Interview with Patrick De Schutter, the CEO of Mailfence [2023]

I’m a serial entrepreneur active in the Internet sector since the mid-nineties. I created several pioneering internet businesses over the years among which including one of the first and largest web agency of Belgium in the 1990’s called Allmansland, IP NetVersting one of the first internet ad sales houses of Europe and many other companies.  Following the revelations of massive spying by Edward Snowden, my partner and I launched a secure email suite Mailfence to offer an alternative to the offerings of Big Tech that continuously track and monetize the data of their users. We believe tech should be a force of good in the world and should not endanger our societies.

My partner and I created in 1996 the very first Internet ad sales house of Belgium and were among the European pioneers in selling of online banners and advertising.  We have therefore gained a very good understanding of how internet advertising worked.  We believe that Big Tech and Ad Tech has gone much too far and is endangering our societies by tracking everything we do.  This motivated us to create an alternative to the offerings of Big Tech players and that’s why we launched Mailfence a few years ago.

We provide end-to-end encryption, which means any encrypted message is kept encrypted from the sender’s system to the receiver’s system. No one in between can actually read the message. It guarantees that our services are private and reliable.

Our protocols are used worldwide, which means most email providers support them. This is why our users can send an encrypted message to someone using a different email provider. Non-Mailfence users can decrypt encrypted messages using their own OpenPGP private key.

Mailfence provides users with full control over their OpenPGP key management via an integrated Keystore. This means any user can straightforwardly generate private and public keys. In asymmetrical encryption, the public key is used to encrypt a message. The recipient can then decrypt the message using the corresponding private key.

Encryption is the way to go to assure your online privacy.

Yes, as mentioned earlier, non-Mailfence users can decrypt an encrypted message using their own OpenPGP private key (asymmetrical encryption). An encrypted message can also be read using a shared key (symmetrical encryption) if the recipient does not own their own keys.

Our company values a work-life balance and has always been a hybrid workplace.  Most of our team have always worked a big part of the time from home even before Covid started to change attitudes in most other companies.  Being environmentally conscious is also part of our DNA. I cherish my bike ride from home to the office which is a great moment to decompress and move.

Developing a service in a world dominated by a few huge tech behemoths that control the entire environment in which we develop our company, such as the search traffic, the operating systems, the app stores. This is a major challenge.  All in all I believe we manage reasonably well 😉 But it is a challenging environment and I hope that the regulatory competition instances will do their job to create a level playing field.

We focus on the people more than technological tools and want to strengthen our team with many more people passionate about developing tech that does not harm our societies.

Join Mailfence instead of starting a new service 😉

Develop Mailfence into one of the leading members of the worldwide movement to regain online privacy.