Alpost is mail and hosting you do not pay for. We run our own hardware in the European Union and earn from advertising rather than subscriptions.
Free mail today almost always means a trade: you do not pay with money, so you pay with something else. We do not think that is wrong in itself — we think it is wrong to keep quiet about it.
So the terms are written on the front page: mailbox size, disk size, the presence of advertising. None of it is hidden in the small print.
Advertising. Ad blocks sit on the pages of the site — in the news and in the portal sections.
We charge nothing for the mailbox, offer no paid storage tiers and ask for no payment details when you register. There would be nowhere and no reason to keep them.
Our servers sit in two countries, and we say exactly what is where. In Zurich, our own nameserver on a Swiss address. In France, a dedicated server that holds the mail and the site files.
This is our own hardware, not rented space in someone else's cloud. Mail and files do not leave Switzerland and the European Union, and the service operates under GDPR.
All our domains are signed with DNSSEC, mail and sites run over TLS, and certificates renew themselves.
A mailbox can be created on any of our domains. They are identical in what they can do — only what follows the @ differs. The server name for mail programs is shared too, so choosing a domain changes no settings.
The server for mail and hosting in Switzerland has already been chosen. It goes live when the flow of clients makes that worth doing: we are not going to keep an idle machine running for the sake of a line on a website.
Until then, mail and site files sit in France — that is what the "What we store" page says. When the Swiss server starts working we will say so here and in the terms, not after the fact.
A small team, not a corporation. That cuts both ways: decisions are made quickly, but there will be no round-the-clock telephone support here.