Security & Privacy Articles

📄️ Anonymous new registration

This article has been updated for beta users. You can find the new version for beta users further below.

📄️ Activate your mailbox.org Guard

Note: The mailbox.org Guard is designed to work with your main email address. It is not intended to be used in combination with aliases.

📄️ An introduction to mailbox.org Guard

Our new mailbox.org Guard offers the first PGP implementation for Webmail that combines both convenience and security to facilitate the easy and widespread use of secure e-mail for everyone.

📄️ Does Guard use the Web of Trust

PGP uses the “Web of Trust” for the mutual signing of encryption keys to ensure users can verify and trust the authenticity of other users. How does this work with mailbox.org Guard?

📄️ Email App Passwords

To protect an email client with a dedicated password or to ensure access with two-factor authentication enabled, you can create as many email app passwords as you need. Follow these simple steps:

📄️ Encryption of calendar and address book

For different reasons calendar and address book are not encrypted.

📄️ Fingerprints of our SSL Certificates

Some users were surprised to find out that we do not publish the fingerprints of our SSL certificates from Thawte on our website. Some websites do, but we do not.

📄️ Have mails been encrypted by sender or mailbox.org

If you have activated our automatic encryption for the completely encrypted mailbox, you can no longer determine whether e-mails were encrypted by us or by the sender. But it is possible you might like to find out.

📄️ How can e-mails be encrypted with PGP

We have included an ‘Encryption’ option in the menu on our websites that offers a step-by-step explanation of the encryption process. For an excellent introduction to the process, watch our doodle video.

📄️ How to send e-mails securely without PGP

Even if the recipient of your e-mails does not use any encryption software, you can still make sure that important e-mails are sent via a secure connection (SSL/TLS). To find out more, please have a look at secure.mailbox.org.

📄️ I have lost my PGP private key

All the e-mails stored on our servers that have been encrypted by their senders using your public key can only be decrypted into plain text using your matching private key.

📄️ Import existing PGP keys into Guard

You may replace the automatically created PGP keys on our server with your own. Note that any custom keys need to state your primary mailbox.org e-mail address as UID.

📄️ Is it safe to give my private PGP key to mailbox.org

For Guard to work, we require your private PGP key to be resident on our servers. Only this way can we ensure the secure server-side encryption and decryption of your e-mail messages.

📄️ PGP key management

Note: to use the features described in this article, you must have the mailbox.org Guard enabled.

📄️ S/MIME Encryption

S/MIME offers the encryption and signing of e-mails by means of certificates issued by trustworthy organizations, so-called Certificate Authorities. This makes it possible to ensure that the e-mails actually originate from the respective sender. mailbox.org now offers the possibility to import S/MIME-certificates from selected organizations into mailbox.org-Guard. This way you can encrypt and sign your emails with S/MIME.