of all email traffic is spam
Free email is ad-funded. Every message is scanned, profiled, and sold. You are not the customer. You are the inventory.
Gmail earns ~$12B/year from ads in your inbox. Providers profit from spam, not from fighting it.
Promo tabs, smart sorting, nudges. Designed to keep you in the feed. Email became an ad marketplace.
Your inbox is not yours. It never was.
credentials stolen by infostealer malware in 2025
Corporations have devalued your data and private conversations to raw material. Breaches are not accidents. They are a cost of doing business.
Your correspondence, contacts, and metadata sit on servers you do not control, protected by policies you did not write, under jurisdictions that do not answer to you.
You were told the walls were strong. In reality, you live in a glass cube. Everyone can see in. You just can't see out.
3,322 data breaches in the US alone in 2025. A new record.
user accounts disclosed to US authorities since 2014
Your fundamental right to privacy has been stripped away under the banner of protecting children and national security. The same companies that cite these causes exploit child labor in their supply chains.
We care about children and fighting terrorism too. At the very least, we don't exploit their labor like Google or Apple. And we still protect your data and your constitutional rights.
Privacy is not a loophole. It is a basic human right. The Fourth Amendment exists for a reason. Architecture that cannot surveil is the only architecture that never will.
If they can read it, they will hand it over.
"After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won."
Carlos Fenollosa
Self-hosted email is essential for enterprises, military, law enforcement, and government agencies that handle classified or sensitive communications daily.
Yet privacy-focused products are somehow afraid to serve the very institutions tasked with protecting the public. As a result, these agencies depend on infrastructure they cannot audit, control, or trust.
We don't pick sides. We build architecture. If it protects a journalist, it protects a detective. Encryption does not have a political opinion.
Companies choose between privacy and deliverability. Until now.
"Decentralized email" became a buzzword. Projects raised millions, launched tokens, and promised a revolution. They delivered spam, speculation, and shutdown notices.
Decentralization is a tool, not a product. Tokens replaced product-market fit. When speculation ended, so did the "email."
"We needed email that was private not by promise or policy, but by architecture. Where the server is physically unable to read what it stores."
Nothing on the market worked that way.
So we wrote our own.
"It turned out we weren't the only ones who dream of email like this."
An email that feels nothing like an ad platform or a security tool. Private by architecture, not policy. Precisely configurable, without the bloat.
Decentralization that's actually usable. Lightweight and hard to notice. Just like traditional email, but with a completely different architecture underneath. Not web3 slop. Utility.
What started as an internal utility became a product worth opening to the world.
Decentralized encrypted email ecosystem
Privacy not by policy, but by architecture.
All encryption and decryption happens on your device. The server never sees plaintext, keys, or passwords. It stores only ciphertext it cannot read.
Zero knowledge means zero trust required. The server is physically unable to comply with data requests because it has no data to give.
Architecture-enforced defense against 5 threat classes: passive surveillance, server compromise, insider threats, legal compulsion, and quantum adversaries.
Eight battle-tested primitives. Each chosen for a specific role. No proprietary algorithms, no security through obscurity. Every component is a published standard with public audits and formal proofs.
Every primitive is an industry standard. No custom cryptography. If one component is compromised, the rest still hold.
Dual key encapsulation protects against both classical and quantum threats.
Today’s encryption. Tomorrow’s protection.
The server never sees your password. Not even during login.
RFC 9497 · Asymmetric PAKE · No password hashes stored server-side
But all the user does is:
Recipient’s public key fetched from key directory. Session key encrypted with hybrid ML-KEM-768 + X25519. End-to-end with forward secrecy via ephemeral keys.
Message encrypted and placed on an ephemeral relay. Recipient gets a link. Content decrypts in-browser via URL fragment key. Link expires after read or TTL.
Inbound SMTP received by gateway. Message immediately encrypted with recipient’s public key. Plaintext purged from RAM. Never touches disk unencrypted.
Every path encrypted. No plaintext at rest. No exceptions.
Data never touches a hard drive. Not once. Not ever.
Volume encryption keys exist only in volatile memory. Power off = cryptographic erasure.
Even a compromised key cannot unlock past conversations.
Full E2EE for INK↔INK. Standard SMTP for the rest of the world. Drop-in replacement for Gmail, Outlook, or any provider.
Web3 domains as email addresses. IPFS-based delivery. Data never stored on INK servers. Only routing metadata.
Not “or/or.” It’s “and/and.” Traditional compatibility + full decentralization.
Your private key, split across unrelated systems. No single point of failure.
Threshold K-of-N: need 2 of 3 shares to reconstruct. Partner protocol by our cryptographic partners.
Private by architecture, not policy. Precisely configurable, without the bloat.
8 features. Zero compromises. Every plan.
| INK | Tuta | Proton | Ether | Mbox | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero-access encryption | |||||
| E2EE PQC | |||||
| No-backdoor jurisdiction | |||||
| ZK auth (OPAQUE) | |||||
| Forward secrecy | |||||
| Key rotation & recovery | |||||
| Decentralization | |||||
| RAM-only servers | |||||
| Stealer protection | |||||
| Temporary email | |||||
| Open source client | |||||
| Password emails |
6 features unique to INK. Zero compromises.
If code touches your plaintext, keys, or password: it’s open.
Licensing boundary = trust boundary. If code touches your keys, it's open.
Try it out for free
For personal use
For teams
Fiat payments via partners · Crypto payments via self-hosted service
Same encryption, same interface, every platform.
INK exists to evolve, serve the community, and protect the right to private communication.
ink.email