mailpile : blog

Posted by Bjarni on September 5, 2013 ( Content may be obsolete! )

[Update: PayPal have unfrozen the account, for now at least. Thank you for your support!]

(The following was posted to IndieGoGo as a campaign update.)

Dear Mailpile Supporters,

This update is a mixed bag. We have good news and we have bad news.

The bad news is, PayPal have frozen our PayPal account. This means roughly $45,000 of the $135,000 we have raised so far are in a state of limbo and we don't know when we will get access to the money. Rest assured, we are not taking this lying down and intend to put pressure on the company both through the media and legal channels and we have asked our counsel, the Software Freedom Law Center in New York, to help us work this out with Paypal. We have also disabled PayPal as a payment option on our campaign until it has been resolved.

We understand this turn of events may make some of you angry with PayPal (we are a bit frustrated ourselves), but we would like to request that nobody cancel their payments or take any action aside from speaking out. Ironically, their justification for withholding the cash is concern about charge-backs. So please, don't give them any ammunition on that front by requesting refunds. It's a weird, complicated situation, but we are confident we will prevail in the end.

We also want to reassure you that even though PayPal has let us down, we will still honor all of our promises to each and every one of you. Perks will be delivered on time to the best of our ability and Mailpile will become a reality, no matter how long PayPal holds on to our cash. Enough people have funded us directly through IndieGoGo and we have enough savings that we will be able to keep our word and make Mailpile happen.

So that's the bad news - for more details and updates check our blog at http://www.mailpile.is/blog/ and our Twitter account, @MailpileTeam.

Now for some good news!

The good news is we will be at IndieWebCamp in Brighton this weekend, meeting some of you and brainstorming about our first steps after the campaign completes. We are very proud and happy to have raised over $135,000 dollars, from over 2900 awesome people like yourself and can't wait to get to work.

We'll send out another update tomorrow to keep you all posted and introduce some of our more generous new backers.

Thanks for reading, and thanks again for your support.

-- Bjarni, Brennan and Smári