Having a mailbox on our servers is a way for us to support activists and other individuals we feel we have political affinity with. We don’t gain anything from providing you with a mailbox: we are not compensated for our work and we don’t earn any money from having more users.
Maybe before you request a mailbox because it’s free and anonymous and secure, ask yourself why we should support you, do you feel we have something in common? And besides that, do you really think you need this form of unconditional solidarity?
Please check if you agree with our manifesto.
A/I mailboxes have no space limit but we hope you will use your common sense to not waste precious resources you share with many other users (and remember, donate)! We strongly recommend you to download your mail whenever possible, also to minimize the amount of personal private data present at any time on the servers.
A/I mailbox service offers you a wide range of domains to choose from…. pick your flavour!
And with your mailbox account you can create up to five more addresses (as aliases of your same mailbox account)!
Remember that if you do not read your mailbox for more than 12 months, the mailbox is disabled and its content deleted.
If you have any questions on how to use our mailbox, please refer to the manual in this page:
Why should I make a mailbox account on A/I?
- Because I think the struggle to defend free speech and communication cannot be delegated to politicians.
- Because I am an activist and I need your support.
- Because even if I am not an activist i agree with your ideas in many ways, and I’d rather associate with you.
- Because I don’t have the means to otherwise get tech support for my non profit project and I trust you.
- Because when someone tries to shut down a/i services or threaten their security, the a/i collective will do their best to avoid it. And the more we are, the more it will be interesting.
- Because the more we are, the louder we are.
Why shouldn’t I make a mailbox account on A/I?
- Because I need to be anonymous on social medias and i think that you can provide this.
- Because I need privacy for my business activities.
- Because it’s free (as in free beer).
- Because I need to do something nasty without being caught and i think you will cover my ass.
- Because I need a secure account since i don’t trust provider X.
A/I vs Gmail: upsides and downsides of choosing us
A-I | G-mail | |
Available space | no limits, but please, DOWNLOAD your mail! | no limits: they keep a record of everything (at their will). |
POP3 and POP3-SSL | YES (letsencrypt certificates) | YES (Google INC certificates) |
IMAP and IMAP-SSL | YES (letsencrypt certificates) | YES (Google INC certificates) |
SMTP TLS | YES (letsencrypt certificates) | YES (Google INC certificates) |
Content analysis of your mail | NO, never. | YES, for customized advertising. |
Logging (tracing) of the IPs you connect from | No, never. | Yes, always. |
SSL Webmail | YES (letsencrypt certificates) | YES (Google INC certificates) |
banners in webmail | NO | YES (text format) |
What does it actually mean to “have an e-mail account”?
For those who really don’t know what e-mail means, we would like to help you.
An email account is exactly like having a real mailman in your computer: you write a letter, you send it to an addressee and the mail is delivered through a series of servers (a server is a computer managing a service) between the place where you are and your mail destination.
Having an e-mail account means having a name and an address where people can send you mails.
There are two main ways of reading e-mail messages: you can browse them on the Internet (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and so on and so forth) or you can download them and send them through a software on your computer (a software like Thunderbird, Sylpheed, Outlook Express or any other “mail client” able to “discuss” with your mail server.
Of course, apart from reading e-mail messages, you can also send them, both using a browser and using a mail client as in the previous paragraph. In order to send your mail, you use a service called SMTP, designed for taking your letters and delivering them to your addressee, wherever she may be.
You should know that all these communications are not always encrypted along the way, and they can be easily read at any of the nodes of the Internet they travel through.
It’s not so unthinkable that if someone wanted to control you, reading your messages as though they were flyers left on the sidewalk wouldn’t take her so much time and effort… Therefore, it would be more correct to compare an e-mail message with a postcard rather than with a letter closed in an envelope.
To limit these abuses (and not to exclude any form of control, but to limit it), we force you to use SSL encrypted protocols for sending and receiving messages.
JavaScript license information