Where are our servers located?
Data centers and infrastructure
The mailbox servers are located at two separate locations in Berlin, Germany. We have secure physical access to each of these locations. Our internet lines follow different routing paths and belong to different providers. High capacity, large data volumes, short routing paths: When selecting our locations, the most important factor was quality, not price, in addition to ensuring that the respective locations fall under German jurisdiction. This means that biometric access controls, power supply with multiple physical redundancy, cooling systems, and continuous system monitoring are an integral part of the international standards that are maintained in our data centers.
No ping / traceroute possible to mailbox?
Experienced users may have already noticed: it is not possible to ping the mailbox servers or reach them via traceroute:
traceroute to mailbox (80.241.60.194), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
[...]
4 92.79.213.138 29.428 ms 33.902 ms 38.099 ms
5 ve3405.bbr1.ams1.nl.inetbone.net 28.209 ms 30.601 ms 30.988 ms
6 ve3001.car1-ber1.mesh.eu 39.278 ms 41.699 ms 39.993 ms
7 gate-1.heinlein-hosting.de 42.703 ms 44.108 ms 42.850 ms
8***
9***
The trace ends at our external firewall (alias: gate-1/2.heinlein-hosting.de).
This does not mean that our servers are offline or unreachable – it simply means that our firewall administrators know what they are doing.
Our internal network structures and configurations are not meant for public visibility.
Therefore: yes, our servers cannot be seen. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
But rest assured – they are online and reachable.
Our firewall is blocking your requests?
For us as server operators, deciding how to deal with IP addresses that may be associated with suspicious activities is always a sensitive balancing act. Such activities include many login attempts using a wrong password, or a large number of unsuccessful connection attempts to our servers within a short amount of time. Our firewalls at mailbox, are configured to detect and react to such events.
New customers, especially those who are in the process of configuring a e-mail client for use with their mailbox account, may encounter a situation where they are temporarily banned. Unfortunately, a traceroute to our servers can, in some cases, already trigger a temporary ban. Some e-mail clients also try to guess hostnames or other parameters while in auto-detect mode. This mode can lead to numerous failed connection attempts with our servers, for example, if the user makes a typing error and enters their password incorrectly. We understand that such experiences can be annoying and confusing if one does not know what is going on. However, rest assured that if there is a problem, it will usually just be due to the auto-detect mode of your e-mail client. All firewall issues are temporary and usually disappear once the clients have been set up correctly.
