Terms of Service

1. The service

Portugal Mailbox provides you with a Portuguese postal address for correspondence. We receive letters addressed to you at that address, open and scan them under the mandate you sign at onboarding, notify you by email, and make the scans available to you. Originals are stored for 60 days after scanning and then confidentially destroyed, unless you ask us to forward them.

2. Plan and pricing

• €9.99/month, including reception and scanning of up to 5 letters per calendar month.
• Each additional letter in the same month: €2.50.
• Forwarding of an original within Portugal or abroad: €10 handling + CTT postage cost, quoted before you confirm.
• Prices include VAT. Billing is monthly in advance via Stripe. You can cancel at any time by email to hello@portugalmailbox.com from the address on your account, with effect from the end of the paid period; we stop receiving mail for you on the day we get your email.
• 30-day money-back guarantee: if you are not satisfied in your first 30 days, tell us and we refund the first month in full. Mail already received is scanned and handled normally until termination.

3. What the service does not include

• Parcels, declared-value mail, cash-on-delivery items, or anything that is not a letter. If a parcel arrives, we will ask the carrier to return it to sender.
• Use of the address as a registered office (sede social), tax domicile, company formation address, vehicle registration address or similar legal seat. The address is for correspondence only.
• Use of the address as your registered residence or identity-document address: it cannot be registered as the address on your Cartão de Cidadão or other ID, used as proof of residence (for banks, AIMA, utility providers or certificates of residence), or indicated in judicial or administrative proceedings as your domicile for service of process.
• Address-confirmation code letters. Changing an official address (tax authority, civil registry, ID card) triggers a confirmation-code letter to the new address. Because these uses are prohibited, we do not forward or disclose confirmation-code letters from Autoridade Tributária, IRN or similar entities; receiving one at your mailbox is treated as a breach of these terms.
• Legal responsibility for deadlines attached to official or judicial notices delivered to the address. We scan and notify you promptly, typically within 2 business days of reception, but acting on the contents and their deadlines is your responsibility.
• Legal advice of any kind.

4. Eligibility

The service is available to individuals aged 18 or over, acting in their own name. It is not available to companies or other legal entities, whether as subscribers or as addressees. Sole traders (empresários em nome individual, freelancers) may use it for correspondence addressed to them as individuals.

5. Onboarding, identity and activation

Subscribing happens in three steps, in this order:

1. Payment — you accept these terms and pay via Stripe.
2. Mandate signature — you electronically sign the reception and opening mandate, which authorizes us to receive, sign for, open and scan your mail and to collect registered items from the postal carrier on your behalf.
3. Identity verification — you verify your identity with a valid ID document (citizen card or passport).

Your Portuguese address is only assigned and disclosed to you after steps 2 and 3 are complete. Until then, the service is not active and no mail can be received for you. Your monthly billing period starts on the day your address is activated, not on the day of payment. If you do not complete verification and signature within 14 days of payment, your subscription is cancelled and refunded in full.

We may refuse service where identification is incomplete or in doubt, and may ask you at any time to re-confirm your identity or provide updated documents, suspending the service until you do.

6. Mail handling

• By accepting these terms and signing the mandate you expressly authorize us to: (a) receive and hold correspondence addressed to you at your assigned address; (b) sign for registered letters on your behalf as your agent; (c) open and scan your letters and make the scans available to you; and (d) store the originals and, after the storage period, destroy them confidentially or forward them at your request. All mail is handled by staff bound to confidentiality.
• Scans (envelope and contents) are made available to you by email and remain accessible while your subscription is active, and for 90 days after it ends.
• We may refuse or set aside unopened any item showing signs of illegality or danger, and report it to the authorities where legally required.
• Registered letters requiring a signature are signed for by us as your agent under the mandate. Where a delivery legally requires the addressee in person, we cannot accept it and it will follow the carrier's normal absent-addressee procedure. Collection at a CTT counter is not part of the service: if home delivery fails, we request a new delivery attempt and, if that fails too, we email you the notice so you can reschedule or instruct us.
• Forwarding covers letters and documents only, never goods, cash or valuables, and only to destinations CTT serves and that are not subject to international sanctions. Customs formalities and charges at destination, where applicable, are your responsibility.
• If a scan is illegible or incomplete, tell us within 30 days of delivery and we will re-scan the original while it is in storage. Issues reported later, or after the original's storage period has ended, cannot be corrected.

7. Your obligations

• Use the service only for lawful purposes and only for your own mail (one subscription covers one named person; additional names are additional subscriptions).
• Keep your email and payment details current; scans are delivered to the email on file.
• Update senders with your new address when you cancel; mail arriving after termination is handled as described in section 10.

8. Liability

We are liable for the diligent execution of the service. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for: postal carrier failures (loss, delay or misdelivery before the mail reaches us, or after we hand a forwarded item to the carrier); the content of your correspondence or any deadlines, rights or obligations it contains; decisions you take or fail to take based on a scan; illegible or damaged documents received; temporary unavailability of the website or email delivery failures outside our systems; or indirect losses of any kind (lost profits, lost opportunities, fines, penalties or interest triggered by your correspondence).

Our total aggregate liability in any 12-month period is limited to the amounts you actually paid us in that period. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under Portuguese law, including for wilful misconduct or gross negligence, and nothing limits your statutory consumer rights.

9. Service changes, suspension and refusal

• We may decline any application before activation, at our discretion, with a full refund of anything paid.
• We may suspend the service immediately where we suspect unlawful use, where identification is incomplete or in doubt, where an authority or court requires it, where payment fails, or where continued operation would put our staff or the service at legal risk. During suspension we hold mail unopened.
• Non-payment: while payment is outstanding, new mail is held unopened (not scanned) and forwarding requests are not executed. Scans from periods you have already paid for remain accessible to you. Service resumes, and held mail is processed, once payment is settled. If payment remains outstanding for 30 days, we may terminate with cause under section 10.
• We may change the service (features, allowances, reception address) with 30 days' email notice. If the reception address changes, we keep receiving at the old address for at least 60 days.
• We may modify prices or these terms with 30 days' email notice; if you do not accept, you may cancel with effect from the change date and we refund any period paid beyond it.

10. Termination

• By you: at any time, from the Stripe billing portal or by email, with effect from the end of the paid period. No notice period, no justification.
• By us, without cause: at any time, with 30 days' email notice, refunding pro rata any prepaid period after the effective date. We do not have to justify the decision.
• By us, with cause and immediate effect: misuse or unlawful use, false identification, chargebacks or persistent non-payment, threats or abuse towards staff, or use of the address beyond its correspondence-only purpose. No refund of the current period in these cases.
• On any termination, scans remain available for 90 days and stored originals for 30 days. Mail arriving after termination is not scanned or forwarded: registered items are not signed for, so the carrier returns them to sender through its normal procedure; ordinary letters are returned to the carrier marked "no longer at this address" where practicable, or confidentially destroyed after 30 days. We accept no responsibility for mail sent to the address after termination.

11. Your responsibility and indemnity

You are solely responsible for what you cause to be sent to the address and for acting on your correspondence. You agree to indemnify us for losses, fines or third-party claims arising from your misuse of the service, from false information you provided, or from unlawful content addressed to you where you knowingly directed it to us.

12. Force majeure

We are not responsible for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control: postal strikes, carrier failures, natural events, power or network outages, acts of authorities, or failures of third-party providers (Stripe, hosting, email). We will mitigate and resume as soon as reasonably possible.

13. General

If a clause of these terms is held invalid, the rest remains in force. These terms, the reception mandate and the privacy policy are the entire agreement. We may assign the contract within our corporate group; you may not assign your subscription. Portuguese law governs.

These terms are drafted in English, which is the binding version of the Terms of Service; the signed reception mandate is bilingual and its Portuguese version prevails. Consumer disputes: under Lei 144/2015, you may refer a dispute to a Portuguese consumer arbitration centre, such as the Centro de Arbitragem de Conflitos de Consumo de Lisboa (centroarbitragemlisboa.pt), or use the EU online dispute resolution platform (ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr).