Our business

Our WEB.DE, GMX, and mail.com brands have over 43 million active users around the world. This makes us the leading e-mail provider in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Building on this strong market position, we develop services and apps that simplify people’s digital lives – from office tools and cloud storage to personal ID management. Thanks to our Big Data platform and artificial intelligence, we create added value for our customers as well as targeted content and advertising solutions.

Michael Hagenau - CEO

"E-mail is one of the most widely used Internet applications. It is indispensable for contact with companies, public authorities, universities and potential employers. Our market position as one of Europe's leading providers enables us to drive innovation independently and in collaboration with partners. We are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to create attractive services that offer a tailored user experience."

Alex Charles - Chief Product Officer

“E-mail has become the hub of our digital lives. Given the growing volume of messages, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. That’s why we’re continuing to develop e-mail – into a digital assistant. Intelligent sorting functions help our users focus on the right information at the right time by reducing unwanted distractions and highlighting important options for action. This saves our users time and money, and they can concentrate on the important things in life.”

Rasmus Giese - Chief Media Sales Officer

“As one of Germany’s highest-reach advertising marketers, United Internet Media provides free access to WEB.DE, GMX and mail.com. As a partner to the advertising industry, we deliver branding and dialog campaigns with outstanding performance values. With our pioneering research and wide-ranging involvement in market initiatives and industry associations, we play a key role in shaping the future of online advertising.”

Thomas Ludwig - Chief Technology & Development Officer

“With the expertise of around 500 IT professionals, we operate Europe’s largest e-mail and cloud platform. A highly scalable container-based infrastructure is the foundation on which our development teams design AI-powered processes and innovative solutions for over 43 million users. We are agile and keep a constant focus on technical excellence.”

Dana Kraft - Chief Finance & Human Resources Officer

"We have a solid and successful business model with the secure e-mail platforms as the central communication medium and information hub in everyday digital life. Thanks to the in-depth expertise of our teams and our consistent customer focus, we have been successfully holding our own in the market for years. We value openness and trusting cooperation and give our diverse teams the freedom to develop new ideas. We live sustainability as a corporate value and want to shape the digital future in the most environmentally friendly way possible."

The content produced by our own independent editorial team is one of the highest-reach media offerings in the German-speaking world. In Germany, WEB.DE and GMX are among the top 10 online media and an established news source.

Our products are available either as fee-based subscriptions or as free accounts. To finance our free e-mail and news offerings, we operate our own marketing company: United Internet Media offers advertisers a comprehensive and attractive portfolio for branding and dialog marketing.

As an internet company with many years of market experience, one of our core competencies is to identify and systematically develop customer wishes, trends and new markets at an early stage. This is how we achieve a high level of added value – with products developed in-house and operated at the Group’s own high-performance data centers.

Mail & Media Hauptstandort Karlsruhe
Mail & Media Zweigniederlassung München

Our success story

From its base in Karlsruhe, Germany, WEB.DE went online in November 1995 as the “German Internet Directory”. About one-and-a-half years later, in March 1997, GMX (Global Message Exchange) was launched in Munich as one of Germany’s first e-mail providers. A year later, WEB.DE also added a free e-mail service to its edited Web directory.

In the years that followed, both companies established e-mail in Germany with strong customer growth and maintained their leading market position in the face of emerging American competition. GMX extended its lead in the German-speaking world and expanded into France, Spain, and the UK. In 2010, the mail.com brand expanded the company’s international offering with a focus on the USA.

E-mail made in Germany

GMX and WEB.DE are among the pioneers in the fight against spam and in the use of encryption technologies. In the wake of the discovery of mass surveillance by intelligence agencies, the two platforms joined forces with Deutsche Telekom to found the “E-mail made in Germany” initiative. The participating e-mail providers ensure automatic encryption on all transmission paths and also guarantee that they only store and process data at secure data centers in accordance with German data protection laws.

WEB.DE and GMX also offer simple and convenient end-to-end encryption of e-mail and cloud content. In 2015, for example, the two brands became the world’s first major e-mail providers to integrate the PGP encryption standard. Since 2017, data can also be encrypted in the cloud.

Communication hub for your digital life

To help keep inboxes under control in the face of rising e-mail volumes, WEB.DE and GMX introduced the Smart Mailbox in 2020. In addition to categorizing e-mails by topic, it integrates smart services using artificial intelligence. In the case of parcel tracking, for example, the current shipping status is displayed directly in your inbox. Newsletters, subscriptions, and contracts can also be conveniently managed with the Smart Mailbox.

GMX and WEB.DE attach particular importance to driving forward the digitization of conventional mail. Their De-Mail service offers a solution for legally binding digital communication with companies and public authorities. As cooperation partners of the German postal service Deutsche Post AG, both e-mail services have enabled their customers to announce and receive letters by e-mail since 2020. This adds the digital benefits of e-mail to traditional letters. The e-mail inbox is increasingly becoming a communication hub for our digital lives.

Taking marketing to a new level

The marketing company United Internet Media (UIM) was founded in 2006 with sites in Munich and Karlsruhe and sales offices in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. At its heart is the Target Group Planning (TGP) technology, which is based on high-quality first-party data and enables advertising messages to be targeted precisely for specific groups. TGP is constantly being refined and offers one of the market’s broadest and deepest target group portfolios. In 2009, UIM introduced the trustedDialog quality standard for secure and trustworthy customer dialogue. In 2013, the marketer’s Programmatic Advertising service enabled the automated allocation of advertising space in real time. In 2014, the advertising format InboxAd was introduced to tap the mobile advertising market. Since 2015, UIM has also been marketing the digital offerings of the German telephone directories “Das Telefonbuch”, “Das Örtliche” and “Gelbe Seiten”. The company supports advertisers with solutions for the post-cookie era, including ID-based targeting with first-party data or alternative identifiers such as the netID login standard.

United Internet AG

We are a subsidiary of United Internet AG, Europe’s leading internet specialist with almost 10,000 employees. Within the Group, 1&1 Mail & Media Applications SE with around 1,000 employees represents the Consumer Applications segment, which comprises United Internet’s applications for home users. In particular, these include Personal Information Management applications (e-mail, to-do lists, appointments, addresses) and online storage (cloud), as well as domains, website solutions tailored to consumer needs, and office software. In the course of portfolio development, the GMX and WEB.DE brands – the most widely used e-mail providers in Germany for many years now – are gradually being expanded to become complete command centers for the communication, information, and identity management needs of users.

Job search