Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Privbox is an email service operated by [COMPANY NAME], registered under [TAX ID], with its address at [COMPANY ADDRESS] (“Privbox”, “we”, “us”). These Terms of Service (“Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and Privbox and govern your use of privbox.me, our webmail, and every related service (together, the “Service”).

2. Accepting these Terms

By creating an account or using the Service, you confirm that you have read and agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

You must be at least 16 years old, or the minimum age of digital consent in your country if it is higher. If you use the Service on behalf of a company or organization, you confirm that you have the authority to accept these Terms on its behalf.

3. Your account

• You are responsible for keeping your password safe and for everything that happens in your account.
• We cannot see or recover your password. If you lose it and have no recovery method set up, you may lose access to your account and its contents.
• We strongly recommend turning on two-factor authentication.
• Let us know immediately at [email protected] if you believe your account has been compromised.
• Addresses are personal and non-transferable. You may not sell, rent or transfer your address to someone else.
• We may reject or reclaim addresses that impersonate people, brands or public bodies, or that are reserved for technical use.

4. Acceptable use

To keep the Service reliable for everyone, you agree not to use it to:

• send spam, bulk unsolicited messages, or mail to lists of recipients who did not ask to hear from you;
• send phishing, malware, or messages designed to deceive recipients about who sent them;
• harass, threaten, defame or abuse other people;
• share content that sexually exploits minors, promotes terrorism, or is otherwise illegal;
• infringe the intellectual property or privacy rights of others;
• create accounts in bulk, by automated means, or to evade a suspension;
• probe, overload or interfere with our servers, networks or other users;
• break the law of the country where you are, or of the Netherlands, where our servers are located.

We apply sending limits to protect the reputation of our servers. If we detect abuse, we may limit, suspend or close the account involved, in proportion to the seriousness of the case and, where possible, after warning you.

5. Your content

Your emails, contacts, calendars and files belong to you. You give us only the permission needed to store, process and deliver them so the Service works, and nothing more. We do not use your content for advertising and do not sell it.

We do not read your messages. Automated systems, such as the spam filter, analyse incoming mail to protect you, without human review.

6. Free and paid plans

The Free plan includes the storage and features described on our pricing page. To keep the Service sustainable, Free accounts that stay inactive (no sign-in) for more than [X] months may be disabled and later deleted. We will email you before that happens.

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, through our payment provider Stripe. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account; your plan stays active until the end of the period already paid.

If a renewal payment fails, we will retry it for a limited time. If it is not resolved, your account returns to the Free plan. When your stored data exceeds the Free plan limit, you will not lose existing messages, but you may stop receiving new mail until you free up space or upgrade again.

Refunds: [REFUND POLICY, for example: “we refund the first payment of a new subscription if requested within 14 days”]. This does not limit any right of withdrawal or refund you have under the consumer protection laws that apply to you.

We may change prices for future billing periods. We will give you at least 30 days’ notice before a price change applies to your subscription.

7. Availability and changes to the Service

We work to keep the Service available and secure, but we do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may perform maintenance, and we may change, add or remove features. If we discontinue the Service as a whole, we will give you at least 60 days’ notice so you can export your data.

8. Security and backups

We protect the Service with encryption in transit, access controls and regular backups, as described in the Privacy Policy. Even so, no system is perfectly secure. We recommend that you keep your own copies of anything important.

9. Suspension and closing your account

You can close your account at any time. After closure, your data is deleted as described in the Privacy Policy, and your address will not be given to anyone else.

We may suspend or close accounts that seriously or repeatedly break these Terms, or when required by law. Except where there is a legal reason or a risk to other users, we will tell you why and give you a chance to export your data.

10. Requests from authorities

We only disclose user data when we are legally required to do so by a valid order from a competent authority, and we disclose no more than what the order requires. Where the law allows, we will notify the affected user.

11. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is”, and Privbox is not liable for indirect damages, lost profits or lost data. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, nor the rights you have as a consumer.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When the changes are significant, we will notify you by email or inside the Service at least 30 days before they take effect. If you continue using the Service after that, you accept the new Terms; if you do not agree, you can close your account.

13. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of [COUNTRY], and disputes will be resolved in the courts of [CITY, COUNTRY], without prejudice to any mandatory consumer protection rules of the country where you live.

14. Contact

Questions about these Terms: [email protected]. To report abuse: [email protected].