Privacy

why.email, Why Mail, Slate, Tabular, Chest, Nook, Townsquare, Porter and the why.email developer API are run by Simplifyd Systems Limited (“we”). Questions about this policy, or about your data, go to support@why.email.

• Your account. Your name, your address, and your password, which we store only as a one-way hash. On a business account, the organization you belong to and your role in it.
• Your mail and what you make. Messages and attachments, calendar events, documents, spreadsheets, files and labels. We store them so you can read them on the web, in Why Mail and in any IMAP app. They are encrypted in transit and at rest, and backed up.
• Your contacts. The addresses you write to are kept for your own autocomplete and suggestions. They are not shared, sold, or used to build a profile of you.
• Your devices. When you sign in to Why Mail on a phone or computer, we keep a record of the device so it can stay signed in, and, if you allow notifications, its push token.
• Payments.Card payments are taken by Paystack on its own page. We never receive your card number; we keep the reusable authorization Paystack gives us for renewals, and the card’s last four digits so you can tell which one it is.
• Running the service. The records needed to deliver mail, stop spam and abuse, and keep the service working, such as delivery results and sign-in events.
• Visits to this website. We count visits to why.email with Umami, which we run ourselves, to see which pages people read. For each visit it records the page, the site you came from, your browser, operating system, device and language, and the country, region and city your IP address points to. It sets no cookies and does not keep your IP address. It runs on this website only, not in your mailbox or the apps.

• We do not show ads, and we do not sell or rent your data.
• We do not read your messages to target you, and we do not buy data about you from data brokers.
• We do not use your mail, documents or files to train AI models.

When you open a message, Why Mail can show who it is from. That card is built from your own mail (the name and signature they use), your organization’s directory for colleagues, and information the person or their company published themselves: their Gravatar, a GitHub account verified to own the address, their company’s homepage, and its public DNS records, which say who hosts its mail.

We only look up people you correspond with or work with. The lookups run on our servers, and images are fetched there, so your browser does not contact those services. Results are cached for two weeks.

New-mail and team-comment notifications on iPhone and Android are delivered through Apple Push Notification service and Firebase Cloud Messaging. A notification carries what it shows you: the sender, the subject and the first words of the message, or of the comment. Turn notifications off in your phone’s settings and we stop sending them.

On a business account, a team comment on a thread is visible only to the thread’s owner and the colleagues mentioned into it, who can then read that thread. Nothing in a discussion is sent to the people on the email.

Your organization’s administrators can add and remove mailboxes and reset passwords for the organization’s accounts.

Townsquare messages are end-to-end encrypted. Our servers hold a message only in encrypted form, only until the recipient’s devices collect it, and then delete it. We cannot read it. We do hold who is in which workspace, which channels exist, and which devices you have signed in on.

An organization can add an AI agent to Townsquare. The agent is a member like any other, marked as an agent, and it stays silent until someone addresses it by name. A message it can read is decrypted on the agent and sent to an AI model provider to produce its answer.

Porter keeps the sign-ins you connect to it (tokens and keys for the services you choose) sealed with AES-256-GCM, and uses them only to make the calls an AI you have authorized asks for, within the reach and time you gave it. Porter records every call, every refusal and every change to a connection, and shows you that record. You can switch a connection off at any time.

Porter’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We use it only to carry out the requests you or the AI you authorized make, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use it to train AI models.

When you use Sign in with Why on another application, or connect an AI agent to your mailbox, we share only what the consent screen lists, and only after you approve it. Sign in with Why tells the application who you are and nothing more; no mail is reachable through it. You can disconnect an application in the inbox under Settings → Connected apps.

A developer account is separate from a mailbox. For mail you send through the API we keep the message, its delivery events for 30 days, and replies to it for 30 days, so that the console can show what happened and webhooks can report it. Addresses that bounced or complained are kept on your suppression list.

• Service providers that help us run why.email, such as the infrastructure it runs on, Paystack for payments, Apple and Google for notifications, and the AI model provider behind Townsquare agents, each only for that purpose.
• The recipients of mail you send, and the people you share a document, file or meeting with.
• Our staff, when you report something. A reported team comment is kept with who wrote it and who reported it; a message reported as junk is kept as its sender and subject, not its body. We keep a report for as long as we need it to deal with abuse, and it stops naming you when your account is deleted.
• Authorities, where the law requires it. We will tell you about such a request where we are allowed to.

Your mail is plain IMAP, so any mail app can copy your whole archive somewhere else. Documents and spreadsheets export to Word, PDF, CSV and XLSX, and files in Chest can be downloaded.

Files you delete in Chest wait in the trash for thirty days before they go.

You can delete your account yourself, in the inbox under Settings → Account or in Why Mail under Accounts; see deleting your account. It is locked and signed out everywhere at once, and deleted thirty days later: its mail, contacts, calendar, documents, files, Porter connections and Townsquare devices. Signing in before then keeps it. Backups expire on their own schedule after that.

You can also ask us at support@why.email for a copy of what we hold about you, or to correct it.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and tell you by email before a change that affects what we do with your data takes effect.