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• Support -> Report a problem, typing your question (requested to be in either English or Swedish, though they'd probably be able to read a question run through Google Translate) and optionally providing your email. You can also view the app's logs at any time, which can be useful to help a technician diagnose your problem.
If you'd rather search for a solution at your own pace, you can go to that same page and click FAQs and Guides instead. This opens the help center in a browser.
Mullvad's help center, including the dropdown filter menus.
Sam Chapman for Engadget
I love Mullvad's approach to laying out its FAQs. Instead of crowding topics into five or six categories and making you guess whether your problem falls under setup, usage or troubleshooting, Mullvad gives you a set of dropdown filters to narrow down the articles which might relate to your problem.
By the time you've named which device, OS and protocol you're dealing with, you won’t have many articles left to sift through. There is an annoying tendency for certain sets of filters to reduce the number of surfaced links to zero, but for those cases, there's a search bar that also works well.
The articles themselves are good enough that I referred to them several times while writing this review. Some of them are a bit overlong, but they're diligent about including both internal and external links to get you where you're going fast.
Live support experience
This is normally where I cover how it feels to get live chat support from the VPN I'm reviewing. However, Mullvad doesn't have live chat support. That's unfortunate, although it's still better than Windscribe's approach of forcing you to banter with a sarcastic robot. Instead, I sent a question via email to Mullvad's support team, and got a response within 24 hours.
Mullvad background check
Mullvad was founded in 2009 in Sweden. It's still owned and operated by its original founders. According to a detailed timeline on its website, its 16-year history has been as uneventful as any user could ask for, with not much changing except updates to stay on the technological leading edge. The only controversy mentioned in Mullvad's own materials is the 2023 police raid of its headquarters, which (as I covered in the privacy section) only makes them look better.
So as not to take Mullvad at its word, I scoured the last 16 years of news items and user reports to search for any other blemishes on its record. Based on that research, I found no reason to doubt Mullvad's honesty about its location, owners or team.
I found just one leak that wasn't noted on Mullvad's own site. In 2023, a security research group called ZATAZ alleged that it found anonymized information on Mullvad users saved on an Internet Archive page, including account numbers (linked article is in French). According to ZATAZ, Mullvad contacted the Archive and got the page deleted.
To my mind, the only mistake Mullvad made in response to the ZATAZ allegations was not making a public statement about the incident. I can see why they didn't think it was a big deal, since even logging into someone else's Mullvad account wouldn't show you their browsing history, but it's always better to communicate about these things.
Final verdict
Mullvad is a VPN that knows what it wants to be and achieves that goal with flying colors. It's not trying to be an everything app — it does privacy and does it well. That's not to say it has nothing going on outside the VPN itself, as its DNS blockers, AI defenses and split tunneling all work smoothly. But if you want a VPN that's not ashamed to be a VPN, Mullvad is the right choice.
Of course, it has its own compromises. It's solidly in the middle of the speed pack and occasionally trips up when unblocking streaming sites. The lack of any protocols other than WireGuard grates on me a bit, since it reduces the user's options for troubleshooting. With all that said, those are minor hiccups on a VPN that does such a thorough job keeping you anonymous online.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/vpn/mullvad-vpn-review-near-total-privacy-with-a-few-sacrifices-130000056.html?src=rss">Mullvad VPN review: Near-total privacy with a few sacrifices
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