Privacy notice
Written from the platform's own documentation by its engineer. It states what the system actually does; it has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer.
1. Who we are
Postroute is a trading name of Dynamik App Ltd, a company registered in England, number 16723248, registered office 29 Greenaleigh Road, Birmingham, B14 4HY, United Kingdom. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC233730.
The person responsible for data protection is Vlad-Alexandru Minea, vlad@dynamik.org.uk. For anything about this service write to postmaster@postroute.co.uk; to report abuse, abuse@postroute.co.uk. Both addresses are read by the person responsible for the server.
2. Two roles
We host email for business customers under a contract. For the mail in a customer's mailboxes — the messages, their attachments, the addresses that write to them and that they write to — the customer decides what it is for and we act on their instructions. In the language of the UK GDPR the customer is the controller and we are the processor. A request about that mail goes to the customer, and we help them answer it.
We are the controller for a smaller set of data of our own: the accounts in this portal, the logs we keep to run and secure the service, the record of deletions, and correspondence sent to our postmaster and abuse addresses.
3. What we hold as controller
| What | Where it comes from | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Portal account: name, email address, an optional phone number, role, whether the account is active, the time of the last login; for each passkey its credential id, public key, label and last use; recovery codes, stored as hashes; a one-time enrolment token while an invitation is open. | Created by us or by the customer's own administrator. | To give the customer's IT person a way in without a password. |
| Login log: each login with a passkey and each use of a recovery code, with the account, the time and the IP address it came from. | The request itself. | Security, and to be able to answer "who logged in, and when". |
| Portal events: a domain added, an administrator invited or deactivated, a mailbox queued for deletion — the account, the object and the time. | The action in the portal. | To know what changed and who changed it. |
| Record of deletions: for each deleted mailbox, who requested it, when it was archived, when it was destroyed, and the message counts. | The deletion queue. | To settle, later, what was deleted and on whose request. |
| Mail system logs: sender and recipient addresses, IP addresses, message identifiers and filtering verdicts, as the mail server writes them. | Mail passing through the server. | To deliver mail, trace a problem and keep the server off blocklists. |
| Correspondence sent to postmaster@ and abuse@. | You. | To answer it. |
4. What passes through us as processor
Every message sent to or from a customer's domains, with its headers, attachments and the addresses involved; the customer's domain names and the DNS records needed to route their mail; the names of their mailboxes and aliases. We do not read it, analyse it for our own purposes, or use it for anything except delivering, storing and filtering it as the service requires.
5. Lawful bases
- Contract (Article 6(1)(b)) — running the service the customer has contracted for, including the portal accounts that let their administrator use it.
- Legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) — the login log, the record of deletions, mail filtering and abuse prevention. The UK GDPR names the security of network and information systems as a legitimate interest; our balancing test for each of these is documented.
We do not rely on consent for anything, because nothing here is optional to the service, and we send no marketing.
6. Where it lives
On one server, mx1.postroute.co.uk, at Hetzner in Helsinki, Finland. Mail
is encrypted at rest on that server. Every night a backup, encrypted before it leaves
the server, goes to a Hetzner storage box in Falkenstein, Germany. Both locations are
in the European Union. Mail moves over TLS wherever the other side supports it, and to
domains that publish DANE the connection is verified against it.
7. Who else sees it
| Who | What reaches them | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Hosting and backup storage: everything at rest, encrypted. | Finland, Germany |
| Spamhaus | When a message arrives, the sending IP address, the domains it carries and hashed forms of addresses are looked up against Spamhaus's blocklists by DNS. Message content is never sent. | DNS queries |
| Let's Encrypt | Domain names only, to issue TLS certificates. | United States |
| Google Postmaster Tools | Aggregate statistics Google publishes to us about mail we send to Gmail addresses. Nothing flows from us to Google for this. | — |
Amazon SES is configured on the server and is not in the sending path. There is no advertising, no analytics, and no sale or sharing of data beyond the table above.
8. How long we keep it
| What | Kept |
|---|---|
| A customer's mailbox | For as long as the customer keeps it. |
| A deleted mailbox | Archived and verified before it is removed; the archive is destroyed 30 days later. Within those 30 days it can be restored on the customer's request. |
| Backups | 14 daily, 8 weekly and 12 monthly copies, then removed. |
| Record of deletions | Kept, as the record that the deletion happened. |
| Portal account | While it is active; removed on the customer's instruction. |
| Login log and portal events | In the application's log, which is kept for 14 days on the server for troubleshooting and security. |
| Mail system logs | The most recent 9,999 lines per service; older lines are overwritten. |
| Correspondence to postmaster@ and abuse@ | In that mailbox, until it is no longer needed. |
9. Cookies
This portal sets one cookie, postroute-session, which keeps you logged in.
It is encrypted, marked Secure and SameSite, and expires after 120 minutes without
activity; there is no "remember me". It is strictly necessary, so there is nothing to
consent to and no banner.
There are no analytics or advertising cookies. The webmail at
mx1.postroute.co.uk sets its own session cookies for the same purpose.
10. Your rights
Under the UK GDPR you can ask for access to your personal data, for it to be corrected, erased or restricted, for a copy in a portable form, and you can object to processing based on legitimate interests.
- If your data is in a customer's mailbox, the customer is the controller: write to them. We help them answer within the month the law allows.
- For a portal account, the logs, or correspondence with us, write to postmaster@postroute.co.uk.
- You can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
11. Changes
This notice is kept in the platform's source repository. Every change to it is dated, versioned and recorded there. If a change affects what we do with your data, the version number at the top goes up.