Free private mail: why exactly that

What "free" means, and where the catch usually is

Free mail is always paid for somehow. Usually by you: with advertising picked from the contents of your messages, or by selling the address, or by your mailbox becoming an asset when the company changes hands.

Ours is paid for by advertising on the pages of the website — in the news and the portal sections. It is tied neither to your mail nor to you: the advertising block does not know who is looking at it, because there is not a single third-party script on this site that could tell it.

Hence the promise of a mailbox that lasts: it costs us nothing beyond disk space that is already paid for.

What we do

1. We do not read your mail, do not analyse its contents and do not pick advertising from it. That is written into the terms, not merely said here.
2. We put no third-party counters or trackers on the site. Not one — the source of any page will show you.
3. We do not ask for a phone number, documents or payment details. There is nowhere and no reason to keep them.
4. We do not sell or pass addresses to anyone.
5. We keep mail on our own hardware in Switzerland and the European Union and work under GDPR.

What we cannot do — said plainly

Messages sit on the server’s disk exactly as they arrived. We do not encrypt them with your key, and an administrator is technically able to open them.

That is not an oversight but a choice with a clear price. Real encryption of a mailbox with a key only you hold would cost you search across your mail, access from a browser, and any chance of recovering the mailbox after a forgotten password. Services that do it that way warn about those losses honestly — and they are good services, simply about something else.

So we say "we do not read" rather than "we physically cannot read". The first is an undertaking we keep. The second would be untrue, and you are entitled to know that before you trust us with your correspondence, not after.

What we do instead of that promise

1. Access to the server rests with one person, not a department and not a contractor.
2. Access to mail files is logged.
3. Nobody is hired for that work: there is no one to hand access to by mistake or inattention.
4. If you need a guarantee rather than an undertaking, encrypt your messages yourself, with a key only you hold. That works on top of any mail service, including ours, and we will not stand in its way.

How mail is protected in transit

This is the second half of the word "private", and it is no longer about promises but about engineering. Everything that exists for it is switched on:

1. Messages are signed with a 2048-bit DKIM key: the recipient can see they were not altered on the way.
2. SPF with a strict refusal — nobody can send in your name from another server.
3. DMARC tells the recipient what to do with a forgery.
4. The zones are DNSSEC-signed: our server’s address cannot be swapped in a DNS answer.
5. MTA-STS in enforce mode: another server must deliver to us over an encrypted channel and only to the host we named.
6. DANE: our key is published in a signed zone, so a sender can be sure it is talking to us without trusting a single certificate authority.

Why almost nobody has those last two

MTA-STS and DANE need signed zones, your own nameservers and a willingness to break your own delivery at the first mistake in configuration. For large mail services that is a poor bargain: they would lose messages, while we would lose the right to say we do not have it.

You can check it from outside without taking our word: any public mail-domain checker will show our records and their signatures.

What is worth doing on your side

1. Save your backup codes — without them a forgotten password means a lost mailbox.
2. Turn on two-factor protection: a password can be read over your shoulder, a code from an app cannot.
3. Give mail programs their own app passwords instead of typing in the main one.
4. Keep anything important somewhere besides here: we make no backups, and the terms say so plainly.