Mailfence strives to make the internet a safer place. That’s why we developed our encrypted email solution. But in our opinion just offering secure and private email is not sufficient. Otherwise our users would need to use insecure or non private solutions to manage their appointments, create and store their documents or chat online. Luckily Mailfence is much more than a secure email. Mailfence allows you to share and organize your private and professional life through powerful productivity tools such as the Mailfence Calendar, Documents, Contacts and Chat. And did you know that you can even create Mailfence Groups in order to share your data with family or colleagues in a secure way? Sounds interesting? Discover the group collaboration capabilities of Mailfence Groups.

What are Mailfence Groups?

Mailfence Groups are group collaboration spaces that allow sharing of data with other users. With groups, you will use the full potential of Mailfence!

Sharing is done in two ways:

Sharing via the group space: group Documents, group Calendar, etc. All group members have access to this common space.

Sharing your private space: This can only be done with your Mailbox and Calendar that can be shared with selected group members.

Belonging to a group has the following consequences. You can:

view the shared mailbox.

view the shared group Contacts.

see the busy timeslots (but not the event details) in the group members’ Calendars.

share the group Calendar publicly via ‘public access link’.

see all the shared data in the group spaces.

share your group Documents publicly via ‘public access link’.

chat with group members with Instant messaging and see whether they are currently online.

send Documents to a group member drop folder.

Be aware that the following data from your Personal data are displayed to members: last name, first name, organization, e-mail address and picture.

How to create Mailfence Groups?

Step 1: create the group

Go to the Settings. Click on Groups in the left column (bottom of the screen). Click on Create a new group. Choose an explicit group name. This name must be unique. You can enter a description, that will inform the members about the group purpose and/or the content. Click on Save to create the group.

You’re not done yet, because at this point your group has no members and no data.

Step 2: invite members

Click on Invite. Select members among Contacts: existing group members, private contacts or group contacts.

If future members don’t appear in the Contacts, create them by clicking on Create new Contact. Members get an invitation e-mail. They have to accept the invitation to join the group. People who have accepted the invitation appear in the group members list.

To send a reminder to people who haven’t answered to the invitation, go to to the Pending invitations section, and choose Send again in the Actions for this person.

Step 3: contents and access rights

Creating the group results in creating group tools i.e., the group has its own Documents, Calendar, Contacts etc.

The group administrator is the only one allowed to add contents to the group tools at this point.

In each tool, create the folder structure if applicable.

Add data to the group.

The default access rights are that group members can see all the folders and data shared in the group but cannot add or delete anything.

You can modify this default and configure access rights according to your needs. You will find detailed help about access rights in our online help.

How to access my Mailfence Groups space?

To access the group space of your Mailfence Groups:

Go to the tool of your choice: Calendar, Documents, Contacts. Select the group name in the context selector, which default value is “Private”. You now see all group data that is shared with all other group members.

Presence and group chat

Mailfence also includes the possibility to chat with other group members. This functionality is based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol. We integrated an ejabberd server, a solution used all over the world to power the largest XMPP deployments.

To access this chat and the list of group members that you can chat with, click on the little green dot (web chat client) at the right bottom of the screen that indicates how many group members are online like you.

For more info about our chat functionality and its possibilities and limitations, please go to our online help.

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– Mailfence Team