Unlike other email services, we ensure that only you have access to your mailbox at all times.

Written by Forward Email Team

Published 12/31/24

Time to read: Less than 5 minutes

Foreword

tldr; Our email service is 100% open-source and privacy-focused through secure and encrypted SQLite mailboxes.

Until we launched IMAP support, we used MongoDB for our persistent data storage needs.

This technology is amazing and we still use it today – but in order to have encryption-at-rest with MongoDB you need to use a provider that offers MongoDB Enterprise, such as Digital Ocean or Mongo Atlas – or pay for an enterprise license (and subsequently have to work with sales team latency).

Our team at Forward Email needed a developer-friendly, scalable, reliable, and encrypted storage solution for IMAP mailboxes. As open-source developers, using a technology you need to pay a license fee in order to get the encryption-at-rest feature was against our principles – and so we experimented, researched, and developed a new solution from scratch to solve these needs.

Instead of using a shared database to store your mailboxes, we individually store and encrypt your mailboxes with your password (which only you have). Our email service is so secure that if you forget your password, then you lose your mailbox (and need to recover with offline backups or start over).

Keep reading as we take a deep dive below with a comparison of email service providers, how our service works, our technology stack, and more.

Keep reading at https://forwardemail.net/en/blog/docs/best-quantum-safe-encrypted-email-service