💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › laur%C3%AB › mail › safe-mail.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:27:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

SAFe-mail (safe-mail.net)

UPDATE August 2020: The signup still requires manual approval and it's hit-and-miss whether you get in. Last time I reviewed them I didn't, even though I gave a real looking name. Now despite a troll name they accepted me for some reason - and I did it through the TOR network too. Clearly, they're not a serious service. Often, you can't even connect to the site and they send you http:// links through E-mail - which are not even redirected to HTTPS (without addons). More importantly, full mail client support is limited to paid accounts - free ones can only receive. Therefore, this should be considered a paid provider, with minimum $25 per year (or about $2 / month). And if you do that, you need to provide your real name, address, and credit card data, so it becomes totally useless for privacy. Lights out for SAFe-mail then, but there's more damning information I wrote previously, so take a look at it if you want to dig deeper still:

Israel-based service established in 1999. Before I delve deep into the meat of the issues, let's look at the first impression. Namely, the site structure and grammar is something a chimpanzee would make - this makes getting any information from the site a puzzle in itself. Most of the stuff in there is ancient, and some sections contradict each other. They've had 20 fucking years to make a proper website but instead we get this abomination...but let's try to make sense of it anyway:

SAFe-mail pretends to be privacy-based but has no real privacy policy. The only thing is a snippet from 2008 saying:

Safe-mail.net is not using cookies and not collecting any data about users. Safe-mail.net does not transfer, sell, trade or oterwise exchange any data it might have about its users with any other company.

So it allegedly does not collect ANY data about its users. Why, then, do they bother to qualify it with a statement that they also don't sell the data? Wait, there's also this: (from the user agreement)

SAFe-mail Ltd. will not disclose information about you or your use of the SAFe-mail system, unless...

Okay, so you DO have data about your users after all...

You agree that SAFe-mail may access your account, including its contents, for these reasons or for service or technical reasons.

So now you admit that you can access even the contents of my account? Isn't this an admission that you read our mail?

Please note that your Internet Protocol address is transmitted with each message sent from your account.

No shit. But what we're interested in is whether that IP, or any other data, is stored by SAFe-mail, and for how long - and this information is not provided. Does this not sound suspicious? SAFe-mail spends a lot of time posturing on how privacy-based it is, yet seems strangely secretive about the kinds of data it collects; in fact, you have to read between the lines to realize that it stores anything at all. A clear indication of a honeypot to me.