Editorial standards
How this site gets written.
A marketing site is an argument, and an argument is only worth as much as its sourcing. These are the rules this one is written to, and they are specific enough that you can check whether they were followed.
Standards
Every number is measured
Where this site states a figure, it came from a measurement rather than an estimate, and the page says what it was measured against. The performance figures on the home page were taken against a live mailbox of 26,930 messages while the product was being built, and the page says so on the block that carries them.
No number here is rounded up into a better one. In practice that means:
- a range is published as a range, so token refresh is 382 to 432 ms rather than "under half a second";
- a timing that varies is marked as approximate rather than given false precision;
- a limit that is ours rather than a provider's is labelled as ours, because the difference matters to anyone deciding whether they can live with it;
- where there is no measurement, there is no claim.
The rule behind the ledger
The claim-and-evidence blocks used across this site may only contain checkable facts. A row containing an adjective has broken the device, so adjectives do not go in one. It is a deliberately awkward rule, because the awkwardness is what stops it becoming decoration.
Sourcing and attribution
Claims about somebody else's product or policy are linked to that organisation's own documentation, not to a blog post summarising it. The set-up guides carry a sources list at the end for exactly this reason: when we tell you Microsoft disabled Basic Authentication for IMAP on 1 October 2022, you can go and read Microsoft saying it.
Primary sources are preferred over commentary. Where a provider's own documentation is wrong, which has happened at least once here, the page says the documentation is wrong, says what was measured instead, and says how it was measured.
Links are checked before publication. A dead source is a broken claim.
We publish the limits
Every substantive page on this site carries a section saying what the product does not do. Not a caveat at the bottom of a feature list: a heading, in the flow of the page, in the same size type as everything else.
This is partly a matter of honesty and partly self-interest. A customer who signs up despite a clearly stated limitation stays; a customer who discovers it in week two asks for their money back and tells someone. So the limits are written at the same time as the claims, by the same person, and they are as specific: "shared and delegated mailboxes are not supported" rather than "some restrictions apply".
One price, one limit, one number
The price and the daily call limit are each defined in exactly one place in this site's code and read from there everywhere they appear. They cannot disagree between two pages, because there is only one of each.
This is a direct response to something we found while researching the competition: a site advertising one price and billing another, and showing two different daily ceilings, in two different units, on two different pages of the same product. If you ever find this site contradicting itself about a number, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
Review dates and corrections
Every page shows who wrote it, when it was published, and when it was last reviewed. Those dates are maintained: when a page changes substantively, the reviewed date changes with it, and the same date is what the page's structured data reports. A page carrying a recent review date has been recently looked at.
When we get something wrong, we correct it on the page rather than quietly deleting it, and material corrections are noted. A correction that leaves no trace is indistinguishable from never having been wrong, which is convenient for us and useless to you.
What we will not publish
- Invented figures. No benchmark we did not run, and no number without a source.
- Fabricated testimonials, ratings or logos. There is no "4.9 out of 5" on this site, no greyed-out review badges, and no customer logos we do not have. When there is nothing real to show, we show the measurements instead.
- Manufactured urgency. No countdowns, no fake scarcity, no discount that expires when you reload the page.
- Comparisons we cannot support. Where this site says a competitor does something, it is something recorded and checkable, not something assumed.
- Claims about security we have not built. See the security page, which says what is not finished.
Telling us something is wrong
If a fact on this site is out of date, unsupported, or simply incorrect, write to support@mailbox-mcp.com and say which page and which sentence.
Provider behaviour changes, and the guides on this site describe provider behaviour, so some of what is written here will go out of date without anyone doing anything wrong. Being told about it early is worth more to us than being right in public, and corrections are made without argument about who noticed.
Content is written and reviewed by Mark McNeece, founder of BSolve IT Limited. On a company of this size the writer and the reviewer are the same person, and it is better to declare that than to imply an editorial board that does not exist.