Here's a thing that surprises almost everyone outside software: the email your applications send is not stored anywhere. People assume it works like their own mailbox — a Sent folder, everything in it, forever. There is no such thing. An app hands the message to SMTP, a provider says 250 OK, and that's the entire record — no copy, no timeline, no proof of what left.
That gap bit us often enough that in 2020 we — Bálint Szekeres and Barbara Balogh — started building the fix. We run technology at a Budapest agency — Bálint as Technology Director, Barbara as Head of Tech. The systems we build there — client websites, their backends, the software behind day-to-day operations — send email that matters: notifications, confirmations, invoices, password resets, contracts. Looking after that mail for years taught us which details count in practice. One example: a high-stakes send like a winner announcement can be paused until someone has read and approved it. Our colleagues and clients rely on that.
So the first tenant was already in the house. Mailway carried its first production mail at the end of 2020 and has run quietly ever since — years before it had a name worth putting on a landing page.
And it exists for one moment in particular: the day a recipient insists a time-sensitive email never arrived — or arrived saying something else — and the disadvantage lands on you. Without a record, that argument is memory against memory. With Mailway it's the exact message, its delivery timeline, and a certificate you can hand to the other side.
How it's run
Mailway is Mailway Ltd., Budapest, Hungary — self-funded: no investors, and no growth target that outranks not losing your email. The infrastructure lives in the EU, on dedicated servers in Germany, and the trust page names every sub-processor involved.
What we believe
- The message stays as sent. SMTP-to-SMTP relays go to the provider byte for byte, so the original DKIM signature stays valid — even opened from the archive years later. Every other path states its fidelity on the record. Nothing is silently rewritten.
- Honest numbers. Provider-accepted is not delivered, and the dashboard says which one it's showing you.
- Your providers, your prices. BYOK — Mailway routes and records; the sending capacity is yours, at provider cost, zero margin.
- EU, without asterisks. Ingested, routed, and archived inside the European Union. No "unless" clauses.
Talk to us
Questions, doubts, edge cases — write to us. Or just point your SMTP config at it and watch the first timeline light up.