💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › laur%C3%AB › mail › elude.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:27:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Curiously, cookies are required just to view the site. Registration possible only through TOR (now v3); no personal data is needed - only solving a really hard picture captcha. Front page says "Elude mail is free. We will never require you to pay to use our email service." However, mail client usage requires a donation (1 USD per month, in Bitcoin or Monero) and the free tier also needs the user to answer the question "To prove you are human, please describe why privacy is important to you?". So it's effectively a paid service since mail clients are such an essential feature. Good privacy policy, not logging IPs or browser data; no third party sharing; FDE enabled. The only thing they store are the registration date, last login month as well as the sender and recipient metadata (the last one is deleted after 24h). ToS is lifted verbatim from RiseUp:
You may not engage in the following activities through the services provided by Elude:
* Harassing or abusing others by engaging in threats, stalking, or sending spam.
* Misuse of services by distributing viruses or malware, engaging in a denial of service, or attempting to gain unauthorized access to any computer system, including this one.
* Contributing to the abuse of others by distributing material where the production process created violence or sexual assault against anyone.
This is still very mild compared to all other providers - most of which have a Bible of requirements to follow. Compared to RiseUp, allegiance to anarchist / "commie" ideology is not required. All in all, Elude is a very good choice assuming you consider it a paid service. Onion access, no personal data, first-party captcha (but hard to solve), great privacy, decent ToS and 10 aliases for the first paid tier (1 USD / mo). The copied ToS looks kind of suspicious, but whatever. Also, we don't know who made the service and if they're going to stick around. Keep in mind I did not truly test this provider because I didn't pay (but might eventually), so I don't even know anything about possible downtimes etc. Still, from what I can discern, Elude is a great option, second maybe only to the below.