Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 2025-05-07

Note: you are looking at the general FAQ. For technical questions, see the Tech FAQ.

[§] Why no free accounts?

Servers and bandwidth are not free, and they won't monitor and manage themselves either. All of this costs something. Trying to hide this fact by offering free accounts has only led to unethical business models.

When we started AltMail.se, we decided that the only way to be an ethical provider is to not offer anything for free – not even free trials. The world does not need another "free" online service, there are plenty of those already!

On the other hand, we believe our account plans are eminently affordable (at least to most people living in the EU, which is our main target audience).

[§] How can I stay fully anonymous if there is no free tier?

Fair question – payments rarely beget anonymity. However, all financial aspects of subscriptions are handled by our payments provider Stripe. AltMail.se systems do not process or store any financial data coupled to these transactions. We do not care who you really are, only that your subscription fees are paid on time.

If you are, out of anonymity concerns, unable to pay for your account via a mainstream online payments platform, then we are afraid you should not be using email at all in such an extremely privacy-sensitive context. Please see "What are the limits on the privacy of my account?" below.

[§] What do you mean by claiming to be an ethical service provider?

Primo, by saying that we are an ethical provider, we wish to highlight the fact that there is no conflict of interest between the service provider (us) and users of our service (you). We operate under the simplest, clearest and most ethical business model, wherein users directly pay for the service they use. This eliminates the moral hazard – and perverse incentives – inherent in other business models that provide a "free" service, but rely on profiling and selling user data to the highest bidder (ad tech), or subsidizing the cost of providing the service from other (profitable) lines of business (anti-competitive behaviour).

Secundo, we say this to emphasize that we take your privacy seriously. This goes hand in hand with the above: we simply have no incentive to profile our users, and are, as a result, not interested in any message traffic (investigations of unlawful activity and abuse notwithstanding). Also worth mentioning that we operate on EU territory outside of US jurisdiction, so we cannot be forced to partake in global mass surveillance programmes carried out on behalf of US government agencies.

[§] What other reasons do you have for running this service?

We believe the current concentration of the majority of email accounts into a few gigantic providers (grossly unethical by our standards) is unhealthy and bad for the email ecosystem as well as the wider Internet community. The more email traffic is concentrated between a couple providers run by Big Tech, the more vulnerable it is to "embrace and extend"-style changes to maximize hostility towards other, smaller providers. It also opens the door to indiscriminate, pervasive mass surveillance by national intelligence agencies. Finally, recent geopolitical events have made it abundantly clear that Europe needs to decrease its dependence on US cloud services.

While spam is (thankfully) less of a problem now than 15 years ago, it has also become harder and harder to run an independent email service — if nothing else, the big providers will often insist that anything coming from smaller, independent services is suspicious (and may even mark it as spam without further justification). To put it simply, the big email providers have gotten too big (with tens to hundreds of millions of users) and there are too few independent, smaller providers to keep them in check. Running AltMail.se is our way to hold on to our stakes. Since we host our personal email accounts here as well, we have quite some skin in the game.

Electronic mail (email) was the first runaway success of the nascent Internet, preceding even the World Wide Web. It was built entirely on open standards, as a loosely coupled system where everyone could freely participate, not just as a user, but also as a site operator. With AltMail.se, we want to prove (and help ensure) that running an independent email service in this fashion is still possible. The alternatives are centralisation and mass surveillance that begets the erosion of democracy, coupled with a fragmentation of the electronic communications landscape into a myriad incompatible, proprietary messenger applications.

[§] Are there any downsides of using AltMail.se?

Not all email providers are created equal. While we certainly see ourselves as having some strong sides (see our landing page for a summary), we do have certain properties and made some choices that might be perceived as downsides. We try to be transparent about them.

We do not host any webmail (see the Tech FAQ). We cater exclusively to people running real mail clients (on the desktop or mobile). If you require webmail access, you are better off looking elsewhere.

At the moment, we do not support email domains other than altmail.se. If you require servicing emails under your existing domain and need it now, you should look at other providers or host your own email.

Because AltMail.se is a small, fully independent outfit with comparatively very low outbound volume, we are disadvantaged in the rigged game of email sender reputation. Even though our outgoing mail is technically correct and standards-compliant (equipped with contemporary measures such as DKIM, etc.) the oligopoly of Big Tech providers might still abuse their positions of market power by marking perfectly legitimate email we send as spam. Other actors much bigger than us are not immune to this either. Note that given our level of technical correctness, delivery is practically always successful on the technical level (the provider of the recipient mailbox accepts our mail for delivery), but might end up in the user's Spam folder where they might not notice it.

For recurring personal correspondence, it is usually sufficient if the other party does a "Mark as not spam" or equivalent action once, and any subsequent mail will be correctly delivered to their Inbox. This is unfortunately not something we can easily improve on our end. It is worth stressing that there is a continuous "mud-wrestling" across the massive providers: on numerous occasions, they have rejected or marked as spam innocent streams of inbound mail from their peers. Yes, we are talking about GMail binning O365 binning Yahoo binning GMail... O365 is especially notorious for binning legitimate mail from everyone, including themselves. Moral: no guarantees even if you use a Big Tech account.

[§] What are the limits on the privacy of my account?

For an immediate and ground-level view of this issue, please do read our Privacy policy. Our commitment to protecting your privacy is legally supported by the jurisdiction in which we operate (Sweden has strong laws protecting free speech and anonymity of private individuals, as well as being subject to EU-wide GDPR legislation). Your legitimate right to privacy might be violated for two (possibly related) reasons: either we are legally compelled to cooperate with law enforcement, or our internal monitoring alerts us to signs of abuse, leading us to investigate account activity on our own. We do this to protect ourselves, your fellow users, and the wider Internet community from consequences and liabilities that would arise should we let such activities run rampant.

For a broader view, you need to understand a couple things about email privacy. The most important aspect is that email (at least as we know it today, defined by RFC 821 and its successors) is inherently insecure, and cannot be secured in a way that works reasonably well for a critical mass of users. End-to-end encryption can help in certain cases, but is prone to complexity, has severe difficulties hiding metadata, and is overall a solution we cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone.

By the way, lest you feel our privacy offering is lousy: this is right on par with most everything out there, including so called "secure" email providers. Note that the issues mentioned here apply to them all the same; what they add on top is heavy marketing and security theater. If you would assume they protect you from state-level adversaries, you would be badly mistaken. Remember: the game is about metadata (such as IP addresses, recipient addresses and such) that cannot be reasonably encrypted (for technical reasons, such as being required to actually transport the mail) while revealing incriminating facts to adversaries. Did we say metadata? Actually, it can get much worse than that.

To be clear, we do not claim that we are more secure, only that we are not inherently less secure than the providers in question. If datacenter doors get kicked in and hard drives get confiscated, AltMail.se will only yield a soup of ones and zeroes, impossible to distinguish from random noise without the encryption keys of our servers and backups – but we do not placate ourselves as being more "secure" or keeping you more "private" than any responsible player in this game. Instead, we provide uncrippled, first class IMAP access to your mailbox (as all providers should, but too many of them fail to do). This allows you to download your incoming email from us every 15 minutes, and permanently delete it from our server. If that (technically unavoidable) level of trust is still too much for you, you really have no choice but hosting your own email.

In conclusion: when it comes to privacy, we do not see a way around the need to trust your own provider. And even then, you better not have to conduct any sensitive communications with someone who has an account at GMail or Yahoo, or uses Microsoft Exchange...

Perhaps the smartest attitude, in the face of confidential information, is to "assume that everything is compromised, and act accordingly." In our humble view, email is simply not an appropriate channel when there is a need for exchanging secrets (including the need to hide the fact of communication taking place). Email is simply not the right tool for that.

[§] Who are you?

We are old-school UNIX sysadmins and programmers, people who like simple old boring tech that just works. We abhor social media, attention-draining gadgets, abusive ad tech (is there any other kind?), the gamification of everything, and the pervasive damage to society (both online and AFK) that all these have brought about. We started AltMail.se for ourselves, and later made it available to the public to serve those who appreciate it. You know who you are!

[§] Can I contact a human behind AltMail.se?

Absolutely! See our contact info.