EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceBusiness Email & GroupwareHeadquarters: NL

Mox: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Mox is a modern, full-featured open-source mail server written in Go, for those who want to self-host their email with little maintenance. A single program handles SMTP for sending and receiving messages, IMAP4 for mail clients, webmail, and an account and administration web page. Mox sets up authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, obtains TLS certificates automatically through ACME, and supports MTA-STS, DANE and TLSRPT, among others. Spam filtering uses a per-user Bayesian filter and sender reputation tracking. Mox is installed as a binary, preferably on a dedicated machine running a Unix operating system, and comes with a quickstart command that generates the configuration and the required DNS records.

Mox is licensed under the MIT licence and is developed and maintained by Mechiel Lukkien; no company controls the project. The work has been funded through NLnet and the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme. Because you run Mox yourself, you decide where mail and account data are stored, for example in a data centre in the EU. Operations and security of the server remain your own responsibility.

Sovereignty score
94 / 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-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

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 October 4, 2026
Headquarters
NL (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Type
Product
Website

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Mox

The European alternatives to Mox 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

28 European Business Email & Groupware vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is Mox one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Why digital sovereignty matters with Mox

Mox is headquartered in NL 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 Mox scores best on data residency.

Mox is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Mox 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 Mox?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Mox include Axigen, Benno MailArchiv and BlueMind. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Mox?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Mox include Benno MailArchiv, CipherMail, Dovecot and EGroupware. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

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

Mox is headquartered in NL (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Mox 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 October 4, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

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 Business Email & Groupware

Business Email & Groupware: Business email servers, groupware, calendar and contact management. 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

See all →
8 European alternatives to Mox — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score