It started with
a missing email.

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 as our own project. Our day jobs are at a Budapest agency, where Bálint is Technology Director and Barbara is 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.

That agency became Mailway's first customer, and still is. 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. 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. The agency and its clients rely on that.

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 run by Mailway Ltd. (under registration), a company in Budapest, Hungary. It is self-funded: no investors, and no growth target that outranks not losing your email. The infrastructure lives in the EU, on Hetzner Cloud servers in Germany, and the trust page names every sub-processor involved.

What we believe

• The message stays as sent. SMTP relays go to the provider byte-for-byte, except for two header changes wedocument: recipient headers above a provider's recipient limit, and provider instruction headers. The archive keeps the bytes as received, original DKIM signature included. Mailway checks that signature shortly after receiving the mail and keeps the result, because once the sender rotates the key, the signature can no longer be checked. Every other path states its fidelity on the record. Nothing is silently rewritten on our side.
• Honest numbers. Provider-accepted is not delivered, and the console 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.
• What Mailway keeps stays in the EU. Your mail is received, routed, and archived inside the European Union. Where it goes after that is up to the providers you choose.

Talk to us

Questions, doubts, edge cases — write to us. Or join the waitlist: once you're in, your first timeline is one config change away.

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