How Runbox compares to Proton, Tuta, Fastmail, Posteo, and Mailbox

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already decided to move away from Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo — you don’t want to trade your personal data for “free” email. Now comes the difficult decision: which privacy-focused email provider do you commit to?

What follows is an honest attempt at comparing Runbox with a few of the other providers, and we highlight where we think Runbox might be the right choice for you.

The differences that matter

Sustainable by design

Runbox’s servers run on 100% certified renewable energy, primarily hydropower from Norway’s waterfalls, with additional wind and solar generated electricity. Our server park is located in a maximum security data center in Oslo where Norway’s cold climate does some of the cooling work for us, which means less energy spent keeping servers running in the first place. The data center also repurposes energy waste to heat local households in the winter, and holds ISO 14001 and LOS Energy AS 100% Renewable Energy certifications.

We double-offset any operational emissions we can’t eliminate, partnering with the Norwegian nature-restoration initiative Trefadder (“tree-godfather”). Through this partnership, we support tree-planting, old-growth forest protection, kelp forest restoration, and wildlife habitat creation, and since 2021, our contribution has removed 358 tons of net CO2 and added 1,432 trees across 4,475m² of new Norwegian climate forest. The result is a service that’s carbon-negative, not just carbon-neutral.

Proton, Tuta and Mailbox also run on renewable energy, but neither publishes the kind of detail we do — a repurposed-heat-waste system, a documented carbon-negative offset certificate. Fastmail does not appear to make sustainability part of their marketing at all.

Runbox scores well in Ethical Consumer’s independent email provider guide, alongside Posteo, Proton, and Tuta — all four of us rated meaningfully higher than Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud on privacy and environmental practice combined. Runbox has held the Ethical Consumer Best Buy rating every year since 2020, based on an independent assessment of both our environmental practices and our privacy policy together.

Read our Environmental Policy and more about our approach to Sustainability,

Norwegian jurisdiction

Runbox owns and controls our servers in Oslo. We’re not classified as an “electronic infrastructure provider” under Norwegian law, so we’re not required to retain traffic logs, and we can delete data on request at any time. Before we disclose any data, our principle is to require a court order from Norwegian authorities — regardless of who’s asking or where the request originates.

Norway is part of the EEA (European Economic Area) and fully implements the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) through the Norwegian Personal Data Act — the same regulation that protects Tuta, Posteo and Mailbox users in Germany, and broadly comparable to the FADP (Federal Act on Data Protection) that governs Proton in Switzerland.

No jurisdiction offers full immunity, however. We comply with legally valid requests in cases of clear violations of Norwegian law or our Terms of Service, as we do not wish to provide a safe haven for digital criminals. On the contrary, we actively defend against such threats on a daily basis, whether it comes in the form of spam, phishing, extortion attempts, or other malicious attacks directed at our services or our customers. You can see how we comply with requests for data on our Transparency Report page.

The same tradeoff shows up everywhere. In 2021, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice upheld an order requiring Tuta to monitor the unencrypted messages of two accounts in a blackmail case; Tuta says end-to-end encrypted content couldn’t be accessed. Since January 2024, a US-Australia agreement lets Australian authorities send orders directly to providers with US-hosted data, including Fastmail, in as little as days rather than the year or more the older process took. And Proton has, in documented cases, provided IP address data (2021) and billing information (2024) to Swiss authorities once compelled, which then reached French police and the FBI.

Read more about Norwegian privacy.

Decentralized email

The bigger and more centralized a service gets, the greater a target it becomes, and the more of your life ends up depending on one company’s decisions. Bundle your email with a VPN, a password manager, and cloud storage under a single login, and you’ve bundled the risk right along with the convenience — one breach, compromised account, or policy change, and everything you’ve placed in that one basket is affected at once. Runbox isn’t built that way — we provide email, calendar, contacts, and the hosting features that naturally sit alongside it, and nothing you didn’t ask for as every connected service works independently and can be switched off (or never enabled in the first place).

Compare that to the field: Proton bundles a VPN, a password manager (Pass), cloud storage (Drive), video calls (Meet), and now an AI assistant (Lumo) into one account — convenient if you want a single vendor for everything, but also a substantially larger account to secure and a stronger reason to stay locked in once you’re there. Mailbox also bundles email, calendar, drive, an office suite, and video conferencing. Tuta, Fastmail, and Posteo don’t bundle — all three focus on email rather than building a wider suite, closer to Runbox’s own approach to communication services — though none of them pair that with the domain registration and hosting services that Runbox provides as opt-in and independent features.

Read more about the benefits of decentralizing your online life.

The encryption question

Runbox ensures that every connection between your device and our servers is encrypted with TLS using Perfect Forward Secrecy, which protects your mail in transit. Our servers will also always attempt to encrypt connections between our service and other external services, provided they also support TLS encryption. Additionally our servers employ full-disk encryption at rest, which protects against a physically stolen drive.

Real end-to-end encryption is an extra layer of security that you can add to your Runbox account today. For instance, by using a Mailvelope browser extension for Chrome or Firefox that adds PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption capabilities to the Runbox webmail. You can also achieve full encryption by using an email client such as Thunderbird, which has OpenPGP built in, and Apple Mail, which has native S/MIME support. On Android, K-9 Mail pairs with the OpenKeychain app for PGP. 

That’s the beauty of Runbox – you can set it up any way you want, as you are not locked in to our set of services and features. Worth mentioning that we are currently working on major upgrades to the Runbox platform which will pave the way for integrated account-level and end-to-end encryption.

It’s important to note that end-to-end encryption sounds like a blanket guarantee, but in practice it only fully applies between users of the same service. Proton and Tuta both encrypt your mail by default, but you only get true end-to-end encryption when both sender and recipient use the same system. The moment you email someone on Gmail, Outlook, or almost anywhere else, that protection doesn’t apply unless you have specifically exchanged PGP keys with them in advance.

By Proton’s own documentation, mail to a non-Proton address is not end-to-end-encrypted by default. Subject lines and sender/recipient addresses are encrypted at rest, but not end-to-end, which means only the message itself is fully encrypted. Tuta encrypts metadata such as subject and sender/recipient names, but does not support the PGP standard. Fastmail has no native PGP support, Posteo supports PGP through a browser extension, and Mailbox offers native browser-based PGP and browser-extension support. Both Proton and Tuta offer workarounds as opt-in extra steps, similar to using a browser-based PGP extension with Runbox.

Read more about how to add encryption to your Runbox account.

Your inbox, your rules

We fully support the established IMAP, POP, and SMTP standards for incoming and outgoing email, which means you’re never locked into our webmail — you can use Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook, or whichever client you like, with no proprietary app or bridge software standing between you and your own mail.

Our Progressive Web App for mobile devices works the same way on an iPhone, an Android phone, or a privacy-hardened device like GrapheneOS or Fairphone.

In comparison Tuta doesn’t support IMAP, POP, or SMTP at all, so you’re limited to their own native apps. Fastmail, Posteo and Mailbox are closer to Runbox’s approach here — both stay email-focused with IMAP support — but neither matches Runbox’s combination of plan flexibility and domain or web hosting included as optional add-on services.

The same openness works in reverse. There’s no proprietary format holding your mail hostage — connect any IMAP client, let it sync, and your mail lives locally or moves to wherever you might go next. 

What’s included

A Runbox account includes calendar and contacts (synchronized over standard CalDAV and CardDAV, not a proprietary format), file storage via the FTP standard, and domain and web hosting — registration, DNS, and email on your own domain — without needing a separate provider. Our free DNS Compliance Checker verifies your setup and explains any fixes in plain language.

Most privacy-focused providers cap standard plans well below what Runbox offers at a comparable price, and few include web hosting as a standard add-on to the service the way we do. You don’t have to pay extra or switch providers just because your needs grow. Runbox offers six storage tiers from 2 GB to 250 GB, so you can pay for what you actually need rather than jumping straight from a small free tier to a much larger paid one. Proton’s paid plans jump from 15GB to 500GB with nothing in between, Tuta and Fastmail offer three or four named plans, Posteo offers one flat plan and storage add-ons, and Mailbox offers three plans ranging from 2GB to 50GB.

Runbox includes 100 aliases on the Runbox domain names for every account, unlimited aliases on your own domains, and unlimited plus-addressing. Fastmail offers up to 600 aliases account-wide, and Tuta offers unlimited aliases on custom domains. Proton offers roughly 10–15 aliases on custom domains, while Mailbox ranges from 3 up to 250 on custom domains.

Read more about all the Runbox features with details on every part of our service.

Added account security

Security isn’t just what happens to your data on our servers, it’s also what protects your account day to day. Runbox includes TOTP (Time-based One-time Password) based Two-Factor Authentication and per-device App Passwords so that a compromised device won’t expose your main password. Trusted Browsers settings, an Unlock Code as a 2FA backup, per-protocol service toggles so you can disable IMAP, POP, or SMTP individually if you don’t use them, and active session monitoring so you can inspect and revoke access at any time.

Every provider in our comparison offers some form of Two-Factor Authentication, so that alone isn’t a differentiator — what varies is the depth of the functionality around it. Proton adds hardware key support, Sentinel account-takeover monitoring, and authentication logs. Tuta supports TOTP and U2F hardware keys. Fastmail offers 2FA including U2F/FIDO2 hardware keys and Passkeys, alongside app-specific passwords and session/device management — comparable depth to Runbox’s own approach. Posteo supports TOTP 2FA, as does Mailbox. Runbox’s combination of App Passwords, Trusted Browsers, an Unlock Code, and per-protocol toggles is thorough, though not every piece is unique to us alone.

Read more about Runbox Account Security.

No AI in your inbox

Boxy has no access to your account, email, or personal data, doesn’t cross-reference between users, and doesn’t retain any data between sessions. Responses are logged for 10 days, stored securely in Norway, and then permanently deleted.

Proton takes a careful approach with Scribe, its built-in writing assistant, and Lumo, a separate zero-access encrypted AI assistant that never logs or trains on your chats. Tuta, Posteo and Mailbox don’t build AI into their email at all. Fastmail doesn’t either by default, though an optional MCP integration lets you connect external AI tools if you choose to turn it on. However, as with all AI tools, the energy consumption behind them raises real environmental questions of its own, separate from privacy or security. Read more about our approach to sustainability.

Read our Generative AI Policy for more information about our stance regarding AI tools, and learn more about how we think about AI in general.

The honest summary

Runbox is built for people who want their email to match their values: digital autonomy, real privacy protections, sustainable infrastructure, and putting ethical, environmental, and democratic values first. We’re not trying to also be your VPN, password manager, and cloud drive. We’re employee-owned and independent since 2000, and we’re not answerable to outside shareholders. That independence also guides our policies on who can be legally compelled to hand over your data, whether your provider is quietly pulling you into an ecosystem you never asked to join, and whether an AI model has any access to your inbox.

If cryptographic protection of your message content is your single top priority, Proton and Tuta encrypt more completely than Runbox does without an add-on, and neither can be forced to hand over an email’s actual content — although full legal immunity isn’t something anyone can offer, including them.

If you’d rather have one provider handle your email, VPN, password manager, and cloud storage in one basket, that’s something Proton offers and Runbox chooses not to. But if employee ownership and management, putting our environment first, a decentralized email system, and keeping AI out of your inbox matter to you, then we believe Runbox is worthy of consideration.