bytemail
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Privacy

We never see your mail. There is nowhere for it to go.

bytemail talks directly to your mail provider over IMAP and SMTP. There is no bytemail server in the path of your mail.

No server of ours

Your Mac connects to your provider directly. There is no relay, no sync host, no account to create with us. The one exception is yours to turn on: read receipts, below.

Keychain credentials

Passwords and OAuth tokens live in the macOS Keychain, read only at connection time.

Local index, local rules

Search, smart categories, mail rules, To Reply and phishing checks run on-device. Summaries and Rewrite use Apple's on-device model. Nothing is sent to a cloud to be read.

Trackers stripped

Tracking pixels are removed before a message is shown, even when you load images, and tracking codes are cleaned from the links you open.

AI apps only when you say so

Connecting Claude, Cursor or another AI app is off until you turn it on, and then only for the accounts you pick. What it reads goes to that app, not to us.

Read receipts, off by default

Turning them on asks you to accept that, in the EU, tracking whether mail was read can need the recipient's consent. Standard receipts travel as ordinary mail; for the rest, our server keeps only a hash of a random code, the time and whether the image was loaded automatically — never an address, a subject, the message or an IP. To tell you at once, it also keeps your Mac's or iPhone's push token beside that hash, and deletes both after 60 days.

No analytics

No telemetry, no crash pings unless you press Send on a report you can read first.

Outbound connections, full run
Your mail provider (IMAP, port 993)reading your mail, TLS
Your mail provider (SMTP, port 465 / 587)sending, TLS or STARTTLS
login.microsoftonline.comonly if you sign in with Microsoft; token exchange, no mail content
Sender websites (favicon)a sender's brand icon for its avatar; never for spam, no identifiers sent
Image hosts inside a messageonly after you choose to load remote images
A mailing list's unsubscribe addressonly when you press Unsubscribe; a one-click request with no cookies
bytemailapp.comupdate check (no identifiers); licence check with your key, a hashed ID for this Mac and its name, so a licence covers 5 devices
bytemailapp.com/api/opensonly if you send mail with read receipts on; asks about random codes, nothing else
bytemailapp.com/api/opens/devicesonly with read receipts on; leaves this device's push token with those codes so a read arrives at once
—that is the whole list

Where things are stored

Credentials go in the macOS Keychain, per account, and are read only when a connection opens. The local message cache is an SQLite database inside the app's container, covered by FileVault like the rest of your disk. Deleting the app deletes the cache; removing an account deletes its Keychain entries.

If you connect an AI app in Settings › AI, it talks to bytemail on your Mac — no bytemail server involved here either. What it reads goes to that app, and to its provider if the model runs in the cloud; a local model keeps everything on your Mac. The same goes if you swap Apple Intelligence for your own Claude or OpenAI key for summaries and replies: the text goes straight from your Mac to that provider. How AI apps work with bytemail.

Remote images and tracking pixels are blocked until you say otherwise, and never load at all in the Spam folder. Smart categories, snooze and rules all run locally — nothing about your mail is classified anywhere but on your Mac.

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