Posteo is a privacy and security focused email service from Germany

Martin Brinkmann
Jun 2, 2015
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Unless you are making sure that you are using encryption when using email, chance is that your emails get read by machines and maybe also individuals as they are not protected by any means.

German email service Posteo just announced an addition to the service's privacy-focused email offering that allows all users to encrypt their mail data with the click of a button.

Posteo is not free but affordable at $1 per month or $12 per year. Users get 2 Gigabyte of free storage for that with options to increase storage for $0.25 per Gigabyte per month.

What sets Posteo apart from the majority of other email services out there is its focus on privacy and security.

Privacy begins when you sign up. While you can use your credit card or PayPal to subscribe, Posteo supports cash as well which ensures your anonymity. The sign-up form itself requests no personal information and Posteo promises that they don't save IP addresses and replace user IP addresses when sending emails with that of the Posteo server.

Posteo supports TLS-encrypted access and transmissions, encrypts all data on AES encrypted hard drives, and supports the previously mentioned crypto mail storage.

To use it, select Settings > Encryption from the menu, enter your account password again to verify that you have access to it and then the "activate crypto mail storage now" button.

Once you hit the button, all emails of the account are encrypted using the password. This includes not only the email body but also attachments and metadata. In addition, all future emails that arrive are encrypted as well.

Posteo notes that encryption blocks them from accessing the contents of user emails and that users will lose access to all emails if they forget the account password.

Encryption does not prevent the use of IMAP or POP3 so that you can access your account using local email programs and mobile devices.

Crypto storage is not the only protective feature that Posteo offers. Users may enable inbound encryption  and end-to end encryption of individual emails using S/MIME or OpenPGP. In addition, address book and calendar can be encrypted directly on the web interface to protect the data using the account password.

Additional information about security and privacy are available on the site's encryption help page.

Posteo is a subscription-based email provider. One benefit of paying money for email is that you get an ad-free tracker-free environment. The service, including its webmail interface and newsletter, is completely ad-free and uses no tracking tools on the web either. Since it is not financed by advertising, it has no advertising partners or parses emails to deliver targeted advertisement to users of its service.

As far as additional features are concerned, you may configure aliases (two are free, more for $0.10 per alias) which you can use instead of the primary email address. Aliases support a variety of localized Posteo domains but no custom domains at the time of writing.

What else? The service ships with its own spam and virus filter, supports custom filters to sort emails by content or sender automatically, folders, a pop3 migration service to migrate from another service, forwarding and auto-reply, and support for IMAP and POP3 connections.

You may also use signatures and HTML emails, receive attachments of up to 50 Megabyte in size, or switch between different view modes for emails.

Address book and calendar support import and export operations. It is for instance possible to import CardDAV contacts to the address book or export calendar data as ics files. In fact, data exports are one of the key features of Posteo as it gives users full control over their data at any time.

POP3/IMAP information

Server name: posteo.de
Username: [email protected]
Password: Your personal password

Outgoing mail server (SMTP):

  • With STARTTLS using port 587, or
  • with SSL/TLS encryption using port 465

Incoming mail server (IMAP):

  • With STARTTLS using port 143, or
  • with SSL/TLS encryption using port 993

Incoming mail server (POP3):

  • With STARTTLS using port 110, or
  • with SSL/TLS encryption using port 995

Closing Words

Posteo is not free but the base service is reasonably priced at €1 per month especially if you consider that it supports anonymous payments and several options and features that protect user identities, emails and other data. All in all an interesting email service for privacy and security conscious Internet users.

Summary
Posteo is a privacy and security focused email service from Germany
Article Name
Posteo is a privacy and security focused email service from Germany
Description
Posteo is a subscription-based email provider from Germany that puts a strong focus on security and privacy, for instance by supporting full data encryption.
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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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