Compare
Mailotte vs Proton Mail
These two solve different problems. Proton makes your mail unreadable to Proton. Mailotte makes your mail useful without selling you. Picking well means being honest about which you actually need.
Proton Mail is the default recommendation in every private-email listicle, and mostly it deserves to be. It is Swiss, it is funded by subscriptions rather than advertising, and it holds your mail with zero-access encryption — Proton's servers store ciphertext they cannot decrypt.
That guarantee has a price, and the price is what your mail can do. Content the server cannot read is content the server cannot search well, cannot sort for you, and cannot answer questions about. It is also why connecting Thunderbird or Apple Mail to Proton requires Proton Mail Bridge, a desktop application available on paid plans, which decrypts locally and re-serves your mail over IMAP on your own machine.
Mailotte takes the other side of that trade deliberately. Your mail is encrypted in transit and your attachments and files are encrypted at rest, but Mailotte's servers can process message content — which is what makes triage, meaning-based search and receipt extraction possible, and what lets a phone mail app connect with nothing but an app password.
Side by side
| Mailotte | Proton Mail | |
|---|---|---|
| Encryption model | 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. | Zero-access encryption at rest; end-to-end between Proton users. Proton's security page. |
| Can the provider read your mail? | Technically yes; contractually and by policy, it is never profiled, sold, or used for training. | No. That is the core guarantee. |
| Jurisdiction | MAILOTTE LTD, registered in England & Wales (no. 17119010). | Proton AG, Switzerland. |
| Where mail is stored | Servers in the EU only, for every account. | Switzerland and the EU. |
| 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. | IMAP/SMTP via Proton Mail Bridge, a desktop app on paid plans. No direct IMAP. |
| Search | Full-text and meaning-based search, server-side, across your whole mailbox. | Encrypted search requires downloading and indexing mail locally in the client. |
| Inbox triage / AI assistance | Built in: two-pile triage, receipt and booking extraction, meaning-based search. | Proton Scribe assists with writing on paid plans; encryption limits server-side inbox analysis. |
| AI trained on your mail | Never. Your mail is not used to train any model — ours or anyone else's. | No. |
| Free plan | 5 GB, 3 aliases. | 1 GB, 1 address, no custom domain. Proton pricing. |
| Ads | None. Mailotte has no advertising business, so there is nothing to profile you for. | None. |
Choose Proton Mail if this sentence matters to you
"My email provider must not be technically capable of reading my mail." If that is a requirement rather than a preference — journalism, legal work, activism, or simply a threat model that includes the provider itself — Proton is the better product and Mailotte is not a substitute. Mailotte's servers process your mail. No amount of policy changes that fact, and we would rather say so on our own comparison page than have you find out later.
Choose Mailotte if this one does
"I want out of the ad ecosystem, but I am not willing to lose a working inbox to get there." Zero-access encryption is a real cost paid in search, sorting, and client support every single day. Most people leaving Gmail want the surveillance gone, not the software. That is the gap Mailotte is built for.
So which one should you pick?
Mailotte, if: You want EU hosting, no advertising, no AI training, native IMAP, and a genuinely smart inbox — and your threat model does not require the provider to be blind.
Not Mailotte, if: You need zero-access or end-to-end encryption as a hard requirement, or you want the wider Proton bundle (VPN, Drive, Pass).
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 Mailotte end-to-end encrypted like Proton Mail?
No, and that is a deliberate trade. Mailotte encrypts mail in transit and encrypts attachments and stored files at rest, but its servers can process message content — which is what makes triage and meaning-based search work. Proton's zero-access model is stronger and costs those features.
Can I use Thunderbird or Apple Mail with Proton Mail?
Only through Proton Mail Bridge, a desktop application on paid plans that decrypts locally and serves IMAP to clients on the same machine. Mailotte supports IMAP, SMTP and POP3 directly with an app password, including on phones, where a bridge cannot run.
Which is better for privacy, Mailotte or Proton Mail?
Proton, on the specific axis of whether the provider can read your mail. Mailotte is comparable on the axes most people actually care about — no ads, no profiling, no data sales, no AI training, EU-only storage — and better on daily usability.
Can I use both?
Yes, and plenty of people should. A zero-access mailbox for the handful of things that need it, and a smart everyday inbox for the rest, is a reasonable setup.