Terms

Last updated 30 September 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Despoina Labs LLC, a California limited liability company, which runs Clova.Email, the email service at clova.email.

Who may use Clova.Email

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 13 you may not create an account, and you may not use one somebody else created. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13 we close it and delete what is in it.

Some places set a higher age than 13 before a person can agree to something like this on their own. Where the law where you live does that, that higher age is the one that applies to you here.

There are two ways in: signing in with a Google account, or a username and password you choose here. A password account has no email address attached to it by default, so it is given a one-time recovery code at signup — if you lose both the password and that code, nobody can get you back in, and we cannot either.

What the service is today

Clova.Email gives you addresses of your own and keeps the mail sent to them — either under one of our domains, or under a domain you already own and bring here. You can make one-sender inboxes that lock to whoever first writes, temporary inboxes that stop accepting mail when their time is up, and a prefix that turns anything you put after it into a working address.

The service both receives and sends mail, and the rules below cover both. An address here is not a safer place to send something from than anywhere else: using one to send what these rules forbid costs you the account just the same.

This is early software. Features appear, change and occasionally go away again, and we may change or discontinue any part of the service.

Bringing your own domain

You can point a domain you already own at Clova.Email, either when you sign up or afterwards from your profile if your plan includes it. Adding one to an account that already exists does not move or rename anything: the account keeps the name you sign in with, and answers at both.

You must actually control the domain, and you prove it by publishing a record we give you. Claiming a domain you do not control is a misuse of the service, and any account made that way is closed.

That record has to stay published. We check it again every week, because domains change hands and an account still collecting mail for a domain its owner has moved on from is somebody else's post. If it stops answering, you are warned in your mailbox for thirty days, warned more seriously for thirty more, and after that the domain stops accepting mail. Nothing is deleted when that happens, and putting the record back brings delivery back at the next weekly check.

Mail you send from your domain is signed with our key, which you publish in your own DNS as part of the setup. That signature says this server was authorised to send as your domain — which it is, by those records, for as long as they are there.

Your account

An account is for one person. Keep your sign-in to yourself — your Google account, or your password and recovery code — and treat anything done through your account as done by you. Tell us if you think somebody else has got into it.

Using it for your own work is fine, and so is a domain that belongs to your business. What is not fine is one account standing in for several people, or credentials passed around a team.

Do not create a new account to get around one we have closed.

The rules

These are the things that will cost you your account. They are short because they are not negotiable.

Personal and professional use, at a human volume

This is a mailbox for correspondence: mail a person writes and a person reads. It is not a platform for marketing, newsletters, bulk distribution, mailing lists or automated sending, and it is not a relay for any of those running elsewhere.

Keep your sending to what one person could reasonably do in a working day. There is no published number, because the honest limit is a shape rather than a figure: if you would not sit and type it, it does not belong here. We may slow, limit or refuse sending that goes past that, and mail sent in bulk is treated under the spam rule below — which costs the account.

If what you need is a mailing list or a campaign tool, use one. They exist, they are good at it, and sending that traffic from here damages the deliverability of every other person on this service.

No spam

Do not use Clova.Email to send, relay, test, or support unsolicited bulk mail — not from here, not from anywhere else. That includes using addresses here as return addresses, bounce collectors, sign-up confirmations or reputation cover for a mailing operation running elsewhere. It includes harvesting addresses and it includes selling or renting lists.

We have no tolerance for this at all. An account used for spam is closed, and we do not restore it.

Nothing illegal

Do not use the service for anything unlawful where you are or where we operate. To be unambiguous about the worst of it: no material that sexually exploits children, no fraud or phishing, no malware, no distributing stolen credentials or stolen data, no threats of violence.

Material of that kind is reported to the authorities, and the account is closed.

Nothing aimed at another person

Do not use Clova.Email to harass, threaten, stalk, impersonate or intimidate anyone, and do not use it to publish private information about a person without their consent. Addresses that are quick to create and hard to trace back are useful precisely because they protect people — using them to get at somebody is the one thing that turns this service into the problem it exists to solve.

Leave the service itself alone

Do not try to break into other people's mailboxes, overload the service, work around its limits, scrape it, or automate against it in ways that degrade it for everybody else. Do not resell access to it.

How we enforce this

Every message arriving here is inspected automatically for spam, abuse and illegal material. No person reads your mail as a matter of course — the one exception is that when something is flagged and a complaint is made about it, someone here may read that message in order to decide what to do. That is set out in full in the privacy policy, and this page does not widen it.

If you break the rules above we may remove content, close individual inboxes, suspend the account, or close it and delete what is in it. For spam, illegal material and harassment we will generally do the last of those immediately and without notice, because waiting has a victim.

If you think we have got it wrong, write to abuse at clova.email and a person will look at it.

Reporting abuse

If mail from an address here is being used to spam, defraud or harass you, tell us at abuse at clova.email. Include the full headers if you can — they are what lets us find the account behind it.

Your mail is yours

You keep every right you have in what is in your mailbox. We claim no ownership of it.

We need your permission to do the obvious mechanical things — receive a message, store it, back it up, and show it to you when you ask — so by using the service you give us permission to do exactly that and nothing else. It is not a licence to publish your mail, to sell it, to train anything on it, or to show it to anyone but you. It ends when you delete the material or close the account.

Paying for it

Paid plans are billed by Stripe. Card details are entered into Stripe's own form and go straight to them — they never reach our servers, and we never see or store a card number. What we keep is an identifier for your subscription and which plan it is for.

A plan renews automatically, monthly or yearly, at the price shown on the pricing page when you subscribed. Moving to a bigger plan, or from monthly to yearly billing, takes effect immediately and is charged pro rata: part-way through a period it costs the difference. Moving to a smaller plan, or from yearly to monthly billing, takes effect when the period you have already paid for runs out: until then nothing changes, nothing is refunded, and you can change your mind. Moving to a plan with lower limits switches off the permanent addresses and prefix inboxes past them, keeping the one you signed up with and the ones used most recently; their mail is kept, and you choose which are on from each one's settings. A domain of your own, which only Business includes, keeps taking mail for 30 days after the account moves off Business, and then stops until it is back on Business; nothing already delivered is touched.

Cancelling. You can cancel at any time from your profile. Your plan keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and is not renewed after that — we do not refund the unused part of a period, and we do not cut you off the moment you cancel. You can change your mind before it runs out and keep the plan without being charged again.

If a payment fails, your mail keeps arriving, and you are told in your mailbox. After a week, sending pauses. After a month, the account returns to the free plan and its limits, which switches off the permanent addresses and prefix inboxes past them as any move to a smaller plan does; a domain of your own keeps receiving for 60 days more, and then stops until the account is back on Business. Nothing is deleted at any point, and paying again restores the plan.

Prices can change, and we will say so in your mailbox before a change affects what you are charged. Taxes may be added where we are required to collect them.

Availability

We put our best effort into both halves of this: getting your mail out, and getting other people's mail in. We do not guarantee deliverability or uptime, but we work to make both dependable, and when something goes wrong we would rather tell you than leave you to find out.

Mail is never one server's doing — it takes a sender and a receiver agreeing, and we are only ever one of the two. Mail you send can be refused, delayed or filed away by the receiving server on rules that are theirs, not ours. Mail sent to you can be turned away by us, because a sender that is misconfigured or behaving abnormally is hard to tell apart from one that is hostile, and we would rather refuse it out loud than file it silently somewhere you will never look.

So mail can still be delayed or rejected. Do not use this as the only route for mail you cannot afford to miss, and keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose.

Ending it

You can stop using the service whenever you like. Deleting a message, a conversation, a draft or a whole inbox is something you do yourself, and so is closing the account: the Danger Zone at the bottom of your profile asks you to type the account name, and then closes it.

Closing is reversible for 30 days. You are signed out immediately, but you can sign back in during that month, and a banner in your mailbox points at the Recovery Zone on your profile, whose Recover button undoes the whole thing. Mail keeps arriving throughout, so that people writing to you are not bounced the same afternoon, and you can read and download it. That is what the month is for.

After the 30 days it is over. Sign-in is refused, mail to every address in the account is rejected, and a background pass erases the mail, the attachments, your profile and what links you to the account — your Google sign-in, or your username, password and recovery code. That pass runs weekly rather than continuously, so allow up to a week beyond the 30 days for the data itself to go — the account is shut and unreachable that whole time. There is no undo after it runs.

We may close an account that breaks these terms, and we may discontinue the service. If we ever shut the service down deliberately, we will give notice and time to get your mail out.

Warranty and liability

We do not offer a warranty. The service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows: we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that it will be free of errors, or that mail will always arrive.

What we offer instead is the work. Running this well is the whole job here, and it gets our best effort — but best effort is what it is, and a warranty is a different thing to promise.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential losses, for lost profits, or for lost or undelivered mail. Some places do not allow limits like these, and where that is so, they do not apply to you.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change in a way that matters, we will say so here and move the date at the top. Continuing to use the service after that means the new version applies. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and ask us to close your account.

Law

We operate from the United States and comply with the laws that apply to us there and elsewhere where they apply. Nothing in these terms takes away a right you have under the consumer law where you live that cannot be signed away.

Getting in touch

Questions about these terms, and reports of anybody breaking them, go to abuse at clova.email.