Last week I emailed 14 different email providers and identifying myself as a blogger I asked them about their connection logs retention policy, here are the answers:
Would it be possible for you to let me know for how long does your email service keep customer connection logs? (By connection logs I mean timestamp logs that contain computer IPs used to connect to the account)
| Email provider | Connection logs retention |
| Countermail.com | We keep a traffic log for 24h, the incoming external server IP-addresses are stored in this log, but the countermail users IP-addresses are never stored in this log |
| Protonmail.ch | The answer to your questions is fairly simple: we do not have connection logs where ip’s are matched with accounts and tracked |
| Inbox.com | We are sorry but we can not share this info with you because it is not considered a public information |
| Hushmail.com | They told me to read their privacy policy, I did and it says that Hushmail keeps connection logs for 18 months |
| AnonymousSpeech.com | For trial user we keep a connection log for 5 days. After this 5 days we delete them. For paid memberships we do not keep ANY log information |
| Mailbox.org | The specific logs you asked about are deleted after 7 days |
| NeoMailbox.com | Updated: It took them ONE MONTH to reply. “We keep email logs for 7 days after which they are securely wiped.” |
| Cotse.net | Did not reply |
| MyKolab.com | Unfortunately, I am not in the position to give you a concrete time frame for this. For example, deleted mails are not purged from our storage immediately but at regular intervals, usually every day at night time when there are less users on the systems. In addition to that, we keep backups for disaster recovery, but we only keep them for a limited amount of time and not forever |
| Unseen.is | We keep email server access logs for seven days. This is only to prevent abuse and spamming using our system |
| OpenMailbox.org | We keep logs 1 year to comply to local laws |
| Posteo.de |
We only save IP addresses when an account is accessed using an external email client and in the process of sending or receiving emails. When an account is accessed via the webmail interface we generally do not save IP addresses. This data is automatically deleted after seven days. The data is only used to diagnose problems and can not be requested by authorities. Only in response to a judicial ruling in the case of a serious crime can this data be accessed. |
| CryptoHeaven.org | The logs are kept for anywhere from 8 to 48 hours, and that is only on the web server and not the mail system |
| Fastmail.fm | We normally keep logs of email and server activity for up to 6 months. This is for the purposes of diagnosing and fixing problems, which are often reported to us weeks or months after they occur. Backups and logs may be kept longer in special circumstances. For example, if a problem is taking a long time to resolve, logs relevant to that investigation may be retained. Or if a server that contains backups or logs is temporarily offline because of a fault, then those backups or logs may not be deleted until the server is brought back up. These situations are unusual, however, and when they do occur, they are temporary |
Chris
protonmail has a very easy to use interface and for sending encrypted email to non protonmail users. I like them even more now. Thanks for asking this question.
btw what information is retained when someone leaves a comment here?
I like the blog!
hacker10
Hello Chris,
I appreciate you sharing your experience with ProtonMail. As for what information is retained when you leave a comment, I can see your computer IP and the email address you gave.
You can use an anonymous proxy to comment here but there are many chances that this will be deleted by the automatic spam filter, specially if URLs are included.
hacker10
Chris
Thanks for the reply!
mailbox.org
Thank you for mentioning us.
For reasons of transparency, we would like to add, that we do keep other logs as well. We published a detailled list of all the logs and how long we keep each type of log here:
https://mailbox.org/en/data-protection/
Thomas
Hello hacker10,
I think Tutanota also does not keep customer connection logs.