You can now donate your remaining credit balance for a good cause when you cancel

Update: 29 June 2018

We have made some further adjustments to the handling of residual credit balances at mailbox.org. In any case, we will always fully refund any remaining credit balance if a subscription is cancelled within the first 14 days.

Last year, we took the step to abolish the minimum top-up amount of 12 Euros that previously applied to every transaction. This meant that our customers were now able to increase their credit balance by any amount they like. We recommend customers top-up their accounts regularly but maintain just enough credit for the next month or two. This way, the accumulation of large credit balances can be avoided and they don’t become a problem should there be a cancellation at some point in the future. As this is an effective way of keeping account balances small, we ask for your understanding that we do not refund residual balances to individual customers after the initial 14-day period, as the overall effort in time and payment fees would be considerable.

We would like to point out that any residual credits do not go into our pockets but are donated to a good cause. When a customer decides to cancel their account through the web interface, they can choose from a list of charitable organisations where the residual money should go to. We then collect all donated funds and make regular payments to these organisations.

Our users stay with us because they choose to, and not because we lock them into long-term contracts. Every private customer is free to cancel their subscription by the end of the calendar month. Although we are sorry if a user decides to go, we won’t stand in anyone’s way if that is what they need to do.

It has always been our policy to refund any remaining credit balance in full, no matter if there’s 50 EUR or just 2 EUR left in an account. However, in the majority of cases, we are actually dealing with very small amounts, and the truth is that refunds are quite costly, because they take a significant amount of our time and incur transaction fees. This is because any bank transfers made to the customer’s reference account or Paypal transactions need to be checked and issued manually, and unlike private bank customers, we as a business also have to pay for each transaction.

If we want to continue with our refunds policy, we must find an economically more viable way to deal with these small amounts. We therefore decided to offer more alternatives for our customers to let them choose what should happen with the residual credit when they close their account. This will hopefully lower our costs, and save resources that can be better spent on maintaining and improving our service for all users.

We have introduced a new option „Donate balance“. This will allow users to contribute their remaining funds to a charitable organisation after their account has been deleted. Several organisations and causes are available to choose from a list. Please note that we cannot issue donation receipts on behalf of these organisations.
Should you not want to donate and desire a full refund instead, then this continues to be possible, of course. Please get in touch with our support team.

We hope this change will be appreciated by our user community, and we also hope all this won’t become relevant anytime soon for any of our satisfied customers who read this.

With best wishes,
Your mailbox.org team