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One platform behind every package

Our creator, Lodge and small organisation packages are priced and described differently because the people using them need different things.

Underneath, they share the same foundations.

That means a Lodge Secretary and a creator sending their first brand pitch get the same mail infrastructure, the same security work and the same standards of care. The packages decide what you get; they do not decide how well it is run.

Email, calendars and contacts

At the heart of the platform is Stalwart, an open-source mail and collaboration server written in Rust. It handles email, calendars and contacts as a single, modern system, and we run its current 1.0 release.

What that looks like for you:

• Professional email on your own domain, with mailboxes, aliases and forwarding addresses.
• Modern webmail, using our own customised fork of the open-source Bulwark webmail, built around the JMAP standard.
• Synchronised calendars and contacts using CalDAV and CardDAV.
• Automatic configuration, so compatible apps can usually be set up with just an email address and password.
• Fast full-text search across your mail, including the text inside attached documents such as PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and OpenDocument files.
• Support for the mail apps you already use, on desktop and mobile, through IMAP and SMTP.

We wrote about how and why the platform was rebuilt in Taking Back Control of Email, and about its move to Stalwart 1.0 in Independent Email, Without the Compromise.

Security and encryption

“Encrypted email” can mean several different things, so here is exactly what the platform offers:

• In transit. Connections to the platform are encrypted, as are connections between mail systems wherever the other side supports modern secure transport.
• End to end. The platform supports S/MIME and OpenPGP, the two established standards for end-to-end encrypted email. A message encrypted by its sender stays encrypted until its recipient opens it: we store it exactly as it arrived and have no way to read it.
• At rest, with keys only you hold. Any mailbox can opt in to having every message it receives encrypted with its owner’s own S/MIME certificate or OpenPGP key before it is stored. The server only ever holds the public half of the key. The private half stays in your mail app, so stored messages can’t be read by anyone who gets hold of the server’s storage or a backup — and that includes us.

Encryption at rest is a choice rather than a default, because it involves trade-offs worth understanding. Messages are encrypted as they are stored, so they arrive in readable form and spam filtering and mail rules work as normal. Senders, recipients, subjects and dates stay readable so that mail can still be listed and sorted. Search can no longer look inside the body or attachments of encrypted messages. Only mail stored after it is switched on is encrypted, and you need a mail app that supports S/MIME or OpenPGP and holds your private key, such as Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail.

For a mailbox handling sensitive welfare matters or confidential client information, that trade can be well worth making. We’ll help you decide which mailboxes it suits, and set it up with you.

The records that help other mail systems trust messages from your domain — SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MTA-STS — are published and maintained automatically, as are signing keys and TLS certificates. Fewer manual steps means fewer opportunities for mistakes.

Curious how your current email set-up compares? Run our free email health check on your own domain. It takes about 15 seconds and explains the results in plain English.

Built in separate layers

Our Mail Edge is a layer of dedicated mail gateways between the mailbox platform and the rest of the world’s mail systems. That gives us a clear boundary between the public internet and the systems actually holding your mail.

Web-facing services such as webmail and account discovery can use Cloudflare at the edge. The mailbox platform and mail gateways themselves are independently operated and remain under our control.

Keeping the layers separate means each one can be maintained, upgraded or replaced without putting everything else at risk.

Email delivery, actively monitored

A receiving server can accept a message and still put it in spam, or fail to make it visible to the recipient. A successful handover alone doesn’t tell you where it landed.

We have built our own monitoring system to check delivery beyond our Mail Edge. Every day, it sends a small number of test messages through our outbound routes to mailboxes we control at major providers, including Gmail and Outlook. It checks whether those messages reach the inbox, land in spam or remain missing, and how long they take to arrive.

We compare results across routes, check email authentication and review provider reputation feedback where it is available. Alerts draw our attention to delivery problems so we can investigate without waiting for a client to report missing mail. These checks use our own monitoring mailboxes; they don’t require access to your recipients’ inboxes.

Routing with alternatives built in

Our Mail Edge also uses routing rules we maintain ourselves, with alternative delivery paths for supported connection and sending-reputation failures. When one path encounters an eligible problem, mail can automatically fall back to another route.

The monitoring gives us evidence about how those routes are performing, including which route actually delivered a test message. Together, the routing, daily checks and operational alerts give us a practical way to look after delivery beyond our own servers.

Each receiving provider still controls its own filtering, and test results cannot guarantee where every message will land. What we provide is active checking, alternative routes and someone responsible for investigating when the evidence changes.

Websites and the tools around them

The same approach applies beyond email:

• Websites are built with static tools such as Hugo and deployed on modern hosting, so they are fast, secure and low-maintenance.
• Forms, mailing lists and enquiries replace manual admin without locking your data into a proprietary platform.
• Bookings and RSVPs can take payments through your own Stripe account, so money goes directly to you rather than through us.
• Video meeting rooms and multi-platform live streaming are available as modules, without another monthly subscription to a large provider.

How we look after it

The platform has been providing real email to real clients for more than two years.

Changes are introduced alongside the live service rather than in a dramatic migration weekend. New components are tested on their own, then brought in when they are ready, while mail keeps flowing.

When we move data, we do it in a way that keeps an untouched copy available until the new system is proven. Your mail is not something we take chances with.

Open standards, and a way out

Everything is built predominantly on open standards: IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV for email, calendars and contacts; ordinary HTML for websites; open formats for data.

That matters for two reasons.

First, you can use whatever apps you like. Our webmail should be good enough that you choose it, not the only thing that works.

Second, you can leave. Your domain, your mail and your configuration remain yours, and moving them elsewhere is a normal, documented process rather than a negotiation. You can read more about that commitment in our philosophy.

Someone you can talk to

The platform is run by the same people who set up your account. If something isn’t working, you speak to someone who knows how it is built — not a ticket queue in another time zone.