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Terms of Service

Last updated: 2021-06-12

General provisions

By opening an account with AltMail.se, you agree to be bound by our Terms of Service as defined below. We reserve the right to make changes to these Terms of Service, and you are advised to keep yourself updated on them from time to time. Should we post significant updates to this document (or documents linked to from this document), we undertake to notify our account holders via email.

Our Privacy Policy defines the extent and details of the data collection and processing performed as part of servicing your account. By opening an account with us, and agreeing to the present Terms of Service, you certify your acceptance of our Privacy Policy as well, giving us your express permission to carry out the activities as described.

In accordance with the legal framework of the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU (GDPR), we are not able to offer our services to individuals below the age of 13 years. By opening an account with us, you certify that you are at least 13 years of age and thus able to legally consent to these Terms of Service.

AltMail.se is currently operating in beta mode, which means that we do not serve (accept registrations from) the general public, and we also do not collect payments in exchange for our service. In essence, we currently operate a non-commercial private service for a closed circle of people. Expect therefore a substantial update of these Terms of Service once our beta stage ends, and we widen our stretch to become a commercial service provider accessible to the general public.

These Terms of Service shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the substantive laws of Sweden.

If you have any feedback or questions related to these Terms of Service, you can email us at contact-at-altmail-dot-se.

Limits of Acceptable Use

Accounts may only be owned by natural persons for the purposes of personal email. Legal entities may not own accounts, and people may not use their account for business purposes. Any accounts registered by bots, scripts, or other methods of automation will be terminated.

You accept full responsibility for all email that you send. We do not assume any liability (whether civil or criminal) that arises from your emails. We reserve the right to cooperate with the competent authorities, including the possible handover of any user data available to us at the time of inquiry (such as, but not limited to: access logs, traffic patterns, email content as well as metadata) should there be a legally substantiated request for us to do so. You agree to not hold us liable or seek indemnification for any damages that you may suffer from such an event of disclosure.

You agree to not use our service to send anything that can be reasonably categorized as spam (also called junk mail or unsolicited bulk email, understood as irrelevant, unwanted or unsolicited messages, commonly – but not exclusively – sent to large numbers of users with the aim of advertising, phishing, or spreading malware or virus). You understand that sending group email to unrelated people so everyone can see all other recipients is a serious privacy violation, and you agree to abstain from such irresponsible behaviour.

Further excluded from acceptable use are most common forms of automated or semi-automated email sendouts, such as: newsletters or marketing email (wherein substantially the same email is sent to several recipients); client-side mailing lists (wherein your mail client automatically reflects incoming mail to each of a set of recipients); any business-to-customer (B2C) sendouts. Unsupervised or automated email sendouts such as monitoring alerts, notifications sent by home automation appliances, IoT devices and similar origin are allowed only if the recipient of such sendouts is substantially always the same address (you may send automated notifications to yourself, but not the whole world, and you may change your recipient address from time to time, within reasonable bounds). Such email may never be group-addressed to multiple recipients (not even via cc: or bcc:), or sent to several recipients one-by-one. Using 'git send-email' to send a set of source code patches is expressly allowed (even to a mailing list).

Your outbound email is subject to industry-standard spam and virus filtering. Your email may be rejected by our server with an SMTP error due to this. In addition, we enforce a rate limit of 100 outgoing emails per account per day. Hitting the limit will cause subsequent attempts to be rejected with a temporary SMTP error. You agree that in such cases you will wait at least 15 minutes (or the length of time as indicated in the SMTP rejection message) before attempting to re-send the email. Indiscriminately repeated attempts to resume sending email (rejected by the same rate limit) will be flagged as a sign of automated sending activity on your end, and lead to human attention, potentially even disabling your account. We reserve the right to count SMTP rejects towards the aforementioned rate limit.

You agree to not use our service for any unlawful or prohibited activities. You agree to not use the service to store or share unlawful content. We may terminate accounts found to be used for illegal activities, particularly in response to the authorities, or peering email operators, informing us of such illegal activity.

You agree to not place undue load on our service, for example by disregarding our request rate limits and endlessly retrying ("stuffing" our system with requests) even in the face of "retry later" or "rate limit exceeded" responses.

Any account found to be in violation of the above provisions will be disabled. We further reserve the right to take action against accounts with activity that we consider abusive of our service or computing resources.

Confidentiality and Security of your Account

You understand and accept that keeping your password confidential (unknown and unaccessible to anyone but you) is your sole responsibility, which includes keeping client devices and software on your end updated and secure, as well as observing security best practices such as not using the same password for other online services, not typing it on untrusted, unsafe (potentially compromised) devices (such as public kiosks, public workstations accessible at places such as a library, etc), setting a sufficiently complex password that is not prone to dictionary attacks or other guessing attacks based on potential knowledge of your identity, etc. You undertake to immediately notify us at security-at-altmail-dot-se in case you become aware (or have reason to suspect) that your password is compromised.

Beware of third-party services offering to accept your account credentials in order to access your account on your behalf. For example, certain email providers offer to connect an account you have with them to a different account (such as your AltMail.se account). After providing them with your login credentials, they will periodically access your account and download incoming mail into this other account (and possibly also send out mail via our SMTP endpoint on your behalf). This is not allowed, and we reserve the right to disable your account in case we detect such third-party access.

Certain social networks pose a similar threat by offering to log in to your account on your behalf to access your contacts (addresses of people you have corresponded with) so as to "invite them" (spam them with invites pretending to be from you, or worse). While this is an extremely shady practice on their end, it is on you to be vigilant and not fall for such account harvesting schemes. We have technical measures in place to detect such third-party access, and we reserve the right to disable your account in case it gets flagged for such a breach of account security.

Limits of Availability, Liability, and Warranty

Our service is provided "AS IS" and you agree to not hold us responsible nor seek indemnification for any damages that may arise as a result of the loss of use, data, or profits connected to the performance of our service.

While we do our best to ensure the highest possible availability and strive to keep your account secure at all times, we cannot guarantee any particular level of service or guarantee the security of user data. You agree to not hold us liable or seek indemnification if confidential material is unintentionally released as the result of a security failure or vulnerability in the implementation of our service.

We reserve the right to alter and improve our service at any time without notice. We also reserve the right to, at our sole discretion, terminate any account without prior notice and without any externally communicated justification.

We cannot guarantee that an account address that you register and start using has never before been registered (and subsequently deleted) by someone else. Likewise, if you add an alias to your account, there is no guarantee that nobody has ever used that alias before (either as an alias or as a primary account address), or that nobody will use it after you remove it from your account. This means that (at least theoretically) you might receive email that was not meant to be sent to you, or that email meant for you will be delivered to the mailbox of someone else (after you have given up that address).

Our mail exchanger accepts neither incoming nor outgoing email on behalf of accounts that are disabled, have exceeded their allocated storage quota, or have been terminated. We do not retain the contents of terminated accounts, and reserve the right to terminate accounts that have been disabled for an extended period of time.

While our service is in the beta phase and you are not asked to pay for it, we reserve the right to terminate your account if no account activity is observed for a consecutive period of ninety (90) days. Successful SMTP authentications (part of submitting outbound email to our server), IMAP logins or logins to the account portal are considered account activity; unsuccessful login attempts as well as incoming email delivered to your account do not constitute account activity.

You acknowledge that we do not have any obligation to recover your account in case you lose your account password and have not set up a verified recovery address, or we cannot send email to your recovery address for (permanent) technical reasons outside our control.