Legal
Privacy Policy
Effective July 16, 2026
Ask by Mail receives email from an address you verify. It sends the text needed for an AI reply and keeps useful context for later conversations. This policy explains what happens to that information.
1. Information we handle
Account and sender details
We keep your name, primary email address, password hash when you use a password, personal assistant address, verified sender addresses, account settings, and authentication records. We never store your plain-text password.
Email and assistant content
When you email your assistant, we process the sender, recipient, subject, message identifiers, message text, quoted or forwarded text, and thread headers. We keep parsed message text and thread records so the assistant can follow the current conversation and maintain continuity across later email.
Memory and usage
We store useful facts and preferences extracted from your messages, along with daily and monthly usage events, plan status, delivery status, and operational error classifications. Message text and memories are not placed in analytics, URLs, Stripe metadata, or routine application logs.
Billing, support, and security
If you use Pro, we keep the identifiers needed to connect your account to Stripe. Stripe receives payment details directly. We also keep contact-form messages and the technical data needed to authenticate email, prevent abuse, diagnose failed delivery, and protect accounts. That may include IP address, browser and session data, AWS event identifiers, and mail-authentication results.
2. How we use it
We use this information to:
- create and secure your account and personal assistant address;
- accept mail only from sender addresses you have verified;
- reconstruct a thread, generate a reply, and send it back to you;
- remember useful details and preferences for future replies;
- apply Free and Pro limits, process billing, and show account status;
- answer support requests and investigate security or delivery problems; and
- comply with legal obligations and protect the service and its users.
We do not sell personal information.
3. AI and memory
Ask by Mail sends the current message, relevant text from the thread, and your current saved memories to Anthropic to generate a reply. A second model pass may identify a durable fact or preference to add to or update your memories. Those memories are plain records in the Ask by Mail database, not a separate profile held by your email provider.
We control what Ask by Mail stores, but we do not promise a provider retention rule that Anthropic has not guaranteed to us. Anthropic handles model requests under its own terms and privacy practices, linked below.
4. Service providers
- Amazon Web Services uses SES to receive and send email and S3 as a private temporary raw-email buffer. Read the AWS Privacy Notice.
- Anthropic processes message, thread, and memory text to generate replies and memory updates. Read the Anthropic Privacy Policy.
- Stripe processes Pro payments and maintains billing records. Read the Stripe Privacy Policy.
- Google is an optional sign-in provider. Google gives us basic identity information needed for sign-in, including your verified email address. Ask by Mail does not request Gmail access and cannot read your Gmail inbox. Read the Google Privacy Policy.
We may also disclose information when law requires it, to investigate abuse or a security incident, or as part of a business transfer. Any new owner would remain responsible for the commitments in this policy.
5. Retention and raw email
Parsed messages, thread records, memories, sender settings, and usage records stay in the Ask by Mail application until you delete your account. We may keep limited security and transaction records longer when needed for fraud prevention, legal obligations, or a billing dispute.
AWS temporarily stores the complete raw MIME email in a private S3 bucket while Ask by Mail processes it. The app requests deletion after processing. A one-day S3 lifecycle expiration is configured as a fallback if that cleanup does not complete. Raw MIME is not copied into Postgres or routine logs.
6. Attachments
Attachment bodies can be present inside the temporary raw email held by AWS. Ask by Mail does not extract, execute, download for analysis, or store attachment bodies in the application database. The assistant does not read attachments yet. If the text matters, include it in the message body.
8. Security boundaries
Ask by Mail checks verified sender ownership and AWS mail-authentication results before accepting a message. Raw email storage is private and encrypted at rest, and access is limited to the systems that process it. User-facing data access is scoped to the signed-in account. Authorized administrators may access limited cross-account records for support, security, and service operations. These controls reduce risk, but email and online storage are not end-to-end encrypted by Ask by Mail and no system can guarantee absolute security.
9. Your choices and rights
You can update account information and sender addresses in Settings. Depending on where you live, local law may also let you ask for access, correction, deletion, portability, or limits on certain processing. You may contact support@askbymail.com to make a request. We may need to verify your identity before acting on it.
10. Account deletion
You can delete your account from Settings. That removes your Ask by Mail account, assistant and sender addresses, parsed messages, threads, memories, usage records, settings, and the local link to your Stripe customer. Deletion is scoped to data controlled by Ask by Mail. Stripe may keep independent financial records under its own legal obligations, and provider backups may age out on their normal schedules.
11. Changes and contact
If this policy changes, the effective date at the top of this page will change. Material changes may also be announced through the service. Questions about this policy can be sent to support@askbymail.com, or through the contact page.