AltMail.se beta
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AltMail.se is an independent, ethical email provider for private individuals.

Our focus is on privacy and security, open standards, stability and performance. We operate from Sweden and our servers are hosted in EU datacenters.

AltMail.se started life as the self-hosted personal email of a couple UNIX greybeards, but we soon realized it was too good to keep it all to ourselves. We do not have any agenda other than providing a seamless, ethical email service to people from all walks of life; an alternative for those wishing to opt out of today's dystopian surveillance capitalism (also dubbed the data economy). We also like simple, dependable services that do one thing and do it well. As email is (still) fundamental to being online, we created the service that serves us best. We suspect you too might like it!

We currently offer accounts to early adopters exclusively via an invitation scheme (no public registrations), and we do not ask for payments while we test and mature the system. This beta phase is meant to be temporary, and once it is over, account holders will be required to pay a small subscription fee (projected to be around 1 EUR/month) to cover hosting and operational expenses going forward.

What we provide:

• An email account to provide a foundation for your online identity, with strong provisions to protect your privacy.
• 1 GB mailbox quota per account.
• Standard, secure IMAP and SMTP access, ideal for people using a real email client on the desktop or mobile. Standard equals interoperable; use your favourite client, plus easily archive your email to offline storage with open-source utilities.
• First-class IMAP support. Organize or trash mail from your client precisely as you wish. Forget the train wreck that is IMAP at GMail and ProtonMail, and the resulting lock-in to their respective webmails/clients. Forget Exchange.
• Easy-to-manage aliases to avoid giving out your primary email to less reputable parties. Give the middle finger to webshops that treat each purchase as a perpetual license to keep spamming you ever after — no "unsubscribe" is quite as effective as the SMTP reject they get once the alias is retired!
• Server-side sorting of incoming mail based on 'plus' subaddressing; additional custom sorting and filtering possible via your own Sieve filters.
• Industry-standard spam and virus filtering.
• Security. Our servers run OpenBSD, widely regarded as the most secure operating system in the world. We built our infrastructure on battle-proven components, and proactively monitor it for signs of trouble.
• More security. Your data is always strongly encrypted both at rest (on our servers and in our backups) and in transit (between your client and our servers). When exchanging mail with other servers, we utilize modern versions of TLS whenever supported by the remote party.
• Privacy. We do not need to know who you are. We do not track you and do not mine your data. No analytics, no profiling, no fingerprinting. We do not set browser cookies or keep server-side logs of your activity other than the technically necessary bare minimum to provide our services. We never ask for your phone number. We are an ethical provider: you are the customer, not the product.
• More privacy. If you delete an email from your account, that email is deleted (as opposed to being hidden from you but still kept around for data mining). If you delete your account, your data is gone (pending a full rotation of our offline backups).
• Even more privacy. When you send an email through your account, your originating IP address (and hence geographical location) is not included in the Received header inserted by our server. You may also use an alias to send out email, without any association to your primary account address. (You still need to watch out for your client to avoid information leakage through User-Agent, Message-ID or similar headers, but if you are half-serious about your anonymity, you knew that already.)

What we DO NOT provide:

• NO accounts for any purpose other than personal email, which covers every legitimate use case for private individuals. It does NOT include mailouts of a commercial or transactional nature (sending business email, newsletters and such), operating a subscription list, or any mail sendout operating in an automated fashion or in bulk.
• NO 2FA (two factor authentication), because it is fundamentally incompatible with the first-class IMAP access we provide. To compensate, we enforce the use of a strong password, and ensure that it is only communicated over a secure channel.
• NO webmail. This decision, perhaps more than anything else we do, is bound to be seen as opinionated or controversial – see the Tech FAQ for our position on this.
• NO marketing emails from us, ever. And no, you cannot send mass mail out to your clients either. Our ToS strictly prohibits it, and our automated monitoring systems enforce this restriction.
• NO integration with Big Tech providers ("Sign in with X") to avoid feeding them your precious data.
• NO add-on services. We do not provide a calendar, online document suite, or storage space. We do not care about your birthday.
• NO backdoors for Three Letter Agencies. NO mass surveillance.
• NO hard guarantee on your anonymity and NO safe haven for criminal activity. We strive to protect your right to privacy as much as possible (within legal bounds). That does NOT, however, extend to protecting or covering up unlawful activities! If it falls under the criminal code of Sweden (such as sending bomb threats or blackmail, trafficking illegal content, or similar), do not even think of doing it! Should we receive legally substantiated orders or warrants from the competent authorities within our jurisdiction, we will cooperate to the extent mandated by law.
• NO tolerance towards abuse. We employ proactive measures to identify and root out malicious usage (whether attempted exploitation of our resources, or aimed towards external parties). Sending out anything that might be reasonably regarded as spam is absolutely prohibited.