Mailbutler

24/09/2026

In 2020, we had about 20 people at Mailbutler — and no real answer to a simple question: what do we actually stand for?

It took a straightforward challenge from our project manager to force the issue, and a few uncomfortable, honest sessions with post-its and disagreement to actually answer it.

Here's the story of how we defined our Core Values back then, why we were willing to lose people over it, and how those values read differently six years later.

Why company core values only work if they're unfiltered — even if that means some people don't fit. A founder's story from Mailbutler.

10/09/2026

A year ago, Fabian took over Mailbutler alone — and made himself a promise: he'd have a real plan, not just good intentions.

He called it Project Phoenix. Six pillars, a one-year timeline, and a goal to rebuild the company from a rough patch into something stable again.

In his latest Founder Stories post, he shares what actually happened — including the parts of the plan that didn't survive contact with reality, and why that wasn't a failure.

Read the full story:

When I took over as CEO, I built a one-year restructuring plan to show my team I had a vision. Here's what happened…

27/08/2026

A year before our 10th anniversary, our CEO Fabian's co-founder told him he was ready to move on to something entirely his own.

The simplest option on the table was to wind Mailbutler down. Fabian didn't take it.

He wrote up the full story on the blog — what almost happened instead, how he sanity-checked the decision instead of just going with his gut, and the very unpolished moment at the anniversary where he couldn't finish his sentence and just cried in front of the whole team.

Read it here:

When my co-founder decided to leave, we could have wound the company down instead. Here's why I chose to keep building Mailbutler alone.

13/08/2026

We hired a certification agency to help us get ISO 27001 certified. Their templates were built for companies 10x our size — and it took a failed internal audit for us to realize it.
We scrapped their approach, built our own lightweight ISMS in the tools we already use, and got certified anyway. Our founder Fabian breaks down what he'd tell another founder before signing an agency contract. 📋

Read the full story:

What working with an ISO 27001 certification agency really taught us — where it went wrong, and what we built instead.

30/07/2026

In 2024, we lost a deal to a large car manufacturer — not because our product was weak, but because we couldn't tick the "ISO 27001" box on their security checklist.

That loss became the reason we decided to get certified. A year of new processes, centrally managed devices, and a lot of writing later — we passed the audit, and our founder Fabian sleeps a lot better these days. 😌

Read the full story here: https://www.mailbutler.io/blog/inside-mailbutler/why-we-pursued-iso-27001-and-what-it-actually-changed/

16/07/2026

A couple of years ago, someone offered to invest in Mailbutler.

Our founder Fabian said no — not because it was a bad offer, but because he didn't want a clock ticking on his own decisions.

In the first edition of our new "Founder Stories" series, Fabian writes about why Mailbutler was never built to be sold: the early days building a VPN client and some Apple Mail plug-ins as a hobby, the investment offer he turned down, and how the team works today — async hours, no overtime, decisions made together.

Read the full story:

Mailbutler's founder on turning down investment, staying independent, and why he never built the company to sell it — just to keep enjoying it.