ProntoEmail has been developed to Protect your Privacy
Using ProntoEmail, you can protect yourself against unwarranted intrusion and mass surveillance and take back your right to communications privacy. Our core values include "privacy by design" and "minimal data retention".
Our core values are:
- Privacy by design. Privacy shouldn't be an afterthought. We built ProntoEmail from scratch, and privacy has always been our main objective.
- Encryption made easy. Encryption is a must to achieve privacy. While existing encryption solutions for email are cumbersome, ProntoEmail makes encryption easy for everyone.
- Optimal security. Privacy and security must go hand in hand. There is no privacy without security.
- Minimal data retention. We store and process as little personal information about you as possible.
- Transparency of purpose. We have no hidden agenda with your information. If we store your data at all, we always tell you exactly why.
- Responsible protection of users' civil rights. We believe communications privacy is a fundamental right. ProntoEmail protects your email against unauthorized and unconstitutional intrusions.
- Transparency about our solutions and remaining threat vectors. 100% privacy or security does not exist. We strive to be as open and clear as possible about what our solution can and cannot offer.
Definitions of the capitalized terms are included in the Terms of Service.
We put you Back in Control
We are fully transparent about which data we process and why. We put you back in the driver's seat when it comes to your data.
Your inbox and other personal information are yours even though we help you by securing it and making it accessible through our user-friendly interface. Exactly which part of your data is processed by us and why, depends on how you are using our Website and the ProntoEmail Service.
1. Visiting our Website
When you visit the Website, the following details are automatically processed:
- Your IP address → to allow effective troubleshooting and abuse control.
- Browser and operating system type and version → to display the Website in the right format for your browser and operating system.
- Country (based on IP-address), date and time → to know in which countries and at what moments our marketing efforts appear to be effective.
- Origin of your visit (such as whether you directly typed the Website URL or accessed the Website through a search engine query or link from another website) → to assess the success of our search engine optimization and information outreach efforts.
- Clicked links and visited (parts of) pages on our Website → to help us get an idea of which of our pages appear to be effective to inform our visitors.
In our weblogs we store the browser user agent, pages visited, IP address and timestamp for a maximum of 7 days after which they are deleted.
All other information is processed in a self-hosted analytics tool and stored anonymized, in order to analyze usage trends.
2. Signing up for an Account
Additionally, when signing up for the ProntoEmail Service you may be asked to provide:
- A name that you choose (optional and may be an alias or pseudonym, but see also our Terms of Service, → to be able to address you when we communicate with you.
- Your desired email address (required), → to provide you with your ProntoEmail email address.
- A password (required), → to provide authentication for your Account.
- To maintain the integrity of the ProntoEmail service, ProntoEmail must take measures to avoid the automatic creation of accounts by spammers. This is because if spammers use ProntoEmail to send messages, ProntoEmail's IP addresses can become blocked by major mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.
- A promotional code (optional, if you have one), → to give you the benefit of a promotional offer. Your preference as to whether you would like to subscribe to our newsletter(s), → to send you our newsletters only if you want to receive them.
- Payment method information. (see 3. Paying for an Account below)
- Information collected as a result of you answering prompts, such as image labeling data, text converted from audio files played to you, → in order for us to protect our website from spam and abuse, we use hCaptcha. Intuition Machines can deduce if we are dealing with a legitimate website visitor or a robot. We have a legitimate interest to know this. For more information, please read hCaptcha's Privacy Statement.
3. Paying for an Account
ProntoEmail offers a paid subscription for optional services which can be paid for with various online payment methods. To facilitate payment and to manage the customers' subscription, ProntoEmail works with third-party payment providers and a subscription management provider.
- For payment processing, ProntoEmail relies on third parties such as Paypal to process payment details such as credit card information to process your payments or refunding such payments. In accordance with Payment Card Industry Security Standards (PCI DSS), which our payment and subscriptions providers all adhere to, they are not permitted to use your information for anything other than processing your payment. In addition, we pseudonymize your data before providing it to our subscription management provider.
ProntoEmail necessarily must share some information with these third-party data processors to provide the ProntoEmail Service
The legal basis of this processing is the performance of the contract between you and ProntoEmail.
In order to protect your privacy, ProntoEmail will minimize the type and amount of data which is being shared with our data processors so you can make use of the ProntoEmail service without sharing more of your private information than necessary.
For example: For ProntoEmail to manage your subscription, a unique and random identifier is generated. This unique identifier enables ProntoEmail to link your ProntoEmail e-mail address to your subscription at Paypal but not the other way around. Please send a message to support@ProntoEmail.com to receive more information on how to perform such a payment.
4. Location of data
ProntoEmail
The ProntoEmail databases (containing customer emails which are stored in encrypted user vaults) are located in data centers in the Cloud. Payment and subscription details are stored in the (cloud) servers used by our payment and subscription management providers, outside of the EU. See below for more information.
Stripe
Stripe's data (credit card information for payment processing) is hosted solely in data centers in the US. Under EU data protection law, there is no requirement to localize, i.e., to store data in the EU. However, when data is transferred to a non-EU country that does not offer the same level of data protection as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a data transfer mechanism has to be implemented to ensure this protection. Stripe's existing measures include the EU Commission's approved Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to accommodate international data transfers.
Chargebee
Chargebee has their main servers located in the US. To facilitate this, ProntoEmail and Chargebee have a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) for the transfer of data outside of the EU. ProntoEmail uses pseudonymization to ensure that our subscription management provider cannot relate your subscription information to your e-mail address. Chargebee's existing measures include the EU Commission's approved Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to accommodate international data transfers.
Paypal
Please see Paypal's privacy statement to understand how they manage your payment details. Paypal's existing measures include the EU Commission's approved Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to accommodate international data transfers.
5. Using the ProntoEmail Service
All of your email messages are stored on our servers. Everything you can see through the regular user interface (your inbox and folders, including spam folder, but excluding contacts) is stored.
Additionally, the following is also stored:
- personalized spam preferences of the User as part of the self-learning process of the spam filter
- a search index, which allows an efficient email search functionality
When you use the ProntoEmail Service to send an email, your IP address is not included in the header of the email. Instead our IP address is shown.
ProntoEmail stores 7 days worth of logs. These include metadata like remote email server IP addresses, and SMTP sender and recipient addresses for emails sent and received. We use the logs for detecting and troubleshooting operational issues like problems with the webmail application, emails not being delivered and fighting spam and phishing.
6. Support
You may visit our support section or send us feedback or a support request. ProntoEmail processes personal data to offer you support. For this purpose, we use the information provided by you, such as your email address and your feedback or request. We need this information for the performance of a contract: to respond to your feedback or support request.
For support inquiry, then you can send an e-mail to support-alt@ProntoEmail.com. Note that it may take slightly longer for an agent to pick up your request. We store any communications up to a maximum of two years.
7. Subscribing to our newsletter
On our support form, we may offer the option to subscribe to our newsletter. If you have subscribed, you may receive our newsletters until you have unsubscribed. You can unsubscribe at any time.
8. Deleted is Deleted
When you delete an email, it is immediately deleted from your secure user vault. As part of our backup strategy a (fully encrypted) copy will remain for the maximum retention period of three days.
Your Account will be stored for as long as our Agreement remains in force. When an Agreement is fully terminated, all data contained in the Account, including all emails, will be deleted permanently.
9. Viewing and Amending your Personal Data
If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy or if you have questions about viewing, amending or deleting your personal data, you can contact us at: legal@ProntoEmail.com.
No Tracking or Advertising -- Guaranteed
ProntoEmail is an ad-free service. ProntoEmail does not collect or share any data with a third party for advertisement or tracking purposes within its application. We only use cookies to the extent that this is necessary to provide you with a smooth and user-friendly experience, and to understand how our Website is used in general.
Other webmail providers collect and use your personal data to display personalized ads to you. As a result, you pay for your webmail with your privacy. We think your privacy is worth more than gold. We therefore don't track your behavior online and we don't build any personal profiles of you. The ProntoEmail Service is strictly ad-free.
What (tracking) cookies are and what they can do
A cookie is a small file that is stored on a computer (such as a PC, smartphone or tablet) when visiting a website. Cookies are very useful to enable a smooth and user-friendly experience on a website, for example to prevent that visitors would have to supply their login details again for every action on the website, or to remember the contents of a shopping basket. However, so-called 'tracking cookies' can also be used to track users across multiple websites and to build personalized profiles for advertising or other purposes, negatively affecting privacy.
ProntoEmail will set cookies for the following purposes; First of all, we want to better understand how our ProntoEmail product is used so that we can improve the service. And secondly, we want to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing efforts aimed at attracting new ProntoEmail users.
We use only anonymous data to try to improve our services
We collect only strictly anonymous statistics from our domain. Anonymous data is collected only in order to get an idea about what pages are effective in informing our users about the ProntoEmail Service, and to improve the user interface. For example, we count the total number of times each page is being visited and we may get some insight into which pages or features are usually accessed consecutively, but we never know who has visited which pages and when.
We use an open source statistical measurement tool for this, called Matomo. We run this very lightweight tool on our own infrastructure to prevent anybody snooping the data, and we have specifically configured it for minimal data collection to ensure that no personal data is recorded at any time.
ProntoEmail blocks remote content by default, to protect your privacy
Some emails contain remote content (such as images, which may even be invisible). If such remote content is loaded automatically, this enables the sender to know when the e-mail was opened, because the sender can detect when its content was loaded and by whom.
To protect your privacy, ProntoEmail prevents any remote content to be loaded automatically when you open an email. It is possible to explicitly choose to always load such content automatically in your Settings. Please note that you should still be careful to avoid opening any attachments or clicking on any links in any email, unless you trust the sender and the content.
ProntoEmail gives you Ironclad Data Protection
We use state-of-the-art technical and organizational security measures to protect your data.
On the Technical Side, we use state-of-the-art cryptography to protect your data. For example:
- Traffic between the User and our servers is encrypted with TLS, and perfect forward secrecy is applied.
- We only store passwords in hashed form on our servers.
- Your ProntoEmail inbox and its folders are stored in your own encrypted User Vault. Your User Vault is only opened when you login. Without the account password or a recovery key the vault is inaccessible when it is closed.
- When you are logged out of ProntoEmail, your entire inbox is encrypted. When you are logged in, your unencrypted emails are unencrypted, but all of your PGP-encrypted emails are still encrypted.
- Users can encrypt emails via OpenPGP.
- The users' key-pair is stored in the User Vault. Additionally, the private key is encrypted by means of the passphrase. Without the passphrase the private key can't be decrypted or used.
- We only use validated encryption algorithms that are considered safe by respected cryptographers.
On the Organizational Side we have strict protocols in place to ensure the safety of your data. For example:
- At each level, access to our systems is restricted to authorized staff with a legitimate need to know. This access is tightly limited and is only for the purpose of providing the ProntoEmail Service to you.
- Any individual, who is given access to the ProntoEmail system, is required to sign a confidentiality agreement.
- No third party, contractor, or sub-contractor of ProntoEmail is given access to the system, except for the purpose of enabling us to provide the ProntoEmail Service to you. All such parties must sign a data processing agreement, containing confidentiality provisions and stringent security protocols.
Compliance with Legitimate Requests by Authorities
While we respect and try to protect your privacy to the best of our abilities, your use of ProntoEmail does not place you above the law. But neither do we place authorities above the law. If we receive a request from judicial authorities to hand over information about one of our Users, we will have our lawyers check the validity of the request and determine whether we are obliged to comply. We will NOT comply with such requests unless we are convinced that the request is legally valid and we believe that it is undeniably our legal obligation to comply.
ProntoEmail will never cooperate with any voluntary surveillance programs. Under the strong laws that protect the right to privacy in Europe, European governments cannot legally force service providers like ProntoEmail to implement a blanket-spying program on their users.
Requests by Private Third Parties
We will NOT comply with any requests from private third parties to provide information about our Users, unless we would receive a valid court order and we believe it is undeniably our legal obligation to comply.
We will not reduce your rights without your explicit consent
We may change our Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted on this page, and we will provide a more prominent notice, such as an email message, if we believe a change significantly affects your privacy.
Legal basis for processing your data
The following legal grounds apply to process your personal data:
- Your consent. By using the ProntoEmail Service, you consent to our processing of your data as part of the ProntoEmail Service.
- Necessary to perform a contract with you or take steps before entering into a contract with you at your request. By signing up for the ProntoEmail Service, you request us to prepare your contract. Once your contract has been entered into, we may process your data as necessary to perform our contract with you (providing the ProntoEmail Service to you).
- Our legitimate interest, to provide the ProntoEmail Service to you in the best way we can.
- Our legal obligations, for example our obligation to store invoices for tax purposes.
Your rights with respect to your data
You may ask us at any time to access, correct or erase your data. You may also request us to keep your information but block it from further processing. You can submit any such request by using our contact details below.
If you inform us that you withdraw your consent to process your information, we will delete your information, unless we are legally required to keep it (e.g. invoices, as explained below under retention periods).
Retention periods
Invoices
We store invoices for 7 years, or whichever period may be prescribed under applicable tax law.
E-mail account
If you have subscribed to the ProntoEmail Service, your Account will be stored for as long as our Agreement remains in force. When an Agreement is fully terminated, all data contained in the Account, including all emails, will be deleted permanently