Privacy policy

This policy covers cityboymail.com and the CityBoyMail email service. It is written to be read, not to be survived. Where we cannot promise something, we say so rather than dressing it up.

The short version

• We do not read your mail to target advertising. There is no code path from a mailbox to an ad system.
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not sell or rent your email address.
• We collect the minimum needed to run an email service and keep it secure.
• Advertising on this site is sold against editorial pages only.
• We can be compelled by lawful process, like every provider. We will not pretend otherwise.

What we collect

Account information

Your email address, a display name if you give one, and a hashed password. Passwords are hashed with a memory-hard algorithm; we never store or see the original. If you enable two-factor authentication we store the secret needed to verify your codes.

Your CityBoy addresses

The names you claim, when you claimed them, and — for forwarding addresses — the destination you asked us to forward to.

Mail content

For forwarding addresses, messages pass through our mail server and are relayed to your destination. They are not retained after delivery beyond ordinary queue and log retention. For full mailboxes, messages are stored so you can read them, on encrypted storage, until you delete them.

We do not scan message contents to build advertising profiles, and we do not sell message data. Automated systems do process mail in transit for spam and malware filtering — this is a requirement of running a mail service, not a marketing exercise, and the output is a spam score, not a profile.

Technical and security data

Connection logs, authentication events, and abuse signals. IP addresses are stored as salted hashes rather than in the clear. Server logs that do contain IP addresses are retained for a limited period for security and abuse investigation, then rotated out.

Website analytics

We run first-party analytics with no cookies and no cross-site tracking. We record the page, the referring site's hostname, a coarse device class, and a visitor hash that is salted and rotates every day — so we can count a visit without being able to follow a person across days. Private email contents never enter analytics.

Advertising

We intend to serve advertising on editorial pages through Google AdSense. When that is enabled, Google may set cookies and use identifiers subject to its own policies, and you can manage that through your Google ad settings.

Advertising is never shown inside your mailbox, and no advertising is ever targeted using the contents of your email. Those are both architectural decisions, not preferences: the ad components live only in the public site and have no access to mail data.

How long we keep things

• Account records — while your account is open, then up to 90 days after closure.
• Mail in a mailbox — until you delete it, or 30 days after account closure.
• Forwarded mail — not retained after delivery.
• Security and audit logs — up to 12 months.
• Analytics events — up to 24 months, in aggregate form.
• Billing records — as long as tax and accounting law requires.

Who we share with

We share data with service providers who need it to deliver the service:

• Payment processing — Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Transactional email — the provider that delivers verification and account mail.
• Hosting — our own servers.

We also disclose information when compelled by valid legal process. We will notify you when we are permitted to do so. We cannot promise to resist every lawful order, and any provider who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

Your choices

You can access, export, correct or delete your data, and object to certain processing. Write to privacy@cityboymail.com or use the tools in your account. We verify that a request genuinely comes from the account holder before acting on it — that protection is the point.

Deleting your account releases your CityBoy names back into inventory. That cannot be undone.

Security

Connections are encrypted in transit with TLS. Stored mail sits on encrypted volumes. Passwords are hashed. Two-factor authentication and passkeys are available and we recommend both. We keep audit logs of administrative actions.

No service is immune to compromise, and we will not claim to be. If we suffer a breach affecting your data, we will tell you what happened, what was affected, and what to do about it.

Children

CityBoyMail is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly create accounts for children, and we delete such accounts when we learn of them.

Changes

If we change this policy materially, we will email account holders before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Contact

Privacy: privacy@cityboymail.com
Abuse: abuse@cityboymail.com
Everything else: hello@cityboymail.com

THIS DOCUMENT DESCRIBES HOW CITYBOYMAIL ACTUALLY OPERATES. IT IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE, AND IT HAS NOT BEEN REVIEWED BY COUNSEL. IF YOU HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT YOUR RIGHTS, WRITE TO LEGAL@CITYBOYMAIL.COM.