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Mailfence

It's August 2020, time for an update. First, let me say that I could not sign up despite enabling cookies, JabbaShit, XHR and filling out all the fields correctly several times. Was the issue Pale Moon or maybe the VPN? Who cares - if I can't register, the service is useless. Free tier does not support mail clients so for MailFence to be even slightly worth bothering with, you need to pay (2.50 € per month, Bitcoin accepted). Of course the front page contains privacy posturing:

We believe that online privacy is a fundamental human right which can no longer be taken for granted so we decided that it was time to offer a service which is fully dedicated to email privacy.

I've heard that before. Let's see how this claim stacks up with your privacy policy:

We implement a local instance of Matomo [...]

This crap again. Read ProtonMail's section to see just how vile it is.

We collect IP addresses, message-ID's, sender and recipient addresses, subjects, browser versions, countries and timestamps.

Already a red flag here. No mention of how long this data stays around, but we do have an idea of how long they store your E-mail:

We retain backups of deleted messages and documents for 45 days.

Very private you are. And then comes this excuse:

This is for the purpose of restoring data in case of accidental deletion by users. After 45 days, data will be permanently deleted from all our systems.

Yeah sure - it's always for the user's good. In the end, your deleted mail will stay on the servers for 45 days, regardless of justification. And if that wasn't enough...

Should you close your account, all data will be permanently deleted 30 days after the legal expiration date (i.e. the Belgian law imposes 365 days after account closing).

So you have to wait for over a year for your "deleted" account to be actually deleted. Belgian privacy laws in action! Summarizing: the service stores a lot of data and is strangely secretive about the duration - but we can guess it's somewhere between 45 and 395 days. Mail client support requires paying, and if you're going to do that, there are much better options. So, forget about MailFence.