[3] The company's board of directors is composed of CEO Georg Greve, the founding president of Free Software Foundation Europe, CTO Jeroen van Meeuwen, Michael Moser, CCO and co-founder of Switzerlands leading Open Source Integrator Adfinis AG, and Philipp Koch, co-founder of Swiss hosting company Nine.ch.

Kolab Now, under the original name "MyKolab", was launched in January 2013 as a public beta release and became fully available later that year on August 1, as a paid service.

[4] After documents detailing United States and British government mass surveillance programs like PRISM and Tempora were leaked by Edward Snowden in May 2013,[5][6] US-based companies Lavabit and Silent Circle, under pressure of government agencies, decided to shut down their email services rather than run the risk of having to disclose personal data of their users.

[7][8] In turn, Pamela Jones, author of now-defunct legal site Groklaw, revealed her use of MyKolab in her farewell post.

[11] Hosted in Switzerland, Kolab Now claims the benefit of strict privacy laws; it uses exclusively free or open source software, guaranteeing transparency.

[12] Because the service is subject to the national laws of Switzerland, Kolab Now states that there will be no access to a user's data by third parties without a duly authorized warrant issued by a Swiss judge.

However, the Swiss authorities are generally reluctant to make such requests for access, and the government publishes anonymised statistics of all such lawful interceptions along with the rationale.

A controversial revision of the law, effective 1 September 2017, has recently given them wider license, in particular wholesale monitoring of cross-border traffic.

[19] It is aimed at the individual who wishes a more secure and private alternative to free email services, with full groupware functionality.

It supports different applications such as Mail, Address Books, Calendars, ToDo Management, Journals, Notes and offers many detailed features for each of them.