I am proud to announce the founding of a new association: Fripost, The Free E-mail Association ("Fripost, Den fria e-postföreningen").

We will have a founding meeting November 4, 2010 18:00 at Gnutiken, Övre Husargatan 27, 41314 Göteborg. Please see the suggestions for by-laws on the website:

http://fellowship.se/wiki/Projekt/friepost

We need to elect: a president (ordförande), a board (styrelse), an accountant (revisor) and a nominating committee (valberedning).

With privately controlled e-mail services like Gmail or Yahoo mail the users' freedom and integrity will always come second to the service providers interests. We want to create an alternative. More concretely, this means that we will collaborate around and run a number of mail servers.

The associations email service will be free as in free speech, but not as in free beer. We will be financed primarily by our membership fees. The association will be democratic, and the e-mail service as transparent as possible. To guarantee this, we must be independent from any third parties.

We will suggest a membership fee of 300 SEK per year. This means that we need 50 members to reach 15,000 SEK, which is our estimate of what we need before we can begin with the initial investments. Specifically, we need to buy storage and pay for hosting. The rest can be done by using already donated or otherwise borrowed hardware. We are already running temporary systems that will only need a tad bit more configuring and testing before we are ready to allow the members to start using them.

Everyone is free to become a member at the meeting, and everyone who is a member is electable for the board. There will be a nomination process during the meeting, and the elections will be secret.

To achieve a sufficient level of reliability, we need to do some investments in hardware and hosting. This means we need members. The problem is that some people might be less willing to join until everything is up and running.

However, we must not let ourselves be trapped by this deadlock. We need to do the opposite of waiting around: now is the time to take action.

We invite you to join us and share our vision of a user controlled email service. All interested parties, whether they know for sure they want to join or not, are welcome to our founding meeting and to visit our presentation at FSCONS.

What better place than here? What better time than now?

Sincerely, Stefan Kangas