Terms of Service

Last updated: 2 June 2026 - These terms govern your use of Scroogle Mail.

The short version: pay for your plan, don't use it to hurt people, and look after your password and recovery phrase - our zero-access design means we genuinely cannot recover your mail without them. You get a 14-day statutory cooling-off period and our own 30-day money-back guarantee on top. The long version follows, because contracts have to be contracts. We have tried to keep it readable.

These terms are a contract between you and Scroogle Mail AG, a company registered in the Commercial Register of the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland (UID CHE-214.796.358), whose registered office is at Werdmattweg 7, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland ("Scroogle Mail", "we", "us"). By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please don't use the service - genuinely, no hard feelings.

1. Who can use Scroogle Mail

You must be at least 16 years old to open a Scroogle Mail account. If you are under 16, we're flattered, but the law says come back later.

Accounts are personal: one account per person, except on a Family plan, where each of up to six members has their own account under one subscription. You may not sell, rent or transfer your account to anyone else. Aliases and extra addresses attached to your account are yours to use; they are not a way to hand out mailboxes to other people.

When you subscribe, you must give us accurate billing information and keep it up to date. We ask for the minimum we need to take payment and issue a valid VAT invoice - see our privacy policy for exactly what that is.

2. Acceptable use

We built Scroogle Mail so that private people can have private email. We did not build it to help anyone hurt, defraud or spam other people. Using the service, you must not:

• send spam or bulk unsolicited mail of any kind, including "just this once" marketing blasts to purchased lists;
• distribute malware, ransomware or any other code designed to damage or gain unauthorised access to systems;
• impersonate any person or organisation, or send phishing messages designed to trick people into revealing credentials or payment details;
• store or transmit content that is unlawful in Switzerland or in your country of residence, or use the service in connection with unlawful activity;
• attempt to probe, overload or interfere with the service or other users' accounts, except through our published bug bounty (security@scrooglemail.com).

We act on abuse reports. Because of our zero-access design we cannot read your messages, but we can and do investigate metadata-level signals (such as sending volume and bounce rates) and reports sent to abuse@scrooglemail.com. If we find a breach of this section we may warn you, suspend sending, or - for serious or repeated abuse - close the account. Where the law requires it, we report unlawful activity to the relevant authorities.

Where a plan feature is described as "unlimited" (for example, aliases, folders and filters on Plus), that means unlimited for normal human use of a mailbox. It does not mean you can run an industrial mail cannon or use your mailbox as a free-form database. If your usage is so far outside the norm that it affects the service for others, we will contact you and work it out like adults before we take any action.

3. Your account and your keys

Your mailbox is protected by zero-access encryption: the keys are derived from your password, which we never see. At signup we also issue you a one-time recovery phrase. You are responsible for keeping both your password and your recovery phrase safe, and for the security of the devices you use to sign in. We strongly recommend turning on two-factor authentication in Settings.

Because of our zero-access design, we have no ability - and no obligation - to recover your data if you lose your password and recovery phrase. This is not small print; it is the whole point of the product. The same architecture that stops us reading your mail stops us rescuing it. Keep your recovery phrase somewhere safe: a password manager, or paper in a drawer.

You must tell us promptly at security@scrooglemail.com if you believe your account has been compromised. You are responsible for activity on your account until you do.

4. Plans, payment and VAT

Scroogle Mail is a paid service with no free tier - deliberately, because services that don't charge their users end up charging someone else with their users' data. All prices are in pounds sterling (GBP), and every consumer price we display includes UK VAT at 20%. The price you see is the price you pay; there are no setup fees and no surcharges. Current plans and prices are on the pricing page, starting at £2.99 a month.

We accept major credit and debit cards, PayPal and Apple Pay. Cryptocurrency payment is not available yet; it is on the roadmap. A VAT invoice is available for every payment from Settings, or on request from billing@scrooglemail.com. Our VAT registration number is GB 427 8811 36.

We may change prices from time to time. If we do, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any change affects you, and any billing period you have already paid for is honoured in full at the old price. If you don't like a new price, you can cancel before it takes effect and it will never be charged.

5. Renewals and cancellation

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period - monthly plans each month, yearly plans each year - so your mailbox never lapses by accident. Before every yearly renewal we send a reminder email with the renewal date and amount, so an annual charge is never a surprise.

You can cancel at any time in Settings. It takes two clicks, and there are no retention phone calls - partly on principle, and partly because we don't have phones. When you cancel, your plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for and simply does not renew. What happens to your mailbox after that is described in section 8, and your refund rights are in section 6.

6. Cooling-off, refunds and the money-back guarantee

You have three layers of protection here, and they stack. In order:

6.1 Your statutory 14-day cooling-off right

As a consumer in the UK or the EU buying a digital service, you have a legal right to cancel - for UK consumers, under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. In the model wording: "You have the right to cancel this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. The cancellation period will expire after 14 days from the day of the conclusion of the contract. We will reimburse you using the same means of payment you used, no later than 14 days after we are informed of your decision." To exercise it, tell us clearly that you are cancelling - an email to billing@scrooglemail.com is enough. You may use the model cancellation form below, but you don't have to:

6.2 The immediate-supply waiver, in plain English

At checkout you tick a box asking us to start supplying the service straight away, rather than waiting 14 days, and acknowledging that your statutory 14-day right ends once supply begins. That is the standard legal mechanism for digital services you want to use immediately - it is why your mailbox works the moment you pay instead of a fortnight later. We are required to tell you this clearly, so here it is, clearly.

6.3 Our 30-day money-back guarantee

Because the waiver in 6.2 would otherwise leave you with less protection, we give you more on top: a 30-day money-back guarantee. If Scroogle Mail is not for you, tell billing@scrooglemail.com within 30 days of your first purchase and we will refund it in full, to the same payment method, no interrogation. The guarantee applies once per customer, to your first purchase, and to purchases made directly from us (not through app stores, which run their own refund schemes). It does not affect your statutory rights - it sits on top of them.

7. Service availability

The service is provided "as is" and "as available" - the standard lawyer phrase, which we would rather earn our way out of than hide behind. Our target is 99.9% uptime in every calendar month, measured across our two Swiss datacentres in Zurich and Lausanne, and our status history is published for anyone to check.

If we miss that 99.9% monthly target two months running, Plus and Family subscribers are entitled to a service credit: one week of free service for each missed month, applied automatically to your next renewal. Credits are our way of putting money where the promise is; they are the sole remedy for downtime except where section 10 says otherwise.

We may occasionally need planned maintenance. We schedule it for quiet hours, announce it in advance on our status page, and design the platform so that mail is queued, not lost, during any window.

8. Inactive accounts

A paid account never expires while it is paid, however rarely you sign in. We don't delete paying customers' mailboxes for inactivity, full stop.

If your subscription lapses (you cancel, or a renewal payment fails and is not resolved), your mailbox winds down gently rather than vanishing:

• Days 1-30 (grace): your account becomes receive-only. Incoming mail is still accepted and stored encrypted; you can sign in and read it, but sending is paused.
• Days 31-120 (read-only): incoming mail stops being accepted, but you can still sign in, read everything and export your data.
• After 120 days: the account and its encrypted contents are permanently deleted.

Before deletion we send two warning emails to your recovery address, so a forgotten card expiry never quietly costs you your mail archive. Resubscribing at any point before deletion restores full service with everything intact.

9. Intellectual property

Our client applications are open source, published under their respective licences, which govern your use of that code. The Scroogle Mail name, logo and branding are ours, and these terms don't give you a licence to use them.

Your content is yours, full stop. Your messages, contacts, calendar entries and attachments belong to you. We claim no ownership of them and no licence over them beyond the bare technical minimum needed to store and transmit them encrypted on your behalf. We do not analyse your content for advertising, training, "product improvement" or anything else - we couldn't if we wanted to, and we don't want to.

10. Liability

Our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the service is capped at the fees you have paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, such as loss of profit, business or goodwill.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited - including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or your statutory rights as a consumer. If you are a consumer, nothing here takes away any protection the law gives you.

11. Privacy

How we handle personal data is set out in our privacy policy. The short recap: your mailbox is encrypted with keys derived from your password, so we do not have the technical means to read your email; we keep only the minimal account and billing data needed to run the service; access logs are kept for 3 days by default; and every legal request we receive is counted in our annual transparency report. We comply with the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), and with the GDPR and UK GDPR for our EU and UK customers, and we designed the service so that what we can hand over is almost nothing - encrypted blobs and minimal metadata. Billing records are kept for the 10 years Swiss commercial law (the Code of Obligations) requires.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. For any material change we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before it takes effect, with a plain-English summary of what changed and why. Continued use of the service after the change takes effect counts as acceptance.

If you disagree with a change, cancel before it takes effect. The refund and guarantee rules in section 6 apply, and where you have paid for a period extending beyond your cancellation because of a change we made, we will refund the unused portion pro-rata. Changing the rules on you should never cost you money.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by Swiss law, and the courts of Zurich, Switzerland have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you are a consumer, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections of the law of your country of residence - including UK and EU consumer law - and nothing in this section stops you bringing proceedings there where the law allows it.

14. Demonstration website

This website is a design prototype, published so the Scroogle Mail concept can be evaluated in real conditions. Scroogle Mail is not, at present, an operating email service. No accounts can be created, no subscriptions exist, and the forms on this site - including sign-up, sign-in, contact and checkout - are not connected to any server. Nothing you type into them is collected, transmitted or stored. No payment can be taken through this site, and nothing on it constitutes an offer capable of acceptance. If you have reached this page at scrooglemail.com, you are looking at that prototype.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms? Email support@scrooglemail.com, or write to us at: Scroogle Mail AG, Werdmattweg 7, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland. Billing questions go fastest to billing@scrooglemail.com. A human replies to all of them - we are fourteen people in Zurich, and reading our own inbox is rather the ethos.