Orneos

Orneos is a small French service that puts mail, calendar, contacts, files, photos, notes and an AI assistant called Ornis under one account. It is aimed at people leaving Gmail and Google Drive together: the home page promises that Gmail mail follows within minutes of signing up. The free Essentiel plan gives an @orneos.eu address, a 2 GB mailbox and 5 GB of storage with no card.

It is run by Scott-E, the trade name of a French sole proprietor in Pontault-Combault, which makes it the smallest operator on this page. The legal notice puts mail, calendar and contacts on Contabo servers in Germany and files at OVHcloud in Strasbourg, with backups at Gravelines. It says nothing leaves the EU. The cloud part is Nextcloud, the rest is proprietary, and the mail side uses IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

Plus costs €3 and Pro €9 a month at the founder price, and a custom domain only arrives with Pro. Compared with Proton Mail or Mailbox.org it is younger and has no stated certification, and the AI add-ons run from €8 to €30 a month. It suits a private user or freelancer who wants one cheap French account instead of three services.

What Orneos does well

• Free plan with a 2 GB mailbox and 5 GB of storage, no card needed
• Mail, files, photos, calendar and notes in a single account
• Mail on your own domain from the Pro plan at €9 per month
• Files and backups encrypted before they reach the hosting provider, key held by Orneos
• Hosting in Germany and France, with the legal notice stating nothing leaves the EU

Where Orneos falls short

• Run by a French sole proprietor, so a single person stands behind the service
• No ISO 27001, SOC 2 or similar certification stated
• Only the Nextcloud layer is open source, the rest is proprietary
• The AI assistant adds optional paid tiers of €8 to €30 per month

Standout feature. It is one of the few mail services on this page that bundles photo backup and cloud storage in the same free account.