Hi, I’m Vlad.
I’m Vlad, the person who started Thelemail. Eric works on it full-time alongside me, and a few friends help part-time.
Email is a fairly personal thing to hand over to strangers. You should at least know our names.
I use Thelemail for my personal email, my teams and my family. If something breaks, it affects us too. My own head is on the guillotine here.
Why I’m building this
Email wouldn’t be my first choice for every sensitive conversation. It has limits, especially when a message leaves for another provider. But people rely on it for work, family and access to their accounts. I started Thelemail to push its privacy and security as far as I could while keeping it practical to use.
Technologies like OPAQUE and independently witnessed key transparency made that an interesting problem to work on. They offer ways to reduce how much you need to trust the operator, and they’re technologies I understand and have the skills to build with. These are a few examples of the decisions that have shaped Thelemail from the beginning.
You shouldn’t need to care about protocol names to use it, though.
Encryption should fit into writing and reading email without making you manage keys just to have a private conversation. The inbox should explain what it checked: whether a message was end-to-end encrypted, whether sender authentication passed, and what it couldn’t verify.
A familiar name and a green icon aren’t enough. You should be able to see what a security indicator means. Even an authenticated sender can send you something dishonest.
The practical goal is dependable email for individuals, families and small teams, including people with their own domains. You shouldn’t have to spend your evenings looking after a mail server. And after all that work underneath, opening your inbox should feel good.
What we mean by private
Mail between Thelemail accounts is end-to-end encrypted. Your device unlocks the keys needed to read your stored mailbox.
Email to the outside world has different rules. Compatible recipients can receive OpenPGP-encrypted messages. Otherwise, we process readable mail to send or receive it, with transport encryption where supported, and encrypt it for storage.
The security page explains those differences and the limits.
We’re still earning your trust
Thelemail is early. I can’t offer you the track record of a provider that has been running for twenty years. That takes twenty years.
My approach is to reduce how much you need to trust me as the operator, and make the work inspectable. We publish our browser and macOS clients, key transparency log and local export tool so other people can examine how they work.
That doesn’t remove every reason you need to trust us. We still operate the service and deliver updates. We haven’t completed an independent security audit. Client enforcement of the independently witnessed key log is still unfinished, and our documentation makes that limit explicit.
Putting my name here means being accountable for what we build and what we say about it. If we get something wrong, we owe you a correction and an explanation.
How this keeps running
Paid subscriptions fund Thelemail. We don’t use your stored mail for advertising or AI training.
If you decide to leave, you can export your mail in standard formats. If you bring your own domain, you can take your address to another provider.
I’d like you to stay because Thelemail works well for you.
If you have a question, found something broken, or think we’ve missed something, get in touch.
Vlad Gorokhov
Thelemail