[Completed] Adjustments to Bandwidth and Outgoing Message Quotas

In order to simplify our Price Plans and improve the reliability of messages sent from Runbox, we are introducing standard quotas on email bandwidth usage per week and on the daily outgoing message limit across all subscription plans (with a few important exceptions).

Please continue reading to find out what is being changed and how this may affect your account. We will also notify all our customers by email within the next few days.

What is being done

As of June 1, 2014 we will make the following changes to the Runbox subscription plans (with a few exceptions):

• The bandwidth quota will be upgraded corresponding to the Max subscription plan’s 10 GB per week.
• The outgoing message quota for all subscription plans will be set to 500 messages per day*.

*) Those who have purchased extra quotas will of course keep them, and we will accommodate those who do need to send a larger number of messages — please see below for details.

If you are unsure about which subscription plan you currently have, please see Account > Subscription Information.

Why we are making these changes

The recent revelations in the media of mass surveillance of online communication especially in the US has brought many new customers to Runbox over the past months. This has lead Runbox to garner international attention by publications such as Der Spiegel and The New York Times, and Runbox has gained a position as a leading provider of secure and private email services.

In accordance with our growth strategy we have invested heavily in new hardware to replace and modernize our server park, which will increase our capacity and further improve the reliability and security of our services.

While we continue to roll out these upgrades we have reviewed our subscription plans and decided to simplify and adapt the bandwidth and outgoing message quotas.

Bandwidth quota change

Our growing number of customers access their email on an increasing number of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Additionally, people increasingly use email to share multimedia files such as images and videos.

The new hardware we have installed greatly improves our ability to support this “email-on-the-go” trend and we have therefore decided to upgrade the bandwidth quota to a level corresponding to the Max subscription plan for all existing and future accounts.

With many more people sending digital photographs and videos to friends, family, and colleagues, this new higher quota will allow you to make even better usage of our market leading 100MB attachment size.

Outgoing message quota change

There are two different reasons for the change of outgoing message quotas:

1) A few of our customers send a large amount of legitimate email. While our systems cope well with this, there is an ever increasing volume and therefore cost to processing this kind of email. There is also an increase in staff time dealing with any issues that arise as a result of recipients sometimes reporting such email as spam.

We see that those who send large amounts of bulk email don’t necessarily need large storage quotas, so we have decided to decouple the outgoing message quota from the subscription plans. You can then freely purchase outgoing message quota upgrades independently of your subscription plan.

Please note that this change need not affect your account as you can keep your current quota upon request.

2) Runbox enforces a strict policy on email sent from our service. Unfortunately, some of our customers still have poor password or computer hygiene, which in some cases can cause their Runbox account to be used by spammers to max out the currently very high outgoing message quotas.

This not only causes problems for the account owner, but sending large amounts of unsolicited email via our outgoing mail servers can potentially affect all our customers. If a receiving server detects that unsolicited email has been sent from one of our servers, Runbox may be blacklisted and in turn be prevented from reliably delivering email sent by our customers.

By lowering the outgoing message quota we protect all accounts from jeopardizing the reputation of Runbox’ mail servers. You as a Runbox customer will benefit directly because email sent from reputable mail servers are delivered promptly and reliably to their recipients’ Inboxes.

As part of our aforementioned server upgrades we will have the ability to implement new security features that will also help protect customers’ accounts.

How these changes may affect your account

The bandwidth quota change will only affect your subscription positively if at all, since all subscription plans will now have the maximum 10 GB bandwidth limit per week. With many more people sending digital photographs and videos to friends, family, and colleagues, this new higher quota will allow you to make better use of our market leading 100 MB attachment size.

The outgoing message quota adjustment will only affect customers who send more than 500 messages per day. Please note that the number of messages equals the total number of recipients, because e.g. 1 message with 20 recipients is 20 messages when delivered from our servers.

If you need a higher outgoing message volume we will restore the old quota upon request.

Customers who have paid specifically for increased outgoing message quotas will keep their full quotas as long as they are renewed.

If you are unsure about your current outgoing message quota, please refer to our subscription plans.

We hope you will understand that these changes are not only necessary but beneficial to Runbox and you as a Runbox customer.

And please let us know by contacting Support if you have any questions or concerns about these changes.