Mailboxes

Having a mailbox on our servers (if you don't know what an e-mail is, check at the bottom of this page!) it's a way to safeguard at your (and our) best one's own privacy, avoiding the need to give away personal data o relationships to multinationals or to some commercial provider. At the same time it means being able to use some tools our servers give you to reach this aim as SSL cyphered communication for example.

Furthermore we won't ask you your fiscal code, neither a document number or your name and surname to activate your mailbox.

A/I mailboxes have no space limit but we hope you will use your common sense to not waste precious resources you share with many other users (and remember, donate)! We strongly adivse people to download their email whenever possible, so as to lessen the amount of personal private data present at any time on the servers.

A/I mailbox service offers you a wide range of domains to choose from.... pick your flavour!

And with your mailbox account you automatically earn access to our bookmark sharing service and to the possibility of creating up to five more addresses (as aliases of your same mailbox account)!

If you have any questions on how to use our mailbox, please refer to the following manuals:

• Connection parameters
• Technical notes on A/I e-mail service
• Very simple basic rules to protect your privacy while using emails
• How to change or recover your account password
• Roundcube A/I webmail howto
• Howto setup webmail filters
• Howto setup Eudora mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Evolution mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Fetchmail mail client for A/I
• Howto setup mutt+msmtp as mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Thunderbird mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Sylpheed mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Postfix to handle A/I mail
• Howto setup Mail OSX mail client for A/I
• Howto setup Outlook mail client for A/I

Why should I make a mailbox account on A/I?

YES:

• because i think the struggle to defend free speech and communication cannot be delegated to anybody.
• because i want to make a small difference in my daily life, to keep away from multinational corporations. and because for some reasons, (the wrong ones, you should never trust anyone, mind you!) you trust us :)
• because i prefer my mailbox to be a private matter (and you want to use SSL)
• because i don't want to help advertising a big company when i give someone my mail address.
• because i am annoyed by those who give me an email account for free and then send me tons of banners and promotional offers.
• because when someone tries to shut down a/i services or threaten their security, the a/i collective will try to make their best to avoid it. And the more we are, the more it will be interesting.
• because i like your domains (well, if it's only for this reasons, we won't be exactly "glad" to give you an account... try to understand exactly who you are dealing with...)
• because i don't want my business in the internet to be monitored, processed and resold to the best offering company
• because the more we are, the louder we can scream.
• because you answer my email, sooner or later... well at least you try to!

NO:

• because it's not a free service (like free beer) but a service working only if everyone contributes what he/she can every year.
• because when they attack freedom of speech and of communication i will be the first to know... or almost the first one...
• because our servers are not secure 100% and privacy safeguard is only up to you in the end.
• because i have other trusted internet resources i can use.
• because i have nothing to hide.
• because it seems gmail works better.

A/I vs Gmail: upsides and downsides of choosing us

	A-I	G-mail
Available space	no limits, but please, DOWNLOAD your mail!	no limits: they keep a record of everything (at their will).
POP3 and POP3-SSL	YES (A/I CA)	YES (Google INC certificates)
IMAP and IMAP-SSL	YES (A/I CA)	YES
SMTP TLS	YES (A/I CA)	YES (Google INC certificates)
Content analysis of your mail	NO, never.	YES, for customized advertising.
Logging (tracing) of the IPs you connect from	No, never.	Yes, always.
SSL Webmail	YES (A/I CA)	YES (Google INC certificates)
banners in webmail	NO	YES (text format)

What does it actually mean to "have an e-mail account"?

For those who really don't know what e-mail means, we would like to help you.

An email account is exactly like having a real mailman in your computer: you write a letter, you send it to an addressee and the mail is delivered through a series of servers (a server is a computer managing a service) between the place where you are and your mail destination.

Having an e-mail account means having a name and an address where people can send you mails.

There are two main ways of reading e-mail messages: you can browse them on the Internet (Firefox, Netscape, Konqueror, Galeon, Explorer, Opera and so on and so forth) or you can download them and send them through a software on your computer (a software like Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger, Kmail, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express, Eudora or any other "mail client" able to "discuss" with your mail server.

Of course, apart from reading e-mail messages, you can also send them, both using a browser and using a mail client as in the previous paragraph. In order to send your mail, you use a service called SMTP, designed for taking your letters and delivering them to your addressee, wherever she may be.

You should know that normally all these communications are not encrypted along the way, and they can be easily read at any of the nodes of the Internet they travel through.
It's not so unthinkable that if someone wanted to control you, reading your messages as though they were flyers left on the sidewalk wouldn't take her so much time and effort... Therefore, it would be more correct to compare an e-mail message with a postcard rather than with a letter closed in an envelope.

To limit these abuses (and not to exclude any form of control, but to limit it), you can choose to send and download your e-mail via SSL, i.e. encrypted (coded so as not to be easily readable by anyone).