Skip to the documentation
Knowledge base

Transport encryption

Mail moves over TLS on the hops we run, and transport alone never turns the padlock green, because nothing on this backend can read the transport off a delivery.

Details

  • Outbound leaves over an HTTPS call to the service that puts it on the wire; inbound arrives at the mail servers the records you publish point at. The hop either side of that is opportunistic STARTTLS between two servers that are not ours, offered and never required, and nothing here can promise it on your behalf.
  • So on an OpenEmail mailbox there is no green lock, and nothing here claims one. The servers that receive for you offer STARTTLS but also accept plaintext SMTP, and nothing handed over with a delivered message says which one the sender used, so there is no per-message verdict to show. That we did not check is a different statement from not encrypted, and you are owed the difference.
  • Transport has no green state at all. The lock is dimmed on every message that only had TLS, because reading the transport off a delivery is something no mailbox here can currently do, and a lock that went green without a reading would be decoration. The one thing that does turn it green is unrelated to transport: an end-to-end encrypted message that this browser actually decrypted, which is a fact about the body rather than about the hop.