💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › laur%C3%AB › mail › swisscows.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:26:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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

Swisscows Mail

A requested review. Handling cow dung again doesn't appeal to me, but I will sacrifice myself. Swisscows has already broken trust with their search engine which was famously terrible. So it's easy to expect the same with their E-mail service and that is exactly what happens. To get in, you need a Swisscows account, which requires a phone number - eliminating anyone that really cares about anonymity. You cannot bypass this step in any way. But even before you get to that point, the buttons for accepting their privacy and cookie policies malfunction in funny ways, showing lack of care. Their privacy policy seems to only be written in regards to their search engine - so you're in the dark as to what data their mail service collects. However - presumably - they're doing the same as with their search engine, and so:

We also perform statistical analysis to understand user behavior and trends, to be able to improve Swisscows and decide which features should be implemented next.

This applies. As well as the 7-days log storage which includes "IP and user agent" and surely the metadata. But again, this is just guessing since they don't tell you. Their ToS contradicts their privacy policy:

This means that your activities are in no way logged, stored or transmitted to third parties when you connect to our services. We do not collect IP addresses, browsing history, session information, bandwidth used, connection timestamps, network traffic, and other similar data.

And as usual, you should assume that the worse option is the valid one. So 7 days logs storage. Swisscows brags every so often about their "Swiss privacy laws" - "Swisscows.email was founded in Switzerland and all our servers are located in Switzerland. This means that all user data is protected by strict Swiss data protection laws.", however those still allow direct surveillance by the glowies. They admit this:

The only legitimate reason we would have to start collecting private data would be the existence of a valid judicial order or a court order that would force us to take this step.

How it works in practice you can read about in Proton's section. Anyway, if you pay for the E-mail service, they don't give refunds:

If you buy our paid Swisscows services via all possible sales platforms, we will not give you a refund.

Though stupidly (but better for the user), their free service isn't really worse than the paid one (in terms of the E-mail, at least).

Hey, look, they support mail clients! So they're not as terrible as the worst of this list. But so what, if you end up choking on the phone number requirement for registration? Anyway - if you do want to get the paid version for some reason - you're going to have to deal with Stripe for payment processing:

is made according to the Swisscows user's choice by invoice, PayPal, direct debit, credit card debit (via our partner Stripe GmbH)

And the privacy of that is absolutely terrible:

As allowed by law, we use and share Visitor Personal Data with others so that we may advertise and market our Services to you. Subject to applicable law (including any consent requirements), we may advertise our Services to you through interest-based advertising and emails, and seek to measure the effectiveness of our ads.

Usage data associated with those devices and browsers and how you’ve engaged with our Services, including IP address, plug-ins, language used, time spent on Sites and Third-Party Sites, pages visited, links clicked, payment methods used, and the pages that led or referred you to Sites and Third-Party Sites.

As part of these Services, you will be asked to share Personal Data with us for this purpose (e.g., your government ID, your image (selfie), and Personal Data you input or that is apparent from the physical payment method (e.g. credit card image)). To protect against fraud, we may compare this information with information about you we collect from Business Users, financial partners, business partners, identity verification services, publicly available sources, and other third party service providers and sources so that we can assess whether the person is likely to be you or a person purporting to be you

I don't want to cite the entire policy, so go visit the link if you're still interested in learning about the abuse. Swisscows ToS also disallows this:

Submitting false or misleading information

Lol. Also:

Transmitting content that is generally offensive, unlawful, threatening, harmful, abusive, tortuous, harassing, or may be deemed to be so in a court of law;

Please. Let us be adults, for fuck's sake. Anyway, summarizing: Swisscows Mail does support mail clients in its free tier. But so what, if I can't sign-up because of the phone number requirement? So I can't even verify anything here, for real. Looking at the policies, it's clear that they've all been written in regards to the search engine, so we don't really know what happens on the E-mail side of things. This service is truly run by incompetents; they've even created a paid tier that doesn't bring any real advantage over the free one. Regardless of anything else, the phone number requirement absolutely kills this provider.