Privacy Policy

MailFlare, by MailFlare Labs. Effective 28 October 2026.

MailFlare is a macOS application that alerts you when an email matching rules you define arrives in one of your Gmail accounts. This policy explains what information the app accesses, what it does with it, and what it does not do. The short version: MailFlare processes your email locally on your Mac, stores almost nothing, and transmits nothing to us or to anyone else.

Information MailFlare accesses

When you sign in to a Gmail account, MailFlare asks Google for the gmail.readonly permission ("View your email messages and settings") for that account. For each account you connect, it uses that permission in these ways, and no others:

• Checking for new mail by reading your mailbox's change history since the last check: the identifiers of messages that arrived or changed, and their Gmail labels (such as Unread or Inbox), not their content. If that history is unavailable, for example after MailFlare has been off for a while, it instead lists recent unread messages (message identifiers only) from the last day, and may also run the same search narrowed to the senders, domains, and subject words in your rules, so a burst of other mail cannot hide a match.
• Reading message metadata for messages it hasn't seen before: the sender, subject, date, the short preview snippet Gmail provides, the message's identifier (used only to open the message in Apple Mail if you choose that), and Gmail's own verdict on whether the sender's address is authentic.
• Suggesting people and previewing rules. While MailFlare's setup assistant or Settings window is open, it reads the sender, subject, and date of up to 100 inbox messages from the last 30 days, and the recipients of up to 50 messages you sent in the last 90 days. It uses them only to suggest people to add to your rules and to show which recent mail a rule would match.

MailFlare does not download message bodies or attachments.

It also reads each account's Gmail profile at sign-in, to label the account with its Gmail address, and again when it needs to restart checking from that mailbox's current position.

How that information is used

The sender and subject are compared against the rules you configured. If a rule matches, the sender and arrival time are shown to you in the alert, with a warning when Gmail could not confirm the sender. By default the subject is shown too, and the preview only when you choose Show Preview; in Settings you can turn this off to show everything, or hide the subject as well until you choose Show Details. You can also set a rule to alert only for senders Gmail confirmed. The recent mail described above is used only for suggestions and rule previews in the window you have open. MailFlare does not analyse, index, or retain the content of your email.

What is stored on your Mac

• Your rules and settings, in a configuration file inside the app's private container, plus a few preferences: the addresses of the Gmail accounts you added, whether alerts are paused, and how far you got through setup.
• For each account, a list of message identifiers MailFlare has already alerted on (capped at 500), so it never alerts twice for the same message. It also keeps the identifiers of alerts you haven't dismissed yet, the time of the last check, and its place in that mailbox's change history, so an alert is not lost if MailFlare quits. These are opaque Gmail IDs and times, not message content.
• A Google sign-in token for each account, in the macOS Keychain only. It is never written to a file.
• A diagnostic log recording when alerts were shown and dismissed and any errors, kept locally to help you troubleshoot. It records message identifiers, not message content, unless you turn on verbose logging for troubleshooting.

Message content shown in an alert exists only in memory: while the alert is on screen, and in the menu's list of this session's alerts until MailFlare quits. The recent mail used for suggestions is also held only in memory. It is refreshed at most every 10 minutes while the window is open, discarded when you close it or sign out, and never written to disk.

What is not done

• MailFlare has no servers and no analytics. No data about you or your email is transmitted to MailFlare Labs or to any third party.
• Your Google data is never sold, used for advertising, used to train models, or shared with anyone.
• No human at MailFlare Labs can read your data; it never leaves your computer.

Google API Services User Data Policy

MailFlare's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Revoking access

Choose Sign Out for an account in MailFlare at any time; the app revokes that account's token with Google and deletes it from your Keychain. You can also remove MailFlare's access from your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Deleting the app's container (~/Library/Containers/) removes all locally stored settings and message identifiers.

Children

MailFlare is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted at this address with an updated effective date.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@mailflarelabs.com.