Dear Posteo users and interested parties,

The new chief privacy officer for Berlin, Maja Smoltczyk, has presented Posteo in her yearly report for 2015 as a positive example of innovative privacy concepts. We are very pleased to receive this mention of praise from such a senior figure. We therefore present a translation for you to read:

“Posteo (posteo.de) is a webmail service with all the necessary features. As opposed to other webmail services, the user pays. For this fee, many things are avoided including any data identifying the user, analysis of user behaviour or even the content of messages. This begins with the user creating their account under a pseudonym: Apart from the desired email address and a password, no data is mandatorily collected. Even the prepaid payment can occur completely anonymously in cash. If the user chooses a payment process which involves their personal information, the connection to the email account made via a payment code is immediately deleted after the payment is processed. As well as the implementation of possibilities for transport route encryption when sending and receiving emails and when accessing the webmail interface, optional end-to-end encryption with PGP and S/MIME is also supported. One special characteristic is the feature to encrypt account content and address book: This allows for unencrypted emails to be saved with encryption in a simple manner. As opposed to encryption with PGP and S/MIME, traffic data is also encrypted in the email header. The encryption occurs in the background at the moment that the relevant email is opened. When using this feature, choosing a secure and long password is particularly important.” (p51)

“Data protection is a completely successful selling point, as the example of Posteo shows.” (p53)

The complete report by the Berlin chief privacy officer can be found (in German) at datenschutz-berlin.de.

Best regards,

The Posteo team