MailowsPrivacy policy
What we know about you, why we know it, how long we keep it and who gets to see it. Written to match what the system actually does.
1. Who the controller is and where the data sits
The controller of personal data is DW Technology LLC, registered in the state of New Mexico, USA. Contact for all data protection matters: support@mailows.com.
The processing, however, takes place in the European Union. The servers running the mail, the databases and the webmail stand in a data centre operated by Contabo GmbH in Lauterbourg, France. Your messages therefore do not leave the EU in normal operation; access to them is held by the operator's administration, which is run from the USA. We state this mismatch explicitly, because with an e-mail service it is something you need to know.
2. What data we process
Data you give us
- Registration data: e-mail address, chosen mailbox name, password (stored as an argon2 hash, never in readable form), and possibly the second-factor secret (stored encrypted).
- Billing data if you subscribe to a paid plan — see section 4.
- Mail content: messages, attachments, contacts and calendar that you store in the mailbox or that someone sends to you.
Data that arises from operation
- Operational record of messages — sender, recipients, subject, time, size and delivery result of messages received and sent (never the body or attachments). It serves to enforce quotas, for anti-spam, and so that you can see in the portal what your agent mailbox has received and sent, even after the message itself was deleted.
- Audit record — who performed which administrative action in the account (creating a mailbox, changing a password, issuing a key, granting an agent consent).
- Security records — IP address and time of sign-up and sign-in, failed attempts, trusted devices. We derive the approximate country from the IP address with a database stored on our own server (DB-IP Lite); the address is not sent anywhere for that.
- Records of agent (MCP) access — see section 8.
Website traffic measurement
We measure traffic to our public pages with our own tool on our own
server. When we serve a page, we add it to a daily count by page, by the
domain you came from (only the domain, such as google.com, never the full
address) and by the campaign carried in the link you clicked (the
utm_source, utm_campaign and utm_content
parameters). So that one visitor is not counted more than once a day, we compute
a one-off fingerprint from the IP address and browser identifier with a random salt
that changes every day. Neither the salt nor the fingerprints are stored; they live
only in the server's memory and are discarded at midnight. We store counts
only — not your IP address, not your browser, not a record of your visit.
If you sign up from a campaign link, we store with your organization which campaign or domain you came from. That is how we know which campaign brings customers.
Our own tool stores nothing on your device and reads nothing from it. The sign-in and security cookies we set are strictly necessary for sign-in to work. There is no Google Analytics, Matomo, Plausible, PostHog or similar analytics tool on our pages.
Advertising measurement in ChatGPT (OpenAI Ads)
We advertise Mailows in ChatGPT. To know whether the ads bring customers, we use
OpenAI's measurement code (pixel) in two places: on the public pages
of www.mailows.com (only when you are not signed in) and once after you
complete sign-up (a “registration completed” event, for both brands). The code stores
a _oaiq cookie in your browser with a browser identifier and, if you came
from an ad, the ad click identifier, and sends OpenAI the page address, your IP address
and browser data. If a page contains contact details (for example an e-mail address in
a form), it may send a one-way fingerprint (hash) of them, not the
address itself. The page shown after sign-up displays backup codes and mailbox
connection details, so the code does not run there directly — the event is sent by a
separate hidden frame that has no access to the page content. You can block this
measurement in your browser with an ad blocker or by blocking scripts from
bzrcdn.openai.com; the service works the same.
3. Why we process it
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Providing the mailbox and delivering mail | performance of a contract |
| Invoicing and accounting | legal obligation |
| Scanning incoming and outgoing mail for malicious content, anti-spam, quotas and limits | legitimate interest in safe operation |
| Audit and security records | legitimate interest in protecting accounts |
| Detecting and proving abuse of the service (spam, fraud, phishing), establishing and defending legal claims | legitimate interest in protecting the service, our other customers and our rights |
| Website traffic and campaign measurement (counts only) | legitimate interest in knowing where people come to us from |
| Measuring the effectiveness of advertising in ChatGPT (OpenAI pixel) | legitimate interest in knowing whether paid advertising brings customers |
| Running the MCP tools your AI client calls (section 8) | performance of a contract, within the consent you gave the client |
| Operational e-mails about the service (outage, change of terms) | performance of a contract |
What we do not do: we do not read the content of your mail for any purpose other than technical delivery and malicious-content scanning, we do not sell data, we do not display advertising, we do not profile you, and we do not use the content of your messages to train artificial intelligence models.
4. Who receives the data
Processors without which the service cannot be operated:
| Who | What they hold | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Contabo GmbH | the servers, that is all operational data including mail | France (EU) |
| Stripe | payment data of subscribers; the card never reaches us | EU / USA |
| OpenAI | advertising measurement in ChatGPT: the _oaiq cookie, ad click identifier, page address, IP address and browser data, possibly a fingerprint of contact details on the page | USA |
| Cloudflare | authoritative DNS for our domains — name resolution, not mail content; at sign-up, bot protection for the form (Turnstile), which sees your IP address and browser data | globally |
| Telegram | urgent operational alerts to our own administrators; a security alert may contain the address of the affected mailbox, never mail content | globally |
The AI client you connect yourself (for example ChatGPT by OpenAI or Claude by Anthropic) receives exactly the outputs of the tools it calls, as described in section 8, and handles them under its own privacy policy. It is your choice and your authorisation, not a recipient we pick.
An encrypted copy of the backups sits off the main server, on storage belonging to the operator and reachable only over a private network. Without the key, which is kept offline, it is unreadable.
We pass data on only where a legal obligation requires it — and only to the extent the law requires. The exception is abuse of the service (spam, fraud, phishing): we may pass records of it to law enforcement authorities, a court and the attorney representing us, to the extent necessary to protect our rights and those of our other customers. We naturally deliver mail to recipients on the servers chosen by the other party; that is the nature of e-mail.
5. How long we keep the data
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Mailbox content | until you delete it or the account ends |
| Trash | 30 days, then deleted automatically |
| Audit record of administrative actions | 365 days |
| Record of messages received and sent (sender, recipients, subject, result) | 90 days |
| Delivered webhook events | 30 days |
| IP addresses of sign-up and sign-in | 180 days |
| Counters of failed sign-ins (contain the IP address) | about 1 hour |
| Agent (MCP) access, tokens and attachment uploads | see section 8 |
| Undeliverable events (dead-letter) | 90 days |
| Daily website traffic counts | 25 months |
| Sign-up source stored with the organization (campaign, domain) | as long as the account exists |
| Invoicing documents | as required by accounting law |
| Records of detected abuse of the service | until the matter is resolved, at most until the related claims become time-barred |
Backups are an exception that is only fair to state out loud. We back up several times a day and keep older copies for up to 12 months. When you have an account or a message deleted, it disappears from the live system immediately, but it leaves the backups only as the old backups gradually expire. Backups are encrypted and we reach into them only when recovering from a failure.
6. Your rights
- Access and portability. You can download the entire mailbox content yourself at any time over IMAP or JMAP with an ordinary mail client — you do not have to ask for anything.
- Rectification of account data directly in the portal.
- Erasure. Deleting the account removes the mailboxes and their content; for the limitation regarding backups see section 5.
- Restriction of processing and objection to processing based on legitimate interest.
- Complaint to a supervisory authority — for the Czech Republic the Office for Personal Data Protection.
Write to support@mailows.com; we reply within one month. So that we do not hand data to the wrong person, the request must come from the account address or be verifiable in another way.
7. Security
- All communication with the service is encrypted (HTTPS, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S); we do not offer the unencrypted variants of these protocols.
- We keep passwords as argon2 hashes and second-factor secrets encrypted.
- Incoming and outgoing mail is scanned for malicious content.
- Agent access (API and MCP) is bound to a specific mailbox and scope of permissions, which you can revoke in the portal at any time.
- Backups are encrypted and a copy of them sits off the main server.
Should a security breach occur with a risk to your rights, we will let you know without undue delay and meet our notification obligations.
8. AI agents and the MCP server
Our MCP server lets an AI client you choose (for example ChatGPT, Claude or your own agent) work with mail. It works only after you sign in and give consent: you pick specific mailboxes and a scope (read, send), and confirm it with a second factor. The client never gets your password. The server does nothing on its own; it only answers the tool calls the client makes, within that consent. A personal mailbox can be connected only where the organization has this feature switched on; we keep the connection's app password encrypted.
What each tool receives and returns
| Tool | What the client sends | What the client gets back |
|---|---|---|
mail_health | nothing | service status and request ID; no personal data |
mail_list_inboxes | nothing | ID and address of the mailboxes you granted, nothing else |
mail_list_messages |
mailbox, folder, filters (unread, since a date), page size | for each message: ID, sender address, time received, read/unread, whether it has attachments, spam score, sender authentication results (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), scan and encryption status. No subject and no body. Messages are not marked as read. |
mail_read_message | message ID | sender, time, subject and plain-text body (up to 256 kB, labelled as untrusted content), list of attachments (name, type, size, scan result). The message is marked as read. Attachment content only under the conditions below. |
mail_send_message |
sending mailbox, recipients, subject, text or HTML body (or an OpenPGP-encrypted message), attachments up to 10 MB in total, a key against duplicate sending | message ID, recipients, delivery status, attachment scan result. The message is delivered to the recipients' mail servers. |
mail_prepare_attachment_uploads,
mail_upload_attachment_chunk |
file name, type, size and checksum; then the file content | one-time upload links, upload progress and scan result |
Attachment content reaches the client only when the mailbox owner has switched on “Attachments for AI” for that mailbox (it is off by default) and only for files our scanner marked clean, up to 10 MB: text, an image, or a one-time download link valid for 10 minutes. Every message you send through MCP passes the same recipient rules, quotas, anti-spam and malware scanning as any other mail.
What we record about MCP use and why
- The consent (grant): your account, the client's identifier and the name it presents, the mailboxes and scope, when it was created, last used, paused or revoked, and how many messages and recipients it has sent. Purpose: to enforce your consent and limits and to show it to you in the portal.
- Tokens: the access token is valid 24 hours; the refresh token 30 days and we store it only as a one-way hash. Purpose: sign-in of the client.
- Audit record of every tool call: which action, which mailbox, which client and consent, counts (messages, recipients, attachments), attachment size and checksum; for sending also the IP address of the call and the result. It contains no subjects, bodies or file names. Purpose: security, investigating abuse, and answering your question “what did the agent do”.
- Record of messages (sender, recipients, subject, result), the same one we keep for all mail — see section 2.
- Duplicate-send protection: the key and the reply to a send request, so a repeated request does not send the message twice.
- Uploaded attachments wait for sending in temporary storage held in memory only, which is not backed up.
- Service metrics: only the tool name and whether the call succeeded, with no link to you.
We do not use anything the tools receive or return to train AI models, for advertising or for profiling, and we do not sell it. The OpenAI advertising pixel (section 2) has no connection to MCP and never receives tool data.
How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Consent (grant) | ends after 30 days without use, or when you revoke it; the record is then deleted after 60 days |
| Access token | valid 24 hours; we do not store it |
| Refresh token (hash) | valid 30 days, deleted within 7 days after it expires |
| Audit record of tool calls | 365 days |
| Record of messages | 90 days |
| Duplicate-send protection | 2 days |
| Uploaded attachment content | deleted 30 minutes after it is ready if unused, at the latest 2 hours after the upload started |
| Upload record (name, size, checksum) | 2 days |
Your choices
- When giving consent you decide which mailboxes and whether the client may read, send, or both.
- You can pause, resume or revoke any consent in the portal at any time. It applies to the client's very next call.
- Changing your password or second factor ends all MCP access at once.
- Reading attachments stays off unless you switch it on, and you can switch it off again.
- What the AI client already received stays with its operator under its own privacy policy; ask them to delete it. For anything held by us write to support@mailows.com.
9. Children
The service is not intended for children under 16.
10. Changes
The current wording is always on this page. We will announce any substantial change in advance to the account's contact e-mail.