UPDATE May 2022: requires reCaptcha again, but allows bypassing it by "upgrading" your account, whatever that means (probably paying). Still asks for your real name; registration also fails on Pale Moon. Everything else is as shit as it was when I wrote the first report, except the site is now behind the evil Cloudflare. Mail clients are supported, but auto-configure doesn't seem to work. Accepts signing up from a VPN, and that's where the positives end...A lot of suspicious things in the user agreement; going over all of them would take a year, so I will discuss only the most important ones:
[...] VFEmail.net can terminate and/or change and/or modify your account [...]
Wait, "modify my account"? What the fuck? This can literally mean anything, including rewriting your mail, deleting contacts, or changing the password. Suspicious as fuck!
[...] VFEmail.net or its designee may disclose information to third parties about User and User's use of the Service [...]
Great! Prepare yourself for your privacy being ripped away and thrown around to advertisers and trackers.
User acknowledges and agrees that content, including but not limited to text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, or other material contained in sponsor advertisements or information presented to User through the Service or advertisers is protected by copyrights, trademarks, service marks, patents, or other proprietary rights and laws.
So you will be sent advertisements and can't even show them to anyone. By the way, I've confirmed they add ads to your mail. Whenever you send anything from the free VFEmail account, your recipient gets this:
This free account was provided by VFEmail.net - report spam to abuse@vfemail.net ONLY AT VFEmail! - Use our Metadata Mitigator to keep your email out of the NSA's hands! $24.95 ONETIME Lifetime accounts with Privacy Features! 15GB disk! No bandwidth quotas! Commercial and Bulk Mail Options!
Funny how they claim to protect you from the NSA when they are Cloudflared (a US company) and have no real privacy policy. With a free account, you don't even get SSL encryption on your mail. So it is sent around in plaintext, completely visible to your ISP for example. Now what if you've paid? You get SSL (congrats for being the only provider out there who doesn't provide that for free), aliases, no ads and unlimited bandwidth - but are still in the dark as to the privacy and still subject to the shitty ToS. And to lighten up the mood...
If you do recieve mail between your last POP and the snapshot at 12am, it will exist on backup for a week - unless it's on Saturday night, then it's a year.
WTF? These guys must be trolling around here. Your mail is stored in a backup for a week...except on Saturdays! How random.
As for other data, you don't get told what gets stored and for how long. If you still didn't get the memo - get away from this crap! Honestly, it looks as if some jokers just slapped all the anti-user things they could think of, advertised themselves with bullshit like the "Metadata Mitigator™" - for which of course you have to pay - and went around their merry way while raking in the cash. This might be worse than Gmail, which is more honest in regards to their (lack of) privacy and provides all its features for free.