Why we're building AnhourMail
· The AnhourMail team
A private, fast email service you don't have to think about — and why we started over to build it.
Email is the one account everything else hangs off. Password resets, receipts, the doctor's office, the bank — all of it lands in one inbox. That inbox deserves better than being somebody's ad inventory.
What we want
We want email to be private by default. No ads, no tracking pixels, no profiling. Remote images stay blocked until you choose to load them, so senders can't tell when you opened their mail.
We want it to be yours. Bring the domain you already own, or take a free address while the beta is invite-only. Create a different address for every sign-up, and switch one off the moment it starts getting spam.
And we want it to be fast. We built a webmail before, and it was slow: every click went through the old IMAP protocol. This time the webmail is built on JMAP, the modern mail protocol, so it only fetches what changed and shows new mail as it arrives.
How it's paid for
Paid plans fund the service, including the free plan. There are no ads and no data deals. We plan to publish a breakdown of what it costs to run, so you can see where the money goes.
Built in the open
The apps are open source. You can read the code, report issues, or run it yourself — the self-hosting guide explains how. The mail server underneath is Stalwart, run unmodified.
We'll write here as we go. The changelog has the details; this blog has the why. If you'd like to try it, getting started explains how to get an address.