tldr; Mailfence has hard limits on the number of addresses you can add to your spam whitelist. Once the limit is reached you have to turn off their spam filter or manually check your spam folder.

After being with MailFence for a few years, and with renewal approaching in May I decided it was time to leave them and move to a new provider. I was using them to host a custom domain, so it was relatively easy to move it as I can take my email address with me.

Generally MailFence has been good – however two dealbreakers became very clear in this past year:

• Limited Whitelist for Spam – yup, there was a hard limit of domains that I could add to the spam filter whitelist. So any further domains that were deemed spam would end up in the spam folder regardless of any action I took. Dealbreaker
• Missing emails – this was far less often, but on occasion emails failed to arrive. This became clear when I was signing up to a new service and the “verify your email” registration email never came through. I switched to use a yahoo email and the registration email came through no problem. After looking on Reddit, other users were reporting a similar user. I can only confirm this happening once in the 3 years I was on the service – so not a huge issue. Then again, maybe I was missing more emails?

I was paying about €42 a year for the Entry Plan, and it was generally reliable. However, to increase the number of domains I could whitelist I would have to pay for a higher tier of subscription, but they would still be limited; so essentially putting off the inevitable. The next tier up, the Pro Plan, is €9.50 pm (€114 per year) and the Ultra plan is €29 pm (€348 per year). Now of course they come with other features such as more storage space and aliases, but I didn’t need any of that so I would be paying a huge increase just to get more whitelist entries.

I checked the details then writing this, and from their website

Is there a limit as to the number of entries that can be made to the whitelist?

Yes. The exact limit of your whitelist entries depends on your subscription plan.

The limits are as follows:

• Free plan: 0 entries
• Base plan: 100 entries
• Entry plan: 200 entries
• Pro plan: 300 Entries
• Ultra plan: 400 entries

If you are not receiving emails that you think you should be, please add the sender to your whitelist.

Personally I think that charging to prevent spam hitting your inbox is wrong. Once you hit the limit on domains you could whitelist then you had to either disable the spam filter or diligently remember to check your spam folder. I tried to remember, but of course I would forget every now and again, and then find some important emails sitting in my spam folder there being silently ignored. In the end I had to disable the spam filter.

This type of “feature” puts users at risk and makes their service cumbersome. Every day I had to delete spam from my inbox because I had to disable their anti spam. And of course I risked accidentally falling for spam emails that were now sitting in my inbox.

One positive; since I am using a custom domain for my email I was able to transfer to a new provider in a matter of an hour. After changing some domain settings my emails were redirected to the new provider with no loss in service. This has really convinced me to move all my important emails to my custom domain. If I was using a ‘free’ service I would have been stuck with whatever they provided or faced a long an arduous project to switch emails on every service I use.