Pablo Murad

Cock.li, email the way it used to be

· 4 min read · #email · #privacy · #open-source · #tools · #reviews · #xmpp · #tor

Cock.li gives you an email address the way it used to be: a name, a password and a captcha. IMAP, POP, XMPP, Tor addresses for everything, and Cock-mail, a whole webmail in a single HTML file that runs in your browser. Free since 2013.

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This post isn't sponsored, and I'm not affiliated with cock.li in any way. I write about anything I find interesting.

Remember when getting an email address took a minute? You picked a name, typed a password twice and that was it. No phone number, no "verify it's you", no second email to recover the first one. Cock.li still works like that, and I loved it.

The cock.li home page, a plain page with a dark brown border. At the top, a black and white cartoon character in a cap with the word "COCK" on it, next to the title "cock.li - yeah it's mail with cocks" and a row of links: Home, Webmail, Donate, Contact, Unblock SMTP, Change Password and Register. The About section says the host has been mostly alive since 2013, never asks for personal information, and counts more than a million users. On the right, a donations bar labeled "The bar's just here for looks" and the server info: mail.cock.li for IMAP and POP, xmpp.cock.li for XMPP, and two .onion addresses.

It's a free email host that has been around since 2013 and has more than a million users. The tagline on the front page is "yeah it's mail with cocks", which tells you most of what you need to know about its sense of humor. The rest is on the same page: you will never be asked to verify personal information, because the people behind it believe anyone should have access to email without tying it to the surveillance state.

Signing up takes a minute #

The registration page asks for three things: a username, a password and a captcha. That's it. You also choose your domain from a list, and this is where the fun starts. Besides cock.li itself there's airmail.cc, firemail.cc, memeware.net, cocaine.ninja, waifu.club, 420blaze.it, cock.email and several others, some of them a lot ruder. Picking one is half the experience.

Once you're in, new accounts need to unlock sending. Instead of asking for a phone number, cock.li asks your browser to solve a small proof of work, a few minutes of CPU time, and the page that does it is titled, of course, "unblock your cock". It's a clever way to keep spammers out without collecting anything about you.

Email, and a webmail in a single file #

You get IMAP and POP at mail.cock.li, so any mail client works: Thunderbird, Claws Mail, Apple Mail, K-9 on Android, Mutt in a terminal.

And then there's Cock-mail, the part that impressed me the most. It's their webmail, written from scratch in 2026, and the whole thing is a single HTML file. You can open it with view-source and read every line of it. That one file runs entirely in your browser and talks directly to the IMAP and SMTP servers over WebSockets. There's no webmail backend in the middle logging in for you and juggling your session. The browser speaks the mail protocols itself, the same way a desktop client would. The developers say it plainly: they believe the best email client is a desktop client, and they built a webmail that behaves like one.

Cock-mail, the cock.li webmail, in a dark theme. A sidebar on the left lists the mailboxes (Inbox with 5 unread, Trash, Sent and a few folders) and links for Compose, Settings, Disconnect and View Logs. The middle column is the inbox, with test messages such as "Inline image", "Attached HTML e-mail" and "Plaintext E-mail". On the right, a reply is being written in plain text with From, To, CC, BCC and Subject fields, quoting an older message, with a text file attached.

A few things I really like about it:

  • HTML emails are turned into plain text, with the links pulled out and listed. Remote images are never loaded. No tracking pixels, no surprises.
  • It shows live unread counts and updates by itself when something changes from another client.
  • It handles attachments, inline images, emails attached inside other emails, every character set, and opens mailboxes with tens of thousands of messages.
  • It works on a phone too, with a portrait layout.
  • It's free to use and to deploy on your own mail server, under a permissive license. If your server already speaks WebSockets, that single file is all you need: you set your endpoints at the bottom of it and you're done. The full package, with the server-side helper, is a 60 KB download.

The changelog reads like a craftsman's notebook, with entries like "real IMAP protocol parsing" and support for a mailbox named with a pile of backslashes and quotes, just because it should work. Filters are planned for version 1.0.

More than email #

The same account also gives you XMPP, at xmpp.cock.li, so you can chat with any Jabber user in the world with the address you already have.

Everything is also reachable through Tor. There's a .onion address for the website and another one for the webmail, IMAP, POP and XMPP, so you can use the whole service without ever leaving the Tor network.

Small things that show care #

The site keeps a plain text log at cock.li/log.txt with every update since 2024, written in a voice that's half status report and half stand-up comedy. It suggests you download it and use diff to see what changed, which is refreshingly honest advice for a changelog. There's a warrant canary, a transparency page and GPG keys for the team, signed by an offline master key.

They own their hardware and say they have no third parties. The privacy policy is written in plain language and says exactly what is kept and for how long, with mail logs cleared after a couple of days.

And it's run by a small team, mostly as volunteer work, kept alive by donations in Monero and Bitcoin. The donation bar on the front page carries a perfect label: "The bar's just here for looks."

Go get an address #

If you miss the internet where an email address was something you just had, try it. Pick the domain that makes you laugh, set up a client or open Cock-mail, and if you end up liking it as much as I did, send them a donation. Services like this are rare, and they run on people who care.