pointing out what a scam "DE-Mail", "e-brief" and "Trusted-Cloud", etc. is, ... then this is trending on HN. Hilarious.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6175253192402563072 - or:

[1] http://www.amara.org/en/videos/y1Gk3maFbvNQ/info/bullshit-ma... (select English subs)

I find its approach to useable security features interesting, especially considering the entry-level price points.

edit: typo

I decided to go for mailbox because 1) I know that Germany at the moment has still one of the best regulations about data protection (although I fear this is going to change in the next few years), 2) it provides some features others don't (like protonmail, and startmail). It was worth a try at least, so I decided to use the 30 days trial account.

It looked really good and promising: nice UI, clear documentation, cool domain name if you don't want to use your own. It provides also Office-like, calendar, and storage features. Therefore, I made up my mind, and I was determined to become one of their paying customers. So, I put 12 EUR(1 EUR/month) on the account. A few hours later I found out[0] that mailbox.org is offered by a politically motivated provider called JPBerlin [1]. I sent the cancellation request, and so far my account is still on hold - I could revoke the cancellation, though. An email received after the cancellation request says "please allow us a couple of days". Sure. It's just they took 1 EUR from the account, although I had the cancellation request sent like 10 days before the end of the trial period.

In the end, I would like to say that as a service it looks promising. However, until they stop with their political involvement, I think, not many people will use it.

[0]: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68527 [1]: https://www.jpberlin.de

I'm also pretty happy with the Card+CalDav-offerings from mailbox.org.

With their customer support, however, im rather disappointed:

mailbox.org offers what they call "Familienaccounts" (non-commercial accounts, meant to share, among other things, calendars and contacts with one another [0]).

Grouping existing accounts into "Familenaccounts" by means of contacting their support team used to be a feature that was offered (and advertised) by mailbox.org, and a feature that I've used for two of my family members in the past.

For some technical reason or other, mailbox.org is unable to convert existing accounts into Familienaccounts any more. This wouldn't be that much of a problem (workaround was to backup data, cancel one account, get that account's credit refunded, ask them to remove that account from their list of blocked accounts, recreate that account as a "Familienaccount", pay for the new account and restore the backed up data).

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it took a month of to and fro emailing with mailbox.org support just to get that information (while they still advertised being able to convert accounts on their website).

When we decided to implement the workaround, it took another month from cancelling the old account to getting the new one working, with my wife unable to receive emails for some time inbetween.

I will continue to use mailbox.org, but in my opinion they really need to improve their support.

[0] https://support.mailbox.org/knowledge-base/article/familien-...