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Mailfence Encrypted Email Suite in Thunderbird

Mailfence Encrypted Email Suite in Thunderbird

Today, the Thunderbird team is happy to announce that we have partnered with Mailfence to offer their encrypted email service in Thunderbird’s account setup. To check this out, you click on “Get a new email address…” when you are setting up an account. We are excited that those using Thunderbird will have this easily accessible option to get a new email address from a privacy-focused provider with just a few clicks.

Why partner with Mailfence?

It comes down to two important shared values: a commitment to privacy and open standards. Mailfence has built a private and secure email experience, whilst using open standards that ensure its users can use clients like Thunderbird with no extra hoops to jump through – which respects their freedom. Also, Mailfence has been doing this for longer than most providers have been around and this shows real commitment to their cause.

We’ve known we wanted to work with the Mailfence team for well over a year, and this is just the beginning of our collaboration. We’ve made it easy to get an email address from Mailfence, and their team has created many great guides on how to get the most out of their service in Thunderbird. But this is just the beginning. The goal is that, in the near future, Mailfence users will benefit from the automatic sync of their contacts and calendars – as well as their email.

Why is this important?

If we’ve learned anything about the tech landscape these last few years it’s that big tech doesn’t always have your best interests in mind. Big tech has based its business model on the harvesting and exploitation of data. Your data that the companies gobble up is used for discrimination and manipulation – not to mention the damage done when this data is sold to or stolen by really bad actors.

We wanted to give our users an alternative, and we want to continue to show our users that you can communicate online and leverage the power of the Internet without giving up your right to privacy. Mailfence is a great service that we want to share with our community and users, to show there are good options out there.

Patrick De-Schutter, Co-Founder of Mailfence, makes an excellent case for why this partnership is important:

“Thunderbird’s mission and values completely align with ours. We live in times of ever growing Internet domination by big tech companies. These have repeatedly shown a total disrespect of online privacy and oblige their users to sign away their privacy through unreadable Terms of Service. We believe this is wrong and dangerous. Privacy is a fundamental human right. With this partnership, we create a user-friendly privacy-respecting alternative to the Big Tech offerings that are centered around the commodification of personal data.”

How to try out Mailfence

If you want to give Mailfence a try right now (and are already using Thunderbird), just open Thunderbird account settings, click “Account Actions” and then “Add Mail Account”, it is there that you will see the option to “Get a new email address”. There you can select Mailfence as your provider and choose your desired username, then you will be prompted to set up your account. Once you have done this your account will be set up in Thunderbird and you will be able to start your Mailfence trial.

It is our sincere hope that our users will give Mailfence a try because using services that respect your freedom and privacy is better for you, and better for society at large. We look forward to deepening our relationship with Mailfence and working hand-in-hand with them to improve the Thunderbird experience for those using their service.

We’ll share more about our partnership with Mailfence, as well as our other efforts to promote privacy and open standards as the year progresses. We’re so grateful to get to work with great people who share our values, and to then share that work with the world.