Terms of service

1.The agreement

These terms apply when you use a Mailhubz mailbox, whether through the website at mailhubz.com, the Mailhubz app for Android, or any other mail program you connect to it. Using the mailbox means you accept them. If you create a mailbox yourself on the sign-up page, you also confirm it there, and we keep a note of when you did and which version of these terms it was.

Alongside these sits the privacy notice, which says what we hold about you and why. It forms part of this agreement.

2.What the service is

Mailhubz gives you a mailbox on a domain we host: an address, a password, storage for your mail, and the means to send and receive with it. You can read it in the browser here, in the Android app, or in any mail program that speaks IMAP and SMTP.

The mailbox is yours to use for as long as the account is open. The domain it sits on is ours, so the address itself is not something you can take with you to another provider.

3.Your account

You are responsible for what happens in your mailbox. Keep the password to yourself, and choose one you have not used elsewhere.

Two-step verification is available and we would encourage you to turn it on. It is the single most useful thing you can do to keep somebody else out.

If you think someone has got in, change your password straight away. Changing it signs out every other session, everywhere. Then tell us at support@mailhubz.com.

A mailbox is for one person or one role. You may not resell it, hand it on, or run a mail service of your own on top of it.

How old you have to be

You must be 18 or over to hold a mailbox here, or be acting for a business that has authorised you to. Signing up yourself includes confirming this. This is a service for adults and for work, and it is not built with children in mind.

4.What you may not use it for

The short version is that this is a mailbox for ordinary correspondence, and anything that would make it a problem for other people is not allowed. Specifically, you may not use it to:

• send unsolicited bulk mail, in any quantity, to anyone who did not ask for it
• send anything designed to deceive: forged senders, pretending to be another person or company, or the kind of message meant to get somebody to hand over a password or a payment
• send malware, or links to it
• send anything unlawful, or anything that harasses, threatens or defames a person
• send material that sexually exploits children, which we report rather than merely refuse
• harvest addresses, or feed the mailbox from a purchased list
• break into, overload, scan or otherwise interfere with this system or any other
• work around the limits below, or open several mailboxes to do together what one may not do alone

Mail you send leaves through a relay shared with other senders. A single account sending spam damages delivery for everybody on it, which is why this is enforced strictly rather than case by case.

5.Limits

Mailboxes are not given a fixed size. They share the storage on the server and each takes what it needs, so there is nothing to run out of on your own account and nothing to ask us to raise. What is finite is the server, and if it were ever close to full we would tell you before it became your problem.

That said, it is worth emptying the Trash and the Junk folder from time to time. A mailbox nobody tidies is mostly things nobody wanted.

A message may carry up to 20 MB in total, attachments included. Anything larger is refused when you press send, rather than silently failing later. Very large files are better shared as a link.

Mail you send leaves through a relay shared with other senders, and that relay applies its own rate limits. If you reach one, sending is refused for a while and the message says so; ordinary correspondence will not come near it. We may also limit or suspend an account that sends in a way that threatens delivery for everybody else.

6.Availability

We work to keep the service running and to keep your mail safe, and it is backed up every night to storage kept apart from the machine that serves it. We do not promise that it will never be unavailable. Hardware fails, networks fail, and maintenance sometimes has to happen.

We do not promise that every message will arrive. Email does not work that way: the receiving provider decides what it accepts, and some of them reject or file mail for reasons nobody outside can see. Where a message fails, you get a bounce saying so.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Any normal mail program will download and archive your mail for you.

7.Suspension and closing

We may suspend a mailbox without warning if it is sending spam, if it appears to have been taken over, or if leaving it running would put the service or other people at risk. We will tell you why, and we will put it back if the cause is dealt with.

We may close an account for a serious or repeated breach of the section above. Where we do, we will give you a chance to take your mail with you unless the breach makes that inappropriate.

You can close your mailbox whenever you like by writing to support@mailhubz.com. It and everything in it are then removed from the server, as set out in the privacy notice.

8.Your mail is yours

We claim no ownership of anything you send, receive or store. We do not read it as a matter of course, we do not scan it to advertise to you, and we do not use it to train anything.

An administrator can open a mailbox where that is needed to fix a fault or to deal with a report of abuse. Opening a message that way is deliberately marked so that it still shows as unread to you.

9.Where our responsibility ends

The service is provided as it is. Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not permit to be excluded.

Subject to that, we are not liable for business losses, lost profits, lost opportunity, or loss of data where you have not kept your own copy, and our total liability in any twelve-month period is limited to what you paid for the service in that period.

10.Changes

These terms can change. The date at the top changes with them, and where a change matters we will email you before it takes effect. If you do not accept a change, you may close the mailbox.

11.Law

This agreement is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it. If you live elsewhere, this does not take away rights you have under the law of your own country.

12.Getting in touch

• Your account, or these terms: support@mailhubz.com
• Mail delivery: postmaster@mailhubz.com
• To report abuse coming from this system: abuse@mailhubz.com, with the full message headers