Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and PCN Labs OÜ for the use of Pidgeon. They are written to be read once, in order, by the person they bind — so the awkward clauses are where they belong rather than at the end in capitals.

The acceptable use policy, the privacy policy and, where it applies, the data processing agreement form part of them.

1. Who “we” and “you” are

We are PCN Labs OÜ, registry code 17037148, of Tornimäe tn 5, 10145 Tallinn, Estonia. The legal notice has the rest.

You are whoever holds the account. If you open one on behalf of a company or another organisation, you are telling us you may bind it, and “you” then means both you and it. Where someone invites you into their workspace, the account holder is the organisation and these terms reach you through them.

A consumer is someone acting outside their trade, business or profession. Consumers have rights under EU and Estonian law that no contract can take away, and where anything here would do so, the law wins and the clause simply does not apply to you. §16 and §18 say where that bites.

2. Accepting these terms, and who may

You accept them by creating an account or by using the service.

You need to be at least 18 and able to enter a contract where you live. You need to give an email address that reaches you — everything we are required to tell you is sent there, so an address you cannot read is a problem you have rather than one you have avoided.

3. Your account and how you get into it

Sign-in is a one-time link sent to your address. There is no password to phish, reuse or stuff, and none in our database to leak. We may add signing in with Google or GitHub; if we do, it is an alternative and never the only way in.

External mail clients cannot use one-time links, so IMAP and SMTP use an app password — generated in the application, scoped to that use, shown to you once, and revocable. It is still not a password of yours: there is nothing to reuse elsewhere.

Keep your address, your app passwords and your API keys to yourself. Anything done through them counts as done by you, except where we were at fault. Tell us at security@pidgeon.ai if you think one has been taken, and we will help you revoke it.

4. Domains

You may only add a domain you control, and you prove it by publishing a TXT record we give you. Adding a domain you do not control is a breach of these terms and of the acceptable use policy.

Your DNS stays yours. We tell you which records to publish — MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC — and show you the state of each, and we never need access to your registrar or your zone. If you take the records away, mail stops arriving, and that is the arrangement working as intended: the domain was always yours to point somewhere else.

A domain’s deliverability is not ours to guarantee. We can send correctly; whether a receiving provider accepts it depends on your domain’s reputation, your DNS, and their judgement.

5. What we provide

Mail hosting on domains you control: addresses that receive, a web client to read them in, IMAP and SMTP for the client of your choice, an API and webhooks for the addresses your software owns, and outbound sending within the limits of your plan.

The free plan is the product rather than a trial of it. There is no clock and no card. Receiving is unlimited on every plan, because charging for the thing that makes an inbox valuable would be the wrong business.

Some things this service deliberately does not include, so that you do not have to discover it later: there is no calendar, no contacts, no filters beyond sender rules, and no agent runtime — an agent address is an address with a label on it, and the API and webhooks are the substrate something else can be built on.

6. Limits

Three things limit what an account can do, and the effective limit is the lowest: your plan, your trust tier, and a per-minute rate limit. The current numbers are published in the documentation, and the product enforces them from the same source that page is written from.

Trust is not the plan. A new account starts well below its plan’s daily sending allowance and earns its way up as its mail is accepted and not complained about. This is how a free email service stays deliverable for everyone on it.

We may change the limits. Where a change reduces what you already have, §14 applies.

7. Plans, payment and taxes

Paid plans are billed in advance through Stripe, monthly or annually as you choose, and renew automatically until you cancel. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for; we do not pro-rate a partial month unless the law requires it.

Prices are shown exclusive or inclusive of VAT as the checkout states, and you are responsible for any tax that applies where you are. If you give us a valid VAT number we will apply the reverse charge where it is due.

A failed payment restricts sending and creating. It never stops mail arriving and never deletes a message. We will tell you, and we will give you a reasonable period to fix it before the account drops to the free plan’s limits.

If you are a consumer in the EU you have 14 days to withdraw from a paid subscription without giving a reason. Because a subscription starts immediately, you will be asked to confirm at checkout that you want it to start within that period and that you accept you lose the right of withdrawal once it has been fully performed; where it has been partly performed, you pay for the part you used. Write to hello@pidgeon.ai to withdraw — a sentence is enough, and there is no form to find.

8. Using it properly

The acceptable use policy sets out what this service may not be used for and what we do when it is. Its rule underneath everything: send mail a reasonable person would call legitimate, to people who are willing to receive it.

You are responsible for what is sent from your addresses, including what your own software sends through the API. An automated reply loop is your account’s sending.

9. Your content is yours

We claim no ownership of your mail, your domains or anything you put into the service.

You grant us the narrowest licence that running it requires: to store your content, transmit it, index it so that you can search it, classify it for spam, render it so that you can read it, and hand it to your own code at the endpoints you configure. That licence exists to operate the service for you and for nothing else. It ends when the content is deleted, save for the backup window described in the privacy policy.

We do not use your mail to train models, ours or anyone else’s, and we do not sell it or analyse it for advertising.

You keep the legal responsibility for your content — that you may store it, that you may send it, and that sending it does not break the law where you or the recipient are.

10. Our side of the intellectual property

The service, the software behind it, the Pidgeon name and the design are ours or our licensors’. Nothing here transfers any of it to you beyond the right to use the service under these terms. Where part of the product is published under an open-source licence, that licence governs that part.

If you send us an idea or a suggestion we may use it without owing you anything for it. This is not us taking your invention: it is so that a good suggestion in a support thread does not create a question about who owns the next release.

11. Suspension and restriction

We may restrict sending from an address or an account, or suspend the account, where it appears to be breaching these terms or the acceptable use policy, where we are required to by law, or where continuing would put the service or other accounts at risk.

We will tell you why, and we will do the least that addresses the problem. Restriction and suspension affect sending and creating.

They never stop mail arriving, and never delete a message. The same holds for an unpaid invoice. Your correspondence is not leverage.

The exception is content that has no innocent version — the first entries in §2 of the acceptable use policy — where we act immediately and report it. How to challenge a restriction is in §9 of that policy.

12. Ending it

You can stop at any time, by deleting your account in the application. Because IMAP and SMTP are on every plan, your own client can take a full copy of your mail before you do, and there is a download that streams the whole mailbox as a file. We would rather leaving were easy than have you stay because it is hard.

Deleting your account removes your domains, addresses and messages, subject to the backup window in the privacy policy and to records we must keep for tax or legal reasons.

We may end it too, with 30 days’ notice to your account address, if we stop offering the service or stop offering it to you. In that period you can export everything; we will not delete your mail during it. For a serious or repeated breach, or where the law requires it, we may end it immediately — and we will still tell you where to collect your data unless we are forbidden to.

If we discontinue the service entirely, 30 days’ notice is the floor and we will try to give considerably more, because moving a domain’s mail is not a same-day job.

13. Availability

We do not offer an uptime commitment on the free plan and will not pretend to. Any service level attached to a paid plan will be written here when there is one.

What we do design for is the property that actually matters for email: mail is queued and retried rather than dropped when a component is unavailable, in both directions. A sending server that cannot reach us will try again, and a webhook we cannot deliver is retried on a schedule and held in a dead-letter state you can replay from.

We may take the service down for maintenance. Where it is planned, we will say so in advance.

14. Changes to the service and to these terms

The product changes; that is what a product under development does. Where a change removes something you are relying on, or reduces a limit you already have, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice to your account address.

The same for these terms. A change takes effect 30 days after we tell you, except where it is required by law or is entirely in your favour, in which case it can be sooner. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service before it takes effect and — if you are on a paid plan — we will refund the unused part of what you have paid.

Two promises are deliberately harder for us to change than the rest, because they were made in public: inbound mail is always free, and an existing free account is grandfathered if the free tier ever changes.

15. Warranties, and what they are worth

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill, and we will not knowingly do any of the things this document and the privacy policy say we will not do.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that every message will be delivered, or that it is fit for a purpose you have not told us about. Email is a best-effort system built out of other people’s servers, and a provider claiming otherwise is describing something it does not control.

If you are a consumer, none of that reduces your statutory rights. The EU rules on digital content and digital services give you remedies for a service that does not conform to what was agreed, and this clause does not touch them.

16. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by the rest of this section.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for loss arising from a third party’s refusal to accept mail you sent.
• We are not liable for the loss or corruption of data where you have not kept your own copy — and keeping one costs nothing here, because IMAP, SMTP and the mailbox export are on every plan. We take backups, and they are for our recovery from a disaster rather than a service we offer you: we will not restore one to retrieve something you deleted.
• Our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and one hundred euros.

That cap is low, and it is low because the free plan’s price is zero. If your use of Pidgeon needs a higher one, that is a commercial conversation and we would rather have it than have you rely on a clause that does not say what you need — write to legal@pidgeon.ai.

17. Your liability to us

If you are using Pidgeon for business purposes, you will cover us for claims brought against us by a third party that arise from your content or from your breach of these terms — including a regulator’s action over mail sent from your account. This clause does not apply to consumers.

18. Governing law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of Estonia, excluding its conflict of laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Disputes go to Harju County Court in Tallinn.

If you are a consumer, that sentence does not move you. You keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you may bring a claim in the courts there; we will only bring one against you in your own country’s courts. §5 of the legal notice explains the consumer dispute bodies and names our supervisory authority.

Before any of that: write to legal@pidgeon.ai. Most things are a misunderstanding and take a paragraph to fix.

19. The rest

Notices. We write to your account address; you write to legal@pidgeon.ai or to the registered office in the legal notice. Both count as writing.

Assignment. You may not transfer these terms without our agreement, and we will not unreasonably withhold it. We may transfer them to a company that acquires this business, and we will tell you before we do.

Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read down to what is enforceable.

No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up.

Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control. This does not excuse paying money that is owed.

Entire agreement. These terms, with the acceptable use policy, the privacy policy and — where it applies — the data processing agreement, are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Language. These terms are written in English, and the English text governs. A translation, if we ever publish one, is for convenience.