Skip to content

Mailo

Private email · France
Founded 1998 · mailo.com

French family-owned email since 1998 (Mail Object; founders Voyat & Lenoir, reacquired from Lagardère 2007), French-hosted, Free tier €0 + Premium from €1.50/mo.

Mailo is an EU-owned service hosted in France, with no identified CLOUD Act exposure. It is listed under Private email.

Assessment notes

Mailo is operated by Mail Object, a small French family-owned company run by founders Pascal Voyat and Philippe Lenoir. The service has unusually deep heritage: launched as Francemail in 1998, renamed FranceMel and acquired by Lagardère Group, rebranded NetCourrier, reacquired by its founders in 2007 through Mail Object, renamed Net-C in 2012, and finally Mailo in 2019; a '100% European' email service hosted on secure servers in France, free tier exists, member of PrivacyTech and French Tech ecosystems; EU-owned, EU-hosted, no CLOUD Act exposure. Gap: Mailo publishes no DPA and no public sub-processors list (only standard privacy terms and T&C are available on the public site); no formal ISO 27001 attestation.

Findings

CLOUD Act
Ownership
Sub-processors
— not disclosed

Verified signals

Jurisdiction
  • EU / adequacy hosting: Yes
  • EU / adequacy operator: Yes
  • No US CLOUD Act exposure: Yes
Privacy
  • End-to-end encryption: No
Transparency
  • Public DPA: No
  • Sub-processors disclosed: No
  • Open-source clients: No
  • Third-party certification: No
Jump to

About Mailo

Mailo is one of the older independent European email services, with an unusual 25-year corporate history. It was launched in 1998 as Francemail by Pascal Voyat and Philippe Lenoir, renamed FranceMel in 1999, then acquired by the French media conglomerate Lagardère Group and rebranded NetCourrier. Crucially, in 2007 the founders reacquired the service from Lagardère through their company Mail Object, returning it to independent French family ownership. The service was renamed Net-C in 2012 and finally Mailo in 2019, and across all those rebrands the underlying vendor and family-ownership structure has remained unchanged.

For an EU-sovereignty audit Mailo's positioning is appealingly simple: a "100% European" email service with secure servers physically located in France, operated by a small French family-owned company under French and EU law. It is a member of the PrivacyTech ecosystem and the French Tech initiative, soft positive signals that don't replace formal certifications but indicate participation in the French privacy-and-startup community. The offering is feature-rich for a small vendor: web mail, calendar, contacts, file sharing, IMAP/POP/SMTP, mobile apps, anti-spam, anti-virus, custom domains on paid tiers, and unlimited disposable aliases. The company has been operating continuously for over 25 years, longer than nearly every competitor in the privacy-email space.

The signal gaps reflect what is missing rather than what is wrong: no formal ISO 27001 / SOC 2 attestation was surfaced, no public DPA or sub-processors URLs were captured at audit, and the encryption architecture (specifically whether messages are stored at rest with server-managed keys or with any client-side encryption layer) was not detailed on the homepage or who-are-we page. None of those gaps suggest poor practice, but a procurement-grade buyer will need to request those documents.

Pricing is freemium and remains among the most affordable in the category: Mailo Free at €0/month, with 1 GB of mail, 5 aliases and advertising; Mailo Premium from €1.50 per month, activated for one to five years at a time rather than billed monthly, with 20 GB and up to 100 aliases; Premium+ with capacity expandable to 500 GB. Since the mid-2026 price move Mailo is no longer the cheapest paid tier in this category, Posteo and mailbox.org Light are both €1 per month. Best fit: French and Francophone-EU users who want a long-established, family-owned French email service at a low price, and who don't need formal ISO 27001 documentation or in-house PGP key management.

Sub-processor map · not disclosed

Vendor does not publish a sub-processors list. Schrems II compliance and CLOUD Act exposure cannot be independently verified without it.

Frameworks & certifications · none listed

We checked the vendor's website and standard certification body registries. No active certifications found at the time of last audit (2026-08-26).

Capability matrix

Table 1Capabilities of Mailo

Encryption TLS
Mailbox storage 20 GB
Email aliases 100 aliases
Custom domain Yes
IMAP / SMTP Yes
Calendar Yes
Contacts Yes

Integration & access

REST API No
SSO (SAML / OIDC) No

Compliance & governance

Audit log No
Self-host / on-prem option No

Pricing & tiers

from €1.50/mo
Freemium · billed annually
View pricing page

Public documents

Vendor does not publish a public DPA. Without a publicly accessible Data Processing Addendum, small EU customers cannot self-serve the processor agreement. This is recorded as no public DPA (see How we assess).
Vendor does not publish a sub-processors list. Schrems II compliance and CLOUD Act exposure cannot be independently verified without it.
  • Data Processing Addendum (DPA)
    — missing
    missing
  • Sub-processors list
    — missing
    missing
  • Terms of Service
    www.mailo.com/mailo…
    Open

Alternatives in this category

  • Switzerland · €4/mo
    EU-Based
    E2E: Yes Public DPA: Yes Sub-processors: Yes Open source: No
  • Germany · €3/mo
    EU-Sovereign
    E2E: Yes Public DPA: No Sub-processors: Yes Open source: No
  • Germany · €1/mo
    EU-Sovereign
    E2E: No Public DPA: Not assessed Sub-processors: Yes Open source: No

Featured in these guides