[1][2] It was launched in November 2013 by Belgium-based company ContactOffice Group, which has been operating an online collaboration suite since 1999.

In March 2016, a beta version of end-to-end encryption and digital signatures for emails was released.

[5] On 5 March 2020, Mailfence reported that their SMTP servers are blocked by Russian-based email services.

Mailfence did not respond to this request, citing obligation to provide information about users, violating its Terms and the federal Belgian laws.

[6] Mailfence provides secure email features, with other functions such as Calendar, Contacts, Documents and Collaboration.

[10]  It was enriched with security and privacy features in 2016 at the launch of the Mailfence service with features: managing access or generating specific password for web and non-web services, two-factor authentication, spam protection alongside of plus addressing, sender address blacklist and whitelist, The contacts support (CSV, vCard, LDIF) import, (vCard, PDF) export and can be accessed using CardDAV.

[22] Mailfence claims to be secure and private on their website,[23] offering most conventional security and privacy features, but they also claim to support some less-common privacy and security enhancing features: Like most major e-mail services, the service claims to use TLS with ephemeral key exchange to encrypt all internet traffic between users and Mailfence servers.

OpenPGP keypair is generated in client-browser, encrypted (via AES256) with the user's passphrase, and then stored on Mailfence server.