Frequently asked questions

No. We are an email provider with a particular, privacy-oriented model – and this is not compatible with incorporating own domains. One of our emphases is data economy: we do not collect any user information (names, addresses, etc) of our customers. We always answer requests from authorities for user information in the negative. On the other hand, own domains need to be registered to the name and address of a person. If you were able to use own domains with us, this would affect the entire concept of Posteo: we would need to start saving user information for all customers who use their own domains with us – and to provide these to the Federal Network Agency to be provided on request to the authorities.
Even if only the MX record pointed to us, we would still need to store the assignment of the domain in your Posteo account as user information. Thus we would possess your user information and be required to give it out. For this reason, we have decided not to offer this possibility and instead to use data economy.

No. As we are a publicly accessible email provider that orients itself towards private individual use, we are not a data processor as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This was confirmed in legal research we had conducted. This also means that a processing agreement is not required even in cases where Posteo is used for professional or occupational purposes.
One of the reasons for this is that telecommunications services like Posteo are not only required to be in accordance with general data protection laws, but they are also subject to additional legal requirements. As a result, such services are also regulated by strict security provisions that have been established by German telecommunications law (TKG) and the Telecommunications Telemedia Data Protection Act (TTDSG), among other things. One requirement is that we provide a security concept that is inspected by the German Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur).
As stated in GDPR Art. 95:
"This Regulation shall not impose additional obligations on natural or legal persons in relation to processing in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services in public communication networks in the Union in relation to matters for which they are subject to specific obligations with the same objective set out in Directive 2002/58/EC." Posteo is subject to the obligations that are defined in the Directive on privacy and electronic communications (2002/58/EG). These are also in conformity with the requirements of §§ 3-18 TTDSG.
You are neither required to have a processing agreement with us to meet the guidelines of the GDPR nor do we offer such agreements. Further information as well as reading tips from independent sources can be found in our privacy policy.

No, Posteo is not affected by data retention. You don't need to be concerned about the privacy of your Posteo emails. The law on the reintroduction of data retention ("Gesetz zur Einführung einer Speicherpflicht und einer Höchstspeicherfrist für Verkehrsdaten") completely excludes email providers. The entire area of email is excepted from retention.
In short, Posteo is not one of the affected parties. At Posteo, therefore, it remains the case that no data is retained.

Yes, this is possible. Because we did not want to employ or recommend any third parties to transfer your sensitive email data, we developed our own solution. With the Posteo migration service, you can transfer up to three external email accounts across to Posteo, including their folder structures. You can decide whether to copy the entire contents of your previous email account or selected folders only.
You can also decide yourself whether you would like to permanently delete the emails from your previous provider after migration. The Posteo migration service is free of charge – and you retain control over your data: At no point are your emails transferred via a third party. The selected folders are collected from your previous provider by Posteo and transferred directly to your Posteo account over an encrypted connection. After migration, you can also set up a "change of address order": our email collector will retrieve newly-arriving emails from your previous accounts every ten minutes.

No, we don’t offer webspace and unfortunately, we can’t recommend any third-party offering in terms of both security and sustainability.

No. However, you can terminate the contract at any time. If you decide to cancel the account within the first month, any credit already paid will be refunded in full.

No, we do not offer cloud storage space.

If you'd like to maintain a shared calendar for your family, we recommend registering a Posteo email account as a family mailbox for this purpose. This can then be installed by all family members on their devices and/or used in our web app to collectively maintain a family calendar. By the way, the calendar can be encrypted with just the push of a button.

If you'd like, you can also use this email address as a contact address for everyday family activities such as for clubs, schools, pediatricians and other social contacts.

Additionally, many families want to secure email addresses for their small children as they slowly introduce them to the concept of email. For this purpose, it makes sense to first register alias addresses for the children using the family email account (3 are included in the price). Incoming emails can be delivered to these addresses in separate folders (with the use of filters). Once the children are older, their email addresses can be converted into a separate email account. You can contact our customer support at any time regarding this.

A tip: If you send family photos to the shared mailbox, all of your family members can view these on their devices - because every Posteo email account has a photo stream. Its design is inspired by the visual style of social media, but it is a private, closed space. This way, children can safely try out sharing the photos they want within a family setting.

A Posteo email account costs 1 EUR/month. If both parents have their own Posteo mailbox and an additional family account with aliases for the children, that brings the total to 3 EUR/month.

For this price, you get a mailbox without tracking and advertisement, with many security and encryption features.

App passwords are a practical security option - this way, each family member has their own password for accessing with applications. If a device goes missing, the respective password can simply be removed and replaced with a new one.

Yes. Accounts can also be registered with other Posteo email domains than @posteo.com. In addition to @posteo.com, we offer these domains for your Posteo email address: @posteo.net, @posteo.us, @posteo.ca, @posteo.uk, @posteo.ie, @posteo.es, @posteo.de, @posteo.at, @posteo.ch, @posteo.nl, @posteo.be und @posteo.lu. If you would like to change the domain of your Posteo email address, you can do so in the settings via the menu item "Email aliases" in the section labelled "Posteo email address". Further information about this can be found in our help section.
You can choose from many other Posteo domains for your alias addresses (3 additional email addresses are included with each account). You can find an overview of all available Posteo domains in our help section.
If you would like to suggest an ending which is not listed, let us know via support@posteo.de.

You can always adjust your amount of storage space in the settings of your account. Each additional gigabyte costs an extra 0.25 EUR per month.
For example, if your account is 4 GB in size, it costs 1.50 EUR per month. You can always reduce the size of your account later if you no longer need the extra space.

You do not need to worry that your account or emails will be deleted if your credit reaches zero. In principle, we do not delete any data, if an account is not formally terminated (by the user or by Posteo).
If your credit goes negative, our system regularly sends you reminder emails. About 10 weeks after an account's credit runs out, our system will block an account’s ability to send emails. Once credit is added, the restriction on sending is removed.

S/MIME certificates are sold by various providers. Likewise, Posteo offers certificates that are signed by an official certification authority (Certum) and are displayed as trustworthy in email clients. Certificates can be conveniently created in the Posteo settings. You can find this option in the section "My S/MIME certificates". The certificates have a validity of one year and cost 365 cents.

We are frequently asked if it is possible at Posteo to send password-protected emails like it is with some proprietary providers.
The answer is "Yes, of course". What many people do not realize is that such a feature is not unique to a provider and is possible regardless of the provider. You can encrypt a message with a password and use any provider you like to send it to a person who is not yet using end-to-end encryption with S/MIME or PGP. For example, you can create a password-protected PDF file and send it as an email attachment.
For the optimum protection of your emails, we recommend using real end-to-end encryption with S/MIME (or PGP). This is easy to set up and works independently of the email provider: https://posteo.de/en/help/categories/end-to-end.
Protecting an email with a password is only presumed. Most of the proprietary solutions are simply based on sending a link in an email. By clicking on the link, users are led to a web page of the provider and must enter the agreed-upon password to make a message (not an email) visible in a browser. From our point of view, this process encourages phishing since it involves clicking on a link and entering a password. Additionally, the sender's provider can track the recipient when loading the message - unlike with email. These disadvantages do not exist when sending an email with a password-protected PDF.

No, we can’t offer fax or SMS services. For us as a telecommunications provider, other legal commitments would arise if we were to offer this. We would need to start saving our customers' personal information – and we do not wish to do this for privacy reasons. We will therefore certainly not be offering this service in the future. We are concentrating on providing the most secure and sustainable email communication for our customers, following the principle of data reduction and with maximum privacy.

Posteo was established in 2009.

Yes, our webmail has conversation view. You can choose between conversation and list view. You can find more information about this in our help section.

We receive requests for free accounts from clubs, initiatives and projects every week. We can not offer any free accounts.
Many not-for-profit organisations, clubs and initiatives have accounts and mailing lists with us, and all of them pay for our services.
We think it is important that good, sustainable products are paid for in order to release qualitatively valuable content on the internet from the grip of the advertising industry. Our sustainable offering is tailored, and tightly calculated. We don’t have any room to play with discounts and promotions.
We provide email services with high requirements in terms of sustainability, security and privacy and are completely ad-free. The costs of providing such a service are enormous and because we do not want any advertising whatsoever, operating the service is only possible with paying users. Free accounts also require storage space, administration and support. We appreciate your understanding.

We want to work independently and offer a quality product that does not require the use of tracking. The protection of your email data should not be affected by the interests of the advertising industry. For us, offering a free service that relies on the benevolence of advertisers has nothing to do with sustainable business. We find the culture of free products on the internet financed by the advertising industry alarming, for reasons to do with privacy and informational self-determination.
We believe that it is important that good, sustainable products are paid for in order to release qualitatively valuable content on the internet from the grip of the advertising industry.

We have decided to offer our customers free support by email, to quickly help with questions and problems. We do not offer support by telephone.

No. The reason for this is that if you pay via standing order, we would have to store your bank data (IBAN, name) in connection with the associated account. Criminals covet these types of data records. At Posteo, we therefore anonymize all payment transactions: as a matter of principle, we do not link data that we receive during payments with email accounts. By doing so, we effectively prevent data theft, protect you from misuse, and can always guarantee that you can use our email service without sensitive personal data being collected.
You can comfortably pay via bank transfer, cash, PayPal or credit card. You can add a maximum of 120 EUR to your account. In case of termination, you will receive any remaining credit back in full. You can learn more about the payment methods at Posteo by visiting our payment info page.

Regardless if you pay via bank transfer, PayPal, credit card or pay in cash: Out of principle, we do not connect data that we receive during payment with email accounts. In 2009 we developed our own system with which we carry out all payment processes in a privacy-friendly way.
The payment system is the centerpiece of our privacy-friendly concept. Above all, we do not keep any inventory data related to email accounts because we strictly separate payment data and customer email accounts from each other. You can learn more about how the privacy-friendly payment system at Posteo works in practice on our payment information page.

Yes. You can create filters in Posteo webmail that optionally delete unwanted emails or sort them into folders of your choice.
It is also possible to create an exception list. However, this is generally not necessary, as our spam filter can distinguish very reliably between what is spam and what isn’t.

Yes. Our system regularly sends automatic reminder emails when your account’s credit runs low or runs out.

There is no need to worry that Posteo might cease to exist. Posteo is not a classical startup and we operate sustainably. Posteo is completely self-funded and debt-free. Posteo is funded solely by its customers' monthly fees. We are therefore independent from advertisers and investors.
Posteo exists since 2009 and has been an independent company since 2013. We founded Posteo in order to provide an impetus for greater sustainability and security in the internet – and for the long term. We are not about selling off the company to investors.

Yes. Posteo is free of both debts and loans. We do business sustainably. Posteo is financed by user payments and is not dependent on advertisers.

Yes, we do offer mailing lists, which we set up on request for you, for free.
The mailing lists take the format "listname@lists.posteo.de"
Please decide on a "list name" and email it to support@posteo.de.
Mailing lists are currently free, because they are still in beta phase. They work – but we are not yet fully satisfied with the admin software. When this changes, lists will become accessible via the Posteo webmail interface.
We expect one list to be free with each account, with additional lists incurring a small extra charge. Lists set up during the beta phase will also become chargeable, if more than one list is set up in an account.