Terms of service
These terms cover the email addresses offered at viljoen.co.za. The seller is Safeman Solutions ("we", "us"), a South African business. You can reach us at support@viljoen.co.za. The viljoen.co.za domain is owned by the Viljoen family and used with permission.
The two things we offer
Routed — free. You get an address at viljoen.co.za, and mail sent to it is forwarded to an inbox you already control. There is no mailbox on our side, nothing is stored by us, and you cannot send from the address. You pay nothing.
Hosted — R490 per year. A real mailbox at your address, which you can send from as well as receive to, with {{MAILBOX_SIZE}} of storage, webmail, and access from any mail application that supports IMAP and SMTP.
In both cases you are buying the use of an address, not ownership of it. The domain remains the property of its registrant.
Getting an address
- You request an address through our website. Every request is reviewed by a person.
- We may decline any request on any reasonable ground, without giving detailed reasons.
- Addresses are allocated first come, first served, with our judgement applied.
- We confirm your destination inbox before switching anything on. We email the address you gave us and you must click the link in it. This stops anyone directing this domain's mail at a person who never asked for it.
- Certain addresses are reserved and never issued — administrative and technical addresses required by internet standards, addresses that could be used to impersonate the service, and addresses already in use by the family.
Keeping a free address
A free address is yours for as long as you still want it, and we check that once a year.
- Each year we email you to ask whether you still want the address. Reply, and it runs for another year.
- If you do not answer, we send reminders before doing anything.
- If mail to your destination inbox starts bouncing persistently — usually because that account has been closed — we may suspend the route and contact you.
- We only release an address after that process, never without warning.
We do not re-issue a personal-name address to anyone else after it has been released. Old addresses get used for password resets and private correspondence, and handing one to a different person would expose the previous holder. Released names are retired, not recycled.
Paying for a Hosted mailbox
- The price is R490 per year, paid in advance, in South African Rand.
- Payment is made through PayFast, a South African payment provider, using a link we email you. We never collect card details on this website and we do not see or store your card information at any point.
- Your service period runs for twelve months from the day your mailbox is created.
- Upgrading from Routed keeps your address — it is the same name, with a mailbox behind it.
Refunds — 14 days
If you tell us within 14 days of your mailbox being created that you want a refund, we refund the full R490. You do not need to give a reason. Email support@viljoen.co.za and we process it.
After 14 days the annual fee is not refundable, including if you stop using the mailbox. A mailbox suspended for breaking our acceptable use policy is not refunded at any point.
Renewal, and what happens if you do not renew
Hosted mailboxes do not renew automatically — we ask you each year.
- About a month before your renewal date, we email you a reminder.
- If you have not paid by your renewal date, the mailbox is suspended — you cannot send or receive, but nothing is deleted.
- The mailbox and its contents are deleted 30 days after suspension.
That 30-day window is your safety net: pay within it and everything is restored intact. After deletion your mail cannot be recovered, so please export anything you want to keep. If you would rather drop back to the free Routed tier than lose the address, tell us — that is always available instead of deletion.
What we can and cannot promise about delivery
Forwarded mail is not guaranteed to arrive. When we forward a message to your inbox, the receiving provider — Gmail, Outlook or whoever it is — makes its own decision about that message, and forwarding is known to make some messages look suspicious to those systems even when they are perfectly legitimate. We take reasonable steps to keep forwarding clean, but we do not control the receiving end and we cannot promise every message will land in your inbox rather than your spam folder.
If you need mail you cannot afford to miss, a Hosted mailbox delivers straight to us with no forwarding step, which avoids the problem.
Your responsibilities
- Keep control of your destination inbox, and tell us if it changes. We will re-confirm the new one before switching it over.
- On a Hosted mailbox, keep your password to yourself and use a strong one. You are responsible for what is sent from your mailbox.
- Follow the acceptable use policy.
- An address is for one person. Do not resell it or share it as a group inbox.
Our responsibilities, and their limits
We will run the service with reasonable care and skill and respond to support requests in good time. We cannot promise the service will never be unavailable — no email provider can. We depend on hosting and network providers, and outages happen.
Please keep your own backups of anything important. We are not an archival service. On the free tier we store nothing at all, so there is nothing for us to restore.
Except where South African law does not allow us to limit our liability, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim — which, on the free tier, is nothing. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost business, or loss of data.
Nothing in these terms limits your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 where it applies to you.
Suspension and closure
We may suspend or close an address that breaks the acceptable use policy, that is used unlawfully, or where the process described above has run its course. Where it is safe and reasonable to do so we will tell you first — for serious abuse we may act immediately.
You may close your address at any time by emailing us. Outside the 14-day window, closing a Hosted mailbox early does not entitle you to a refund of the remaining period.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we will email you before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated terms. The price for a period you have already paid for never changes.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.
Contact
Safeman Solutions — support@viljoen.co.za. We aim to answer within one business day.