EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignEmail (Personal)Headquarters: BE

Mailfence: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Mailfence is a secure email suite for individuals and organisations. Besides email with aliases and custom domain names, it offers a calendar, contacts and contact groups, and document storage. You use it through webmail, a mobile web app or IMAP/SMTP. According to the vendor, end-to-end encryption takes place in the browser using OpenPGP, with digital signatures and an integrated key store. The service carries no ads or trackers and comes in free and paid versions. It is delivered as software as a service and the product is proprietary.

Mailfence is owned by ContactOffice Group, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. According to the company, its servers are located in Belgium under its own control, with no intermediaries or subcontractors, and Belgian privacy law applies: information can only be requested by local judges with a court order. The company also states that it cannot claim its system is 100 percent secure. No foreign parent company is named. For a European organisation this is a provider with its headquarters and data storage inside the EU.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked July 2, 2026
Headquarters
BE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
OVH - OVH SAS, FR (FR)Technically measured
Category
Email (Personal)
Type
Product
Website
mailfence.com ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Mailfence

The European alternatives to Mailfence come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

30 European Email (Personal) vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Mailfence

Mailfence is headquartered in BE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Mailfence scores best on data residency.

Mailfence is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Mailfence together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Mailfence?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Mailfence include Bluewin Mail, CounterMail and Disroot. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Mailfence?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Mailfence include Disroot. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Mailfence GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Mailfence is headquartered in BE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes Mailfence an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on July 2, 2026.

Sources

This record was checked via the vendor's website and legal notice during the full audit of June and July 2026. Source links have been recorded per record since 20 September 2026.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Email (Personal)

Email (Personal): Personal email services — inbox, calendar, contacts. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Mailfence — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score