Proton Mail and Mailfence are two famous email service providers known for their privacy-friendly policies.
You will find many articles comparing them as well as other similar providers (Tutanota, …), but most of them are just based on specifications, so I decided to give them a real world test run.
My use case was to exchange emails with normal people with unencrypted mailboxes.
After reading enough of both providers documentation, I’ve became confident that they were both offering adequate security to evade a bit from greedy GAFAs : end-to-end encryption, OpenPGP encryption & signature, a lot of security & privacy best practices, as well as being recommended by many trustworthy sources.
The below comparison will therefore go straight to the differences that I’ve found to be decisive for a practical day to day usage. Depending on how far your paranoia goes, you may read by yourself the thrilling crypto details elsewhere….
Proton Mail wins
Security
As introduced, I’ll be very quick on the pure security features : overall Proton Mail has a slightly superior security model. It provides a zero-knowledge architecture, has never access to the private key which encrypts your data on their servers, and publishes the sources of the client applications.
On the contrary, Mailfence stores the private key on its servers as a trade-off in favor of user experience (e.g. seamless encryption/decryption from the web UI). Of course you should encrypt it before sending it through the web UI, but it is still easy to send it in clear by mistake (I’ve tested it : it’s absolutely possible and they purposely display a warning when detected). This may also facilitate the exploitation of vulnerable keys by a malicious admin.
Multi-factor authentication
Proton Mail allows 2FA with hardware U2F or FIDO2 tokens in addition to TOTP while Mailfence only supports TOTP.
Additionally, when 2FA is activated on Mailfence, you can only define a single service password for each of IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc, and it is displayed only once ! This is nonsense and forces you to configure all of your devices at the same time or save this should-be-displayed-only-once password for a later use…
Mailfence wins
Standards and usability
This is probably the major difference between Proton and others.
Because they wanted to go further than current email security standards, Proton had to build a non-standard ecosystem. I think this is legitimate because they had to innovate. However this leads to locking you into Proton-specific applications : custom Android / iOS applications and a local proxy for desktop. You will not be able to use your favorite email client with Proton Mail (no POP, no IMAP).
Despite delivering very high quality products, I’ve observed some annoying bugs in Proton Mail and Proton apps lack in features, a bit behind other open source products with larger communities, like Thunderbird and K9-Mail.
This is also the reason why I had to reach their customer support more than once, which was not the case with Mailfence, for which I could get around configuration problems myself.
Actual examples of bad experience with Proton include :
- attachments on Android are saved without confirmation but we’re never noticed where to find them, which is misleading and not the usual convention as in other apps
@protonmail.comaddress used when responding to an email that was sent to an alias, making it easy to reveal your private e-mail- Mobile (Android) app was very slow (it has improved a lot in a few months but it still freezes a few seconds when clicking the button and the CPU seems to be put under heavy load when searching in messages) - I assume this is because of client-side cryptography
I also encounter from time to time quite scary bugs like :
- message loss (I still haven’t identified the cause)
- impossibility to send messages (especially on bad mobile network), producing tons of identical drafts as as side effect
- messages with mixed contents 😱 (in Thunderbird it frequently happens that I click on a message but the content of another one is loaded, or the body of an email continues on another one)
On the other side, Mailfence implements plain email standards.
This gives Mailfence a lot of advantages over Proton : you can use your favorite POP/IMAP-compatible email client, import/export using standard procedures (see below for more details), has support for *DAV protocols (not tested) for calendar, contacts, remote file access (get access to the attachments via WebDAV !) …
Sending with custom domain address
This one is a small advantage for Mailfence, but still…
Custom domain hosting works fine, but the more specific case when you just want to use your custom-domain address to send emails from Proton Mail (i.e. without having Proton be the mail provider for all the domain’s addresses) is probably not intended by Proton (there is a trick however : go first through the full procedure to define Proton as the mail host for the domain, so Proton lets you register your alias - by adding MX, TXT, etc. records to the DNS - then remove or update the MX priority to go back to the previous MX handler).
On the other side, with Mailfence you just have to add an email in your personal data section, then validate by following the link in a confirmation email ! This feature is a bit hidden / not well documented but actually works perfectly.
That does not prevent you from properly configuring your custom domain to redirect incoming emails and pass through spam filter (SPF-related entries), though.
Draw
There are a few features worth describing even though they don’t give a clear advantage to one or the other.
Trust
Proton Mail has a good reputation among the global community and Mailfence is recommended by Thunderbird.
Even though they are both located in privacy-friendly countries (Switzerland for Proton and Belgium for Mailfence]), they have to comply with the local laws and both publish reports about the legal inquiries they receive (Proton, transparency report).
They both promote security by transparency : Proton audits its client apps, which are also open source, and Mailfence lets you use your favorite client apps, while using OpenPGP.js in their web client.
None of them publish the server-side code though, but this is hopefully not absolutely required because of end-to-end encryption.
Importing emails
Proton Mail has a helpful feature to import mail history from external providers. You may have to run the procedure several times to get all mail transferred with high volumes, but I found it OK to merge ~1GB of data from 2 GMail accounts (I’ve not tested on my whole 20+ GB of emails because it was a good opportunity to trim old mails).
As Mailfence supports IMAP, it’s even easier to import messages from another provider : just download all messages in your local mail client from the old account and drag & drop them to Mailfence’s. It’s long because messages are copied one by one. But it could not be simpler.
This may seems like a little advantage for Mailfence but I consider it a draw because Proton’s features just does the job.
Overall offer and support
Proton Mail and Mailfence plans have each pros & cons but Proton always offer more storage for the same price, and shows a more ambitious portfolio of services (VPN, password manager). Mailfence should probably do better here ; their free plan was so much limited that I could not test without paying. This is still a limited advantage for Proton because as good as they are, its services are less usable due to non-standard protocols and less mature apps (e.g. Proton Drive provides huge storage but as of now it can only be accessed through the web interface - no API, no automatic upload / synchronization).
It’s also rare enough to mention that Proton’s support team answered quickly and, after a cold start, were quite efficient to answer my questions, even speaking a perfect French (although always pushing first the English response). However as said before, I haven’t even had the need to contact Mailfence’s customer support.
Mailfence documentation, on its side, is quite a mess to search for : Google was better than their search field to find out SPF/DKIM/DMARC values for instance.
Although it may be a bit in favor of Proton, I could not clearly determine a winner on this one…
Anti-spam addresses
Both support Plus Addressing to fight against spam : e.g. uniqueprefix+myname@mf.me or uniqueprefix+myname@pm.me.
Conclusion
Proton Mail is probably the closest to zero-knowledge security email provider, but it comes at a price : you will be locked-in with their ecosystem. Proton is therefore probably well advised for a closed group of people who want to securely exchange messages, files, events, …
On the other hand if, like most people, you want to exchange emails with non-Proton users, copies of your messages will be found in others’ unencrypted mailboxes. In this case Proton does not offer significant advantages and you will prefer Mailfence or similar providers for a better integration with common tools.
Note that what applies to Mailfence here might apply to other email providers with end-to-end encryption as well. I’ve actually started to test Tutanota some time ago and they were looking so much the same that I’ve not bothered testing both of them.
Ultimately, if you search for secure and practical messaging, then you might not want to use emails at all and switch over to other protocols like XMPP, Signal, … which have a larger user base than Proton and do not make compromise with security.