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Mailotte vs Fastmail
Fastmail is the closest comparison of the four — ad-free, standards-first, and now offering EU data residency. The differences are jurisdiction and what the inbox does for you.
Fastmail is the most similar product on this page, and the easiest to recommend honestly. It is subscription-funded rather than ad-funded, it is excellent at the standards (IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV), and it now lets you choose EU or USA data residency. Anyone telling you Fastmail is a privacy problem because it is not encrypted end-to-end should note that Fastmail says so themselves, plainly, on their own security page — they argue E2E would break search, previews and spam filtering, which is the same trade Mailotte makes.
Two real differences remain. Fastmail is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, which places the operating company under Australian law regardless of where your bytes sit — including the Assistance and Access Act 2018. And Fastmail is deliberately a plain mail host: superb at delivering and organising mail you sort yourself, and not trying to sort it for you.
Side by side
| Mailotte | Fastmail | |
|---|---|---|
| Where mail is stored | Servers in the EU only, for every account. | EU or USA, your choice at signup. |
| Who operates it | MAILOTTE LTD, registered in England & Wales (no. 17119010). | Fastmail Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia — Australian jurisdiction regardless of data residency. |
| End-to-end encryption | No. Mail is encrypted in transit, and attachments and stored files are encrypted at rest with a key Mailotte holds — but Mailotte's servers can process your mail. That is what makes search and triage possible. | No — Fastmail states it does not offer E2E in its own apps, for the same feature reasons. |
| Ads | None. Mailotte has no advertising business, so there is nothing to profile you for. | None. Subscription-funded. |
| AI trained on your mail | Never. Your mail is not used to train any model — ours or anyone else's. | Fastmail does not run AI features over your mailbox. |
| Desktop & phone mail apps | Native IMAP, SMTP and POP3 with an app password. Apple Mail, Thunderbird and phone mail apps connect directly — no bridge, no desktop helper. | Full IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV. Best-in-class standards support. |
| Inbox triage / AI assistance | Two-pile triage, meaning-based search, receipt and booking extraction. | Not offered — rules, folders and search that you configure. |
| Aliases | 3 on Free, 10 on Zen, unlimited on Haven. | Unlimited aliases and masked addresses. |
| Custom domains | Custom domains on Haven. | Included on paid plans. |
| Tracker-pixel blocking | On by default, with a dashboard of what was blocked. | Remote-image blocking available. |
Where Fastmail is clearly ahead
Two decades of operating history, a support team with a genuine reputation, and the deepest standards support of anyone in this comparison — JMAP exists largely because Fastmail built it. If what you want is a rock-solid, boring, ad-free mail host that you organise yourself, Fastmail is a better answer than Mailotte and you should just buy it.
Where the difference is real, not marketing
Jurisdiction: EU data residency at Fastmail does not change that the operating company answers to Australian law. Whether that matters depends entirely on your threat model — for many people it genuinely does not. And function: Fastmail will not triage your inbox or answer questions from it, by design. Mailotte will, without the mail leaving Europe or feeding a model.
So which one should you pick?
Mailotte, if: You want the EU jurisdiction as well as EU storage, and you want the inbox to do some of the sorting instead of you writing filter rules.
Not Mailotte, if: You want maximum standards support and a long operating track record, and you would rather organise mail yourself than have software do it.
Every new account gets 14 days of the top plan with no card, and Mailotte imports from Gmail or any IMAP provider — so you can run both for a fortnight and decide with your actual mail rather than a table.
Questions
Is Fastmail hosted in the EU?
Fastmail offers a choice of EU or USA data residency. The company itself is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, so Australian law applies to the operator regardless of which region stores your mail.
Does Fastmail encrypt my mail end-to-end?
No. Fastmail states on its own security page that it does not offer end-to-end encryption in its apps, because it would break full-text search, message previews and spam filtering. Fastmail encrypts mail in transit and stores it encrypted on its own disks. Mailotte's position is the same shape: mail encrypted in transit, with attachments and stored files encrypted at rest — message bodies are not separately encrypted, on either service.
What does Mailotte add over Fastmail?
An inbox that sorts itself into 'needs you' and 'handled', meaning-based search, and automatic extraction of receipts and bookings — all running on EU servers, with a guarantee that your mail is never used to train a model.
Can I use both?
Yes, and Mailotte imports from any IMAP provider, so trying it alongside an existing Fastmail account is straightforward.