Why Elusive exists.
Most email that calls itself secure oversells what it does. Elusive is an attempt at the opposite: a private inbox that tells you the plain truth about itself, and states its limits as clearly as its features.
The idea
Email is the last thing most people still run their whole life through, and it is also the least private. We wanted an inbox where the strong claim, that only you can read your mail, is actually true and easy to verify in plain language, and where the parts that are not private are said out loud instead of buried.
So the security model is written to be read, the defaults are the private ones, and the aliases and personas that most people actually want are built in rather than sold as an add-on.
How we think about it
Honesty is the product. If a claim on the site is not also true in the code, that is a bug. We would rather lose someone with a limitation stated up front than keep them with a claim that does not hold.
Your mail is not a business. There are no ads and no data to sell, so the only honest way to fund this is to charge for capacity, never for privacy, and only if we ever need to.
We would rather not know you. No external email or phone number to sign up. The less we hold about who you are, the less there is to leak, sell, or be compelled to hand over.
What we will not do
- No ads, no trackers, no profiling.Your mail is not a product.
- No selling or sharing your data.Not to advertisers, not to anyone.
- No backdoor in keyfile mode.If you hold the only key, we cannot read your mail for anyone who asks.
- No logging of message contents.It is built in, not a setting you have to trust.
- No claiming what we have not built.If it is not live, it is not sold as if it were.
Who is behind it
A small, independent team, deliberately low-profile. We think a privacy product should be judged on what it does and what an audit finds, not on names, so we keep the focus there for now. You can always reach a human at contact.
Where it is going
Elusive is early, and honest about it. The near-term plan is a published independent audit, signed native apps that let the code you run be checked, custom domains, and shrinking the metadata we hold over time. The full and current picture lives on the security page.