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.
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.
Passwords and OAuth tokens live in the macOS Keychain, read only at connection time.
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.
Tracking pixels are removed before a message is shown, even when you load images, and tracking codes are cleaned from the links you open.
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.
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 telemetry, no crash pings unless you press Send on a report you can read first.
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.