Half Dome from the high country, late light on granite

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Your inbox.
Not their product.

USA-based private email on bare-metal servers. No ads, no trackers, no analytics. From $29 a year.

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USA

Based, staffed, and served from the United States

Bare metal

All-SSD RAID 1. No hypervisor between you and the disk

$29

A year for Economy. Business starts at $199 for ten mailboxes

4+ years

Quietly running for early adopters before the public portal

Web Development

We can build your custom storefront

The mailbox

Uncluttered on purpose.

Webmail without the carnival. IMAP on every serious client. An assistant that can summarize or draft a reply — inside your account, not an ad network. Some features live only in the portal; the rest of your life can stay in Mail.app or Thunderbird.

  • Contacts mailing list, up to 500 addresses
  • Per-user spam that learns from your Junk folder
  • Unlimited Sieve rules
  • Calendar and contacts servers
  • OpenPGP when you want it

webmail · no ads

  • Jordan Hale [email protected]

    Q3 retainer — signed

    Attached is the executed agreement. Let’s keep the large files off the thread…

    9:14a

  • A. Chen [email protected]

    Re: the short address

    [email protected] actually went through. I still cannot believe that.

    Yesterday

  • Ledger [email protected]

    Payment received · INV-1842

    Your payment of $1,240.00 has been applied. Receipt attached.

    Mon

  • You, to aliases [email protected]

    Using shop@ as From

    Sent as the shop alias. Inbox stayed clean. No look of a throwaway.

    Sun

What you actually get

The short list.

The detailed arguments live in the journal.

  • You are not the product

    No ads. No trackers. No third-party cookies. No analytics. We never sell or give your data away.

  • Bare metal, all SSD

    Enterprise-class servers with mirrored SSD storage. Virtualization always costs performance. We skip it.

  • Clustered and local

    USA-based clusters for high availability. Email is latency-sensitive. Locality is not a luxury.

  • Unlimited aliases

    Disposable-feeling addresses that do not look disposable. Send as an alias. Keep subscriber counts per domain low so short addresses stay possible.

  • Bring your domain

    Host on mainmail.us, .ai, or .biz — or bring a domain you own. Business plans manage multiple mailboxes in one interface.

  • Large attachments

    Send the files you actually need. Oversized attachments convert to download links automatically.

  • Your spam, your rules

    Per-user spam control. Move a message into Junk and the system learns you — not a crowd.

  • Your Contacts Mailing List

    One Mailing List- Send a newsletter to up 500 contacts, track opens (when remote content is allowed) and bounces. Helping you keep your contacts up to date.

  • AI, on your terms

    An assistant that can summarize, draft a reply, or analyze a message. It lives in your webmail, not in an ad network.

  • OpenPGP when you want it

    Legacy end-to-end tools are cumbersome. We still support people who want OpenPGP, and we are building smarter protection for the rest.

  • Calendar and contacts

    A calendar server and a contacts server come with the mailbox. IMAP keeps every client in sync. We do not offer POP.

  • Lists without the spam

    Opt-in mailing lists for newsletters and marketing. ARC, DKIM, BIMI, SPF, and DMARC support on the roadmap.

  • Two passwords, on purpose

    Portal and IMAP passwords start the same, then you are encouraged to split them. Forget one, recover with the other.

Annual subscriptions

Three plans. No ads in any of them.

Monthly billing is coming. Custom domains are available on every plan; businesses that need many mailboxes should start with Business.

Economy

$29 / year

A private mailbox of your own, without the surveillance tax of free email.

  • One mailbox on a MAINMAIL domain
  • Unlimited aliases and identities
  • IMAP and webmail
  • Ad-free, tracker-free inbox
  • Fine-grained spam control
Start Economy

Standard

Most chosen

$49 / year

The everyday plan. More room for the way you actually work.

  • Everything in Economy
  • Larger attachments, auto-converted to links when needed
  • Calendar and contacts servers
  • Unlimited Sieve filtering rules
  • OpenPGP options
Start Standard

Business

$199 / year

Ten mailboxes on your domain. Built for companies of 10 to 400.

  • 10 mailboxes on your custom domain
  • Add mailboxes for $15 each / year
  • Admin portal: create, lock, forward
  • Optional groups and catch-all with exclusions
  • Setup usually within minutes during Pacific business hours
Start Business
Half Dome, photographed from the John Muir Trail

Why the mountain

Privacy is the natural state.

That photograph was taken miles inside the wilderness. Free email trained a generation to treat surveillance as the price of a mailbox. It is not. You pay us. We do not sell you.

MAINMAIL™ exists because self-hosting proved the demand — and then proved that most people should not have to run the servers. Bare metal, USA-based, a Delaware LLC. The rest of the argument is in the journal.

Read the journal

Straight answers

Before you subscribe.

Can I bring my own domain?

Yes. Every plan can host a domain you own. Custom-domain owners have access to the business plan. If DNS is ready, we can usually complete setup during Pacific business hours within minutes of a finished registration.

What is the difference between the portal password and IMAP?

They start the same. Change the password in webmail and only IMAP changes. We recommend keeping them different. Either one can recover the other. A verified phone or alternate email can reclaim the account if both are lost.

Do you support IMAP? POP?

IMAP (and JMAP over time) so every client stays in sync. We do not offer POP. Some features live only in webmail; you can still use a desktop or phone client for day-to-day mail.

Where are you based?

The United States. MAINMAIL is a Delaware LLC. Mail is latency-sensitive; locality is part of the product. Bare-metal clusters, mirrored SSD, no hypervisor tax.

Do you sell data or show ads?

No. No ads, no trackers, no third-party cookies, no analytics on the mail we host. You pay a subscription. You are the customer.

Is two-factor authentication available?

Additional two-factor options are coming. Today, the split between portal and IMAP passwords, plus verified phone and alternate email, is the recovery design.

Ready for a quieter inbox

Stop being the product.

Economy from $29 a year. Business with ten mailboxes for $199. The portal is open.

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