Why Private does not have a date
There is no launch quarter for Private anywhere on this site. That is a decision, not an omission, and this is the reasoning behind it.
Update — September 2026
Private opened, without ever having been given a date. Enrolment, unlock, sealed sending and sealed reading are live on the web, and mode is still a per-mailbox setting on every plan. Three parts are unfinished and named as such wherever Private is described: search inside a Private mailbox, sealed reading in custom folders and the Starred and Drafts views, and the mobile app. The rest of this post is as it was published.
Private has no launch date on this site. Not a quarter, not a season, not a countdown. That is deliberate, and it is the kind of decision that looks like weakness on a marketing page and like the only defensible option from inside the work.
A date is a promise about unfinished cryptography
Announcing a month for a feature is normally harmless. If a redesign slips, it ships in November instead of October and nobody is worse off. Key custody does not work like that. The failure mode is not a late release — it is an on-time one that is subtly wrong, held by people who read a date, believed a claim, and put something in a mailbox on the strength of it.
The pressure a public date creates points in exactly the wrong direction: toward shipping the version that demos rather than the version that holds. We would rather not build that pressure and then congratulate ourselves for resisting it.
What we do commit to
Three things, all of which are checkable rather than promised.
- Every description of Private on this site is written as design intent and carries a Coming soon badge. Nothing about it is in the present tense until it is in production.
- Mode is a per-mailbox setting, so nothing you choose today forecloses it later. Starting on Smart is not a decision about Private.
- No plan is priced for it. If a tier ever claims Private before Private exists, that is a bug in our pricing page and we would like to hear about it.
In the meantime Smart is what runs: real mailboxes on a domain you own, over IMAP and SMTP, with the records written and verified for you. That is a finished thing, and it is the one we are asking you to judge us on.