Dear Posteo customers and interested parties,

We have a transparency notice for you: we have updated our donations page. On this page, we document the organisations that we financially supported during the previous year (2021).

Over the past year, we donated a total of 59,500 EUR. Of this, 56,139.93 EUR constituted voluntary donations by Posteo. The remaining 3,361.07 EUR came from users that donated remaining credit when terminating their account.

In March 2022, we additionally donated 10,000 EUR for emergency humanitarian aid in Ukraine (Médecins Sans Frontières/UN Refugee Agency). These donations will only be listed in our transparency notes next year when we disclose the figures for 2022.

#more#

It is important to us that we encourage social engagement and take responsibility as a company.
We therefore donate to carefully selected organisations in the fields of environmental and climate protection, digital freedom and freedom of expression, as well as refugee and humanitarian emergency aid.

Posteo donated to the following organisations in 2021:

UNHCR (UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe):
UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe is the German offshoot of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It ensures the survival of refugees in acute crisis situations with life-saving emergency measures. UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe thus provides for sufficient supplies of water, food and medicines in refugee camps or regions that are hard to access, for example.

Doctors Without Borders:
Doctors Without Borders was founded in France in 1971. The German section was added in 1993. Today, MSF (Médicins Sans Frontières) is an international network that provides emergency medical aid in over 70 countries. As a humanitarian medical organisation, Doctors Without Borders is committed to providing high-quality and efficient health care in countries where people’s survival is at risk due to diseases, wars and disasters.

Reporters Without Borders:
Reporters Without Borders engages itself worldwide for freedom of the press and freedom of information. The organisation documents violations against freedom of the press and supports journalists that are in danger. Reporters Without Borders combats censorship and restrictive media laws.

UNICEF – Living Schools:
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been advocating for the health, education and rights of children and mothers in 190 countries since 1946. UNICEF is politically involved against the use of child soldiers and for protecting refugees and for implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Posteo supports the project Living Schools in Malawi. Schools are being built there that are based on principles of ecological awareness, e-learning and participation in decision-making. The schools have their own water supply system for clean drinking water and sanitation, use solar energy and teach about environmental protection in their school gardens.

Netzpolitik.org:
netzpolitik.org is a journalistic platform for digital freedom rights and presents the important debates and developments about the internet. The platform documents how politics is changing the internet and society through regulation and the continued expansion of surveillance laws. With its work, netzpolitik.org wants to encourage people to become engaged for their digital freedom rights and an open society.

BUND:
Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) is one of the largest German environmental organisations. Throughout Germany there are more than 2,000 voluntary BUND groups engaged with regional environmental topics. BUND is also engaged with climate protection, ecological agriculture and protection of threatened species, forests and water. BUND is the German member of the international environmental network, “Friends of the Earth”.

ECCHR:
The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is engaged with legal measures for human rights. The ECCHR lawyers’ aim is to hold state and non-state actors legally accountable for grave human rights abuses. Among others, the ECCHR was founded in 2007 by human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, who represents whistleblower Edward Snowden in Germany.

Posteo does business sustainably and is independent. Our service is financed entirely by our customers’ account fees. There are no investors or advertising partners at Posteo. You are what makes our involvement in these projects possible. We thank you very much for helping to make a difference.

Best regards,
The Posteo team

Dear Posteo customers and interested parties,

Today we address all users of the encryption add-on Enigmail in Thunderbird. If you regularly encrypt your emails with OpenPGP and depend on this feature, please avoid updating to the forthcoming Thunderbird release (version 78.0). Enigmail will no longer be supported in Thunderbird 78. The program’s new and own implementation of OpenPGP encryption is still in an experimental phase and is deactivated by default.

Should you use automatic updates, no further action is required. An installation of the Thunderbird 78 update will not occur automatically.

Background information:
This summer, Mozilla is planning on releasing a new version of Thunderbird (78.0) that will change how add-ons are supported. Among other reasons, this became necessary due to security issues.
This was also made clear from a security audit commissioned by Posteo at the end of 2017. Various security issues in Thunderbird were identified, particularly with its add-on interface.

Third-party add-ons like Enigmail, that need to access internal components of Thunderbird, will no longer be supported.

Because of this, Mozilla is implementing their own OpenPGP feature in Thunderbird 78. This built-in encryption is planned to replace the Enigmail add-on..
Currently OpenPGP support in Thunderbird 78 is categorised as experimental and is disabled by default: Enigmail is no longer supported in Thunderbird 78.

Waiting for Thunderbird 78.2

From Thunderbird 78.2 onwards, OpenPGP is planned to be made available by default in Thunderbird. We will inform you as soon as this version is made available and an update for OpenPGP users is possible.

Best regards
The Posteo Team

Dear Posteo customers,

We have a brief announcement:
Because of the increasing spread of the coronavirus, our Posteo Lab, located on top of Berlin’s “Kreuzberg”, will remain closed until further notice.

Our Posteo Lab is our public space in Berlin.
Interested parties can normally come and visit daily between 3 and 6 p.m. to test out Posteo, add credit to their accounts and ask questions.

We apologise to everyone who planned to visit in the near future. We appreciate your understanding.
We will make a new post in our blog as soon as we open the lab again.

The background behind closing the lab is that we have recommended to our team that they work from home whenever possible already since the end of February.
Because of this, we are no longer able to consistently have staff in the lab. We also would like to reduce the risk of infection with this temporary closure. Apart from that, our business operations are not affected by the coronavirus. You can send all inquiries via email to support@posteo.de and can add credit to your account again online.

Best regards,
The Posteo Team

Dear Posteo customers and interested parties,

We have a transparency notice for you: we have updated our donations page. On this page, we document the organisations that we financially supported during the previous year (2019).

Over the past year, we donated a total of 44,500 EUR. Of this, 42,045 EUR constituted voluntary donations by Posteo. The remaining 2455 EUR came from users that donated remaining credit when terminating their account. In comparison with the previous year, we were able to increase our donations in 2019 by 3900 EUR.

#more#

It is important to us that we encourage social engagement and take responsibility as a company.
Because of this, we donate to selected charitable organisations in the areas of environment and climate protection, internet politics and freedom of opinion, as well as refugee aid.

Posteo donated to the following organisations in 2019:

BUND:
Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND) is one of the largest German environmental organisations. Throughout Germany there are more than 2,000 voluntary BUND groups engaged with regional environmental topics. BUND is also engaged with climate protection, ecological agriculture and protection of threatened species, forests and water. BUND is the German member of the international environmental network, “Friends of the Earth”.

ECCHR:
The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is engaged with legal measures for human rights. The ECCHR lawyers’ aim is to hold state and non-state actors legally accountable for grave human rights abuses. Among others, the ECCHR was founded in 2007 by human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck, who represents whistleblower Edward Snowden in Germany.

Netzpolitik.org:
netzpolitik.org is a journalistic platform for digital freedom rights and presents the important debates and developments about the internet. The platform documents how politics is changing the internet and society through regulation and the continued expansion of surveillance laws. With its work, netzpolitik.org wants to encourage people to become engaged for their digital freedom rights and an open society.

Reporters Without Borders:
Reporters Without Borders engages itself worldwide for freedom of the press and freedom of information. The organisation documents violations against freedom of the press and supports journalists that are in danger. Reporters Without Borders combats censorship and restrictive media laws.

UNICEF – Living Schools
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been advocating for the health, education and rights of children and mothers in 190 countries since 1946. UNICEF is politically involved against the use of child soldiers and for protecting refugees and for implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Posteo supports the project Living Schools in Malawi. Schools are being built there that are based on principles of ecological awareness, e-learning and participation in decision-making. The schools have their own water supply system for clean drinking water and sanitation, use solar energy and teach about environmental protection in their school gardens. E-learning opportunities are also available to the nearby community.

UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe:
UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe is the German offshoot of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It ensures the survival of refugees in acute crisis situations with life-saving emergency measures. UNO-Flüchtlingshilfe thus provides for sufficient supplies of water, food and medicines in refugee camps or regions that are hard to access, for example.

In addition to these donations, Posteo also sponsored in 2019:

taz – Panter Stiftung
Twice a year, the taz Academy invites 20 young journalists and activists to Berlin to produce a supplement together for the daily newspaper. In 2019 the subject was “Save the environment? Of course, but how?”. Posteo supported the climate workshop as a sponsor.

Reporters Without Borders – Press Freedom Awards
The Press Freedom Awards given by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) honours particularly courageous and independent journalists who will not be silenced despite adverse circumstances and great danger to life and limb. In 2019, Posteo donated the prize money for the “Courage” category in journalism.

Posteo does business sustainably and is independent. Our service is financed entirely by our customers’ account fees. There are no investors or advertising partners at Posteo. You are what makes our involvement in these projects possible. We thank you very much for helping to make a difference.

Best regards,
The Posteo team

Dear Posteo customers,

The Press Freedom Awards given by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) honours particularly courageous and independent journalists who will not be silenced despite adverse circumstances and great danger to life and limb. Posteo is donating the prize money for the “Courage” category in journalism.

It’s a pleasure for us to be able to support courageous media representatives in such a way. On September 12th, the Press Freedom Awards will be held in Berlin for the first time.

This year’s nominees for three prize categories hail from 12 different countries. Among them is a Russian investigative journalist who has already been the target of multiple attacks, a Vietnamese journalist who has been beaten and imprisoned because of her work as well as Pakistan’s oldest daily newspaper that has been repeatedly harrassed by officials.

The nominees from the “Courage” category sponsored by Posteo






Igor Rudnikov (Russia) – There have been multiple attacks directed towards the founder of the independent newspaper Novye Kolesa because of his research on corruption and public fund embezzlement. Furthermore, he was arrested because of his work. In prison he continued to write articles and a book that contains the quote: “Thought cannot be handcuffed or thrown in prison. It will always be free.”






Eman Al-Nafjan (Saudi Arabia) – The blogger and journalist has campaigned massively for women to be allowed to drive cars and to have more rights. Because of this, she was arrested. Currently she has been temporarily freed. She created the website SaudiWoman.me and writes for international media outlets like the British newspaper The Guardian and the New York Times. Since mid-2018 the state has also permitted women to drive cars.






Paolo Borrometi (Italy) – He is regularly threated with death because of his fearless reporting about the mafia and is constantly under police protection. He writes for the newspaper Giornale di Sicilia and his own website La Spia.






Lola Aronovich (Brazil) – The blogger has made a name for herself with her feminist texts and commitment to women’s rights. At the same time she has been treated increasingly with hostility. She receives hundreds of death threats online. Since 2018, a law has been put into effect in Brazil that enhances traceability for misogynistic crimes online. It has also been called the “Lola Law”.

Our support

It is important to us to encourage social engagement and to take responsibility as a company. We therefore support selected charitable organisations in the areas of climate and environmental protection, internet politics and freedom of opinion, as well as refugee aid.

Best regards,
The Posteo Team