We never store your emails.
EmailOwl is an email assistant, so let’s be straight about the obvious worry. Triage means an AI model reads your email — that is the job. What you choose is whose account it goes through: in Connected, your own Claude account; in Private, your own Anthropic API key, called from your device. Your emails are never stored on an EmailOwl server. The task board we build from them is — and below we set out exactly what that contains, where it lives, and what we won’t claim.
Six commitments we design around
These aren’t aspirations bolted on later — they shape how the product is built.
Your emails are never stored
We don’t warehouse your messages: no bodies, no attachments. What our relay does hold is the board built from them. Each task carries the email’s subject line, the sender, the mailbox it arrived at, a one-line summary, sometimes a short quoted phrase where a decision turns on the email’s exact words, and attachment names. Alongside it sits what EmailOwl has learned about your people, projects and family. That is what syncs between your devices, and you can read and delete every line of it in the app. One exception to “never on our server”, even briefly: Outlook.com and Hotmail mail passes through our relay on its way to your Claude account — it is never stored or logged. See Mail in flight below.
Connected: your Claude account
Triage runs as a Routine inside the Claude account you already have. Mail is processed by Anthropic under the plan and terms you already accepted — nothing new to sign, nothing extra to pay.
Private: your own API key
Your Anthropic API key is created by you and used to call the API directly from your device: no shared account, no Claude chat history, and you can revoke it whenever you like. The key stays on the device you put it on: in the Keychain on iPhone and Mac, held encrypted on a Windows PC. EmailOwl keeps no copy of it. To use it on another device, paste it there, or pair your PC from your phone and the key can go with it, encrypted end to end. Give each device its own key and you can see, and revoke, each one separately in the Anthropic Console.
Your memory lives in the app
The picture it builds of your people, projects and priorities is stored in the app on each device, where you can read, correct and delete it. When a device is linked to your EmailOwl account it also syncs through our relay so your devices agree. That is always the case in Connected, and in Private once you restore or link a second device. A Private device you never link keeps its memory only there.
Encrypted in transit, not end-to-end
Mailboxes connect through Google’s and Microsoft’s own sign-in. We never see or store a mailbox password, and the sign-in tokens the app receives stay in your device’s Keychain: they are never sent to us. The one exception is a personal Microsoft mailbox on Connected — see Mail in flight below. The permissions we ask for are read, draft and send. Your stored board is access-controlled and held in the EU, but it isn’t end-to-end encrypted, so we don’t claim to be zero-knowledge. We access it only to run, support or debug the service, and our own admin tools show sizes and counts, never your board or memory text.
Least data, by design
We collect the minimum needed to run the app and bill you. No selling, no ad profiling, no third-party data sharing. Business users: for a mailbox you use for work, you are the controller and we act as your processor for the board we hold — see our Data Processing Addendum.
Pick whose account does the thinking
The same calm inbox. The difference is which AI account your mail is read under, who holds the key — and, because of that, when it can run.
Triage runs as a Routine inside your own Claude account. Gmail, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mail is read by Claude’s own connectors inside your Claude account and never passes through an EmailOwl server. It is processed by Anthropic under the plan and terms you already accepted, and not retained by us.
- OAuth to Gmail & Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Outlook.com — no passwords stored
- Processed under your Claude plan’s terms
- No EmailOwl server copy of your inbox
- Personal Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live mailboxes are read for each run by our relay, in memory only, with read-only permission
The app calls the Anthropic API directly from your device with a key you own. No shared account, no chat history — and on iPhone and Mac the key lives in the Keychain, and the memory it builds of you lives in the app. Windows is a companion app for your board and reply drafting. Apple Intelligence isn’t available on Windows, so drafting there uses an Anthropic API key, held encrypted on that PC. EmailOwl never holds a copy.
- Your key, revocable by you at any time
- iPhone & Mac: the key stays in this device’s Keychain
- Windows companion: key held encrypted on the PC; pairing it from your phone can send the key, end to end
- Built for confidential correspondence
The parts most pages leave out
Four short answers, in the order an assessor asks them.
Mail in flight
In Connected, your Gmail, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 mail is read by Claude’s own connectors inside your Claude account. It never passes through an EmailOwl server: our relay starts the run on your schedule, hands your routine the triage playbook and what it has learned about your people and projects, and receives the finished board. The one exception is a personal Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live mailbox, which Claude has no connector for. Our relay reads those for the run with read-only permission; message lists and bodies pass through its memory during the run and are discarded when it ends. Nothing is written to disk. In Private, your device reads your mail and calls the Anthropic API directly with your key. Only the messages triage judges relevant have their bodies fetched, capped at 8,000 characters, and nothing touches our relay.
Tokens and keys
Your Gmail and Microsoft sign-in tokens live in your device’s Keychain and are never sent to us. We never see a mailbox password. Two credentials do live on our relay: in Connected, the token that lets the schedule start your Claude routine; and, for a personal Microsoft mailbox, a read-only refresh token, encrypted with a dedicated key. Your Anthropic key is not one of them: it stays on your devices, and we keep no copy. Both are deleted with your data. Deleting your data also revokes our Google access from your device; Microsoft offers no revocation call, so you can remove EmailOwl under your Microsoft account’s app permissions.
Nothing happens without a tap
EmailOwl never sends, replies, deletes or moves an email on its own. The app has exactly two actions that touch a mailbox, save a draft and send, and both run only when you tap the button in Draft Reply. There is no code in the app that deletes, moves, files or marks mail as read. In Private, the model that triages your inbox is given no tools at all: it can only hand back a board. In Connected, the Routine runs in your own Claude account under read-only instructions you can open and read there. Calendar entries change only from a button too.
Leaving
Delete my data, in Settings, removes everything at once. The app revokes its Google access and deletes every mailbox token from your device, and our relay deletes your board, memory, completed history, routine token, encrypted mailbox token, mailbox list, family link and subscription record immediately. There is no waiting period. If you simply stop, the same deletion runs on its own after six months without activity, or when your subscription ends. Disconnecting a single mailbox stops it being read from the next run; the tasks already on your board stay until you complete or delete them.
Our servers keep ordinary access logs (IP address, timestamps, request paths) for security and reliability. We don’t log email content or model responses. [publish after relay fix — see owner notes]
Three things we’d rather tell you ourselves
A product page is a list of what something does. This is the short list of what EmailOwl is not for, and what not to trust it with. We’d rather you read it here than find it out later.
Don’t use it for a regulated and privileged mailbox
Don’t use it for a regulated and privileged mailbox. If your mail carries legal privilege, clinical records, or anything under a regulator’s supervision, retention or disclosure rules, don’t connect it. Triage means an AI model reads that mailbox, and the board built from it — subjects, senders, one-line summaries — is stored on our relay. That is a good trade for the school run and the supplier chase. It isn’t a trade to make on behalf of a client, a patient or your compliance officer.
The board is a working view, not the record
Your mailbox is the record of truth. The board is what EmailOwl made of it — and AI misses things, misreads dates and can invent urgency that isn’t there. Use it to decide what to open next. Don’t use it to prove what you were told, to close out an obligation, or to conclude that nothing else came in.
Sending stays in your hands
EmailOwl drafts; you send. Nothing leaves your mailbox that you haven’t read and pressed send on — nothing is deleted, archived or moved for you either. The chance of anyone getting a message sent as you is low. It isn’t zero — so we’re building the other end of that choice too: Planned — a switch that takes sending off EmailOwl’s permissions for a given mailbox, yours to trigger, with the board still working without it. On a mailbox that matters you shouldn’t have to take our word for it. [confirm: per-mailbox send-permission switch — verify against app source before removing the Planned label]
Somewhere between those three lines is the mailbox EmailOwl is built for: a busy one, where the cost of missing something is a late reply rather than a breach. If yours isn’t that mailbox, tell us what you need before you subscribe.
Found something? Tell us.
We welcome reports from security researchers and treat them as a priority. Email our team with steps to reproduce and we’ll acknowledge quickly. Please give us a reasonable window to fix before any public disclosure.