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 compliance score of 4/5 reflects 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 — they're the same documentation gaps that affect Posteo and Mailbox.org's smaller-vendor profile — but a procurement-grade buyer will need to request those documents. Pricing is freemium and one of the most affordable in the category: **Mailo Free** at €0/month; **Mailo Premium from €1/month** (the cheapest paid tier in the directory's private-email category); **Premium+** with capacity expandable to 500 GB. Best fit: French and Francophone-EU users who want a long-established, family-owned French email service at the lowest possible price, and who don't need formal ISO 27001 documentation or in-house PGP key management.