Privacy

FoundersMailis operated by ORXON LLC. We run the mail server ourselves rather than reselling somebody else’s, which is why this page can describe where your mail physically sits.

For anything in this document, write to [email protected].

• Your mail. Messages you send and receive, their attachments, and the folders you put them in. This is the service; we cannot provide it without storing them.
• Your account. The name and email address you signed up with, a hashed password, and your two-factor settings if you turned them on.
• Your mailbox settings. Signatures, filters, vacation replies, display preferences and any PGP keys you upload.
• An audit log. A record of administrative actions — in particular, every time an administrator opens a mailbox that is not their own.
• Operational logs. Ordinary server logs, including IP addresses, kept for a short period so we can debug faults and detect abuse.

Your mail is encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest on our servers. It is not end-to-end encrypted: we hold the keys, which is what makes search, filters and webmail possible at all. Anyone claiming otherwise about a product with a web-based inbox is being imprecise.

Because FoundersMail is a managed service, an administrator of your organisation can open your mailbox without knowing your password. This is deliberate and it is how a business keeps access to its own correspondence when someone is away or leaves. Two things constrain it:

• Every such access is written to an audit log that records who opened which mailbox and when. That record is retained even if the account is later deleted.
• You are told about it. The first time you sign in, FoundersMail shows a notice explaining that your mailbox is shared with your administrators, and it stays up until you acknowledge it.

Our own staff access mail only where it is necessary to operate the service or to respond to a support request you have made, and never to read correspondence for its own sake.

• We do not sell or rent your data to anyone.
• We do not scan your mail to build an advertising profile.
• We do not use your mail to train machine-learning models.
• We do not run third-party analytics or advertising trackers in the mail client or in the iPhone app.

The FoundersMail app shows the same mailbox as the website and stores your session on the device. Three things about it are worth stating explicitly:

• New-mail alerts are pushed, through Apple.Our server watches your inbox and sends the alert through Apple’s Push Notification service, which is what makes it arrive within about a minute. The alert carries the sender and the subject, so that text passes through Apple to reach your phone. Nothing else about the message leaves our servers, and turning notifications off for the app stops it.
• Face ID stays on the device. If you turn on the app lock, the check is performed by iOS. We never receive your face or fingerprint data, and neither does the app.
• Attachments you save are downloaded to the app’s cache so iOS can hand them to the share sheet, and are cleared when you sign out.

We keep the list of third parties short, because every one of them is another party to trust.

• Our hosting provider, which runs the server your mail is stored on.
• Cloudflare, which sits in front of the website and mail client as a CDN and firewall. Mail delivery itself does not pass through it.
• Apple,if you use the iPhone app with notifications turned on. New-mail alerts travel through Apple’s Push Notification service, which carries the sender and subject as far as your phone. Your mailbox itself is never given to Apple.
• The people you write to.Mail is a federated system. A message you send leaves our servers for whoever runs the recipient’s mail, and their policies then apply to it.

Mail stays until you delete it. Deleted mail is removed from the server once it leaves your Trash. Operational logs are kept for a short period and then discarded.

If you delete your account, your mailbox and its contents are removed from the mail server and your account record is removed from our database. Audit log entries recording administrative access are kept, with your identity anonymised — they are a record that an access happened, and deleting them would defeat the reason they exist.

You can export or delete individual messages at any time from the mail client. You can delete your entire account from Settings → Security, in the app or on the web.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to ask for a copy of the data we hold about you, to have it corrected, or to object to how we use it. Write to [email protected] and we will answer.

If we change this page in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you by email before it takes effect rather than quietly editing the date at the top.

See also our terms of service.