How to avoid spam

Private.Ki is not a place where spam is sent from, and it does what it can to keep spam from reaching you — but because your mailbox is encrypted, it can do less than a provider that reads your mail. This article says exactly what is done, what is not, and what you can do yourself. Our position on spam is in the anti-spam policy.

What the server does

Outgoing mail is checked against public blocklists. Before a message to an outside address is handed to the mail relay, our server looks up the recipient domains, the subject, and — if the body is not PGP-encrypted — every domain and IP address mentioned in it against Spamhaus, SURBL, SpamCop and Barracuda. A hit refuses the send: Message blocked: Your message contains content flagged as spam. This protects the reputation of the shared private.ki sending address, which is what keeps everyone's legitimate mail out of other providers' spam folders. The lookups go to those blocklist operators; see Third-party services for what they receive.

Requests are rate-limited. Every call to our servers passes rate limits at the edge, so an abusive or compromised account cannot send at machine speed — see Rate limits. Signing up requires solving a proof-of-work challenge, which makes bulk account creation expensive.

Incoming mail is accepted or refused at the gateway, never quarantined. Whatever the mail gateway rejects never reaches your account. Whatever it accepts is encrypted to your key at once and placed in your Inbox. Once a message is stored, the server cannot read it, so there is no second, content-based filter behind the gateway.

There is no Spam folder

Private.Ki has five folders — Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive and Trash — and no Spam or Junk folder, no "Report spam" button and no per-sender block list. Two things follow:

• Nothing is ever held back where you might miss it. If it was accepted, it is in your Inbox.
• Unwanted mail that arrives is yours to remove: swipe or use Move to trash, and Delete permanently or Clear the Trash when you like.

Spam that arrives is also rendered with the same protections as every other message: external images are blocked, so the spammer does not learn that you opened it, and links show their real destination before opening. Read it, delete it, and it has told the sender nothing.

When spam or abuse arrives

• Do not reply and do not click "unsubscribe" in a message you did not sign up for. Both confirm that the address is live.
• Do not load images. See above.
• Report it if it is abusive, fraudulent or persistent — see Report abuse. Attach the original: open the message, ⋮ → Show original → Download gives you the .eml file with the full headers.
• Delete it. Move it to Trash; if you never want to see it again, Delete permanently from there.

Keep your address out of the lists

Most spam is a consequence of the address being harvested somewhere. Prevention costs less than cleanup:

What our server sees

Common questions