As a host of e-mail services for research and education institutions in Luxembourg, the Restena Foundation provides their employees with a sovereign and open-source web interface so that they can read and send emails with complete peace of mind. Mainly benefitting the teachers in Luxembourg, this web interface, know as ‘Webmail’, has been modernised, after years of service.
A necessary modernisation
Set up and hosted in Luxembourg by Restena’s technical teams and tailored to the specific needs of research and education, the Webmail interface has served as a useful addition to, or even an ideal replacement for locally installed email clients since its launch in the early 2000s. Following the many technical developments that email clients have undergone, the Webmail could however no longer compete. Therefore, Restena embarked on a project to upgrade its interface. Tried and tested with its own staff and a group of external users, the new interface is now in line with the latest operational requirements.
It is is optimised for mobile devices, offers improved performance and speed as an optimised search option and a simplified use (navigation, drag-and-drop organisation, clear and intuitive layout), etc. All this, whilst maintaining compliance with the highest IT security requirements.
Sovereignty and open source, at the heart of developments
The work undertaken for the new Webmail by Restena’s technical teams followed the same technical roadmap as its predecessor: use of an open-source solution (the new Wemail is built from the ‘Roundcube’ open source web email client) and data hosting within the country. These two technical requirements, moreover, guide all the developments made by Restena, extending well beyond its email services.
Activities led by Restena within the European project ‘Enhancing Cybersecurity Services for the Luxembourgish Research and Education community’ - LuCySe4RE whose aim is to improve protection against the cybersecurity risks faced by the Luxembourg research and education community, are a good example. Restena’s teams have developed security event management tools build on an infrastructure based on open-source technologies and managed and monitored by Restena, on its servers, within its premises.
A new interface and data to migrate
The new Webmail interface will permanently replace the current one by 9 June 2026 at the webmail.restena.lu URL. Until then, Webmail users can explore their future environment via the following temporary link: webmail-new.restena.lu.
To fully benefit from the new Webmail, they must however manually export, and then import their calendars and address books within the new interface. This procedure can be done at any time, ideally before the deactivation of the Web interface they are currently using, but at the latest by September 2026 via a new temporary URL that allows to access the deactivated interface and export contacts and calendars.
For confidentiality and data protection reasons, and to minimise the risk of errors arising from an automatic conversion between platforms – the two Webmail interfaces are indeed not built from the same open source web email client – Restena gave preference to this approach. The data individual migration is certainly restrictive, but it also presents an excellent opportunity for Webmail users to check, clean and update the data to import.
→ The steps to follow are set out in the relevant documentation: ‘Migrate address book(s) and calendar(s) towards the new Webmail’’