Trust & reliability

Every account — including free ones — has a one-click full mailbox export (standard .mbox, importable everywhere) in Settings → Account. MailHow speaks plain IMAP, so any mail client or backup tool can keep a live copy of everything at all times. And our terms commit to at least 30 days noticebefore any shutdown, with export available the whole time. A provider you can leave in an afternoon has to keep earning you every day — that’s the point.

Mail and account data are backed up nightly (7 daily + 4 weekly snapshots kept), and independently copied off-site every day — encrypted and deduplicated — to separate infrastructure in the EU (7 daily, 4 weekly, 6 monthly). Backups you never restore are a rumor, so we run restore drills against the off-site copies; the most recent full drill passed in July 2026.

Mail is handled by Stalwart, a modern open-source (AGPL) mail server written in Rust that anyone can inspect. The engine has been independently security-audited twice by Radically Open Security (2023 and 2025). To be precise: those audits cover the engine, not MailHow’s own app code — but it means the software that stores and moves your mail isn’t a black box, and if MailHow ever disappeared, the stack it runs on wouldn’t.

Outbound mail is relayed through Amazon SES— the same sending infrastructure large services use — instead of a small server’s own IP addresses, which is where most small-host delivery problems come from. Sending limits are published, not hidden, and they exist to protect your domain’s reputation. One promise worth writing down: we never silently drop your outbound mail. If something is deferred or refused, it stays visible.

Uptime is monitored externally, minute by minute, on our public status page. When something breaks, the incident gets an honest, plain-language post-mortem — what failed, what we changed. No green dashboards during outages.

MailHow is a small operation, and you should weigh that. The mitigations are the things above: your mail is exportable at any moment, backed up in two places, running on an open-source engine, with a notice period in writing. Questions before trusting us with your domains? Write to hello@mailhow.com — you’ll get the person who runs the service, not a queue.