Company
A small product with strong opinions
Email hosting for people who own a domain and would rather not hand their correspondence to an advertising business to read.
About
Why this exists
Buying a domain is the first thing anyone does when they start something. Getting an inbox on it is the first thing that goes wrong.
The options are a forwarding rule into a personal account, where every reply goes out under the wrong name; a suite sold per seat, where the mail is the least of what you are paying for; or a provider whose business model is reading it. Meanwhile the other half of the problem — the addresses that belong to your software, the receipts and the webhooks and the agent that answers at three in the morning — is sold separately again, by somebody else, on a different domain.
Pidgeon is both halves on one domain and one account: an inbox a person reads, a shared one for a team, and addresses code owns. The free plan is the whole product for one person, because a product that is good is easier to charge for later than a product people were made to try.
How we work
What we will not do
Principles are only worth writing down where they cost something. These do — each one is a decision recorded in the repository, with the argument it had to win.
Your mail is not the product
Nothing here is trained on, sold, or scanned for advertising. The reader blocks remote images by default, which is how a sender learns you opened something, and says so on the message rather than in a policy.
Leaving has to be easy
IMAP and SMTP are on every plan, free included. A product people stay with because leaving is painful is a product that has stopped having to be good.
Billing never gates delivery
A failed payment restricts sending and creating. It never stops mail arriving and never deletes a message. Somebody’s correspondence is not leverage.
One way in, and no back door
Sign-in is a link we email you. There is no code path anywhere in the product that hands a session to a caller, which is a property worth more than any convenience it costs — so it has no exceptions, not even for the demo.
Analytics with the recording turned off
We measure whether the product works, not what you do in it. Session recording and autocapture are off, and the mail client is excluded.
The documentation is part of the work
Every decision that would puzzle someone later is written down with its reasoning, in the repository, next to the code it explains. A document describing how the code used to work is worse than no document.
Contact
Email us, obviously.
We host email. A contact form would be a strange thing to put between you and us.
Security
security@pidgeon.emailFound something? Tell us before you tell anyone else and we will work with you.
Privacy and data
privacy@pidgeon.emailAccess, export or deletion requests, and anything a regulator would ask.