Townes Mail CLI Privacy Policy

THE DATA IT ACCESSES

When you sign in, you approve three Google permissions. With them, Townes Mail CLI can access:

• Gmail (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify): your messages and conversations, including their senders, recipients, subjects, dates, bodies, and attachments; your labels and drafts; and your send-as addresses and signature, so that mail it sends comes from the right address.
• Calendar events (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events): events on the calendars you can access, including their titles, times, descriptions, locations, guests, and Google Meet links, and your responses to invitations.
• Your calendar list, read-only (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.calendarlist.readonly): the names, ids, and time zones of the calendars in your calendar list, your access level on each, and whether each allows Google Meet links.
• Your Google account email address, which it checks against the account you signed in, so that it always acts on the account you meant.

It reads only what a command asks for. It does not sync your mailbox or calendar, and it does not run in the background, apart from an optional weekly job that you install yourself to keep your sign-in active. That job only refreshes the sign-in and checks your account's email address with Google.

HOW IT USES THE DATA

Townes Mail CLI uses Google user data only to carry out the command that you, or your AI assistant on your behalf, runs on your computer. A search returns the matching messages, a send sends the email you wrote, and a calendar command creates or changes the event you described. The tool prints each result to the program that ran the command, on your computer.

Townes does not use Google user data for advertising, does not sell it, and does not use it to develop, improve, or train non-personalized AI or machine-learning models. Townes never receives the data through this tool, and the tool gives no one at Townes a way to see it; someone at Townes would see it only if you send it to them, for example by sharing a log file when asking for help.

WHAT IT STORES, AND FOR HOW LONG

Everything Townes Mail CLI stores is on your own computer, in files that only your user account can read. It keeps no copy of your mailbox or calendar. The paths below are the defaults on both Linux and macOS; they follow the standard XDG_* settings if you have changed them.

What the logs contain. The logs record the commands run, the names of the options used, and the values of a few that hold no content, such as result limits and ids; the email addresses of your accounts; Google ids of messages, conversations, drafts, labels, events, and calendars; the Gmail and Calendar search queries sent to Google; the email addresses of the recipients and calendar guests a command checks or sends to (including drafts and invitations); and timings, error codes, and the name of the program that ran the command. They never record sign-in tokens or other secrets, message bodies, snippets, or subjects, attachment names or contents, or event titles, descriptions, or locations, except where such words appear in a search query that you or your assistant write, which is logged as written. The tool never sends its logs anywhere. Setting the environment variable MAIL_CLI_LOG=off turns the log file off.

SHARING

Townes Mail CLI does not share your Google user data with Townes or with anyone else. Townes does not receive, sell, rent, or trade it, and the tool sends no analytics or usage data anywhere.

The tool sends data to Google only to do what a command asks. Some commands reach other people through Google by design. Sending, replying to, or forwarding mail delivers it to its recipients. Creating, changing, deleting, or responding to an event that has other guests shares that change with them through Google: it can appear on their calendars, and a response, with any note you add, is shown to the organizer. Google emails them about the change only when the command's --notify choice says to.

Results go to the program that ran the command, as described under Your AI assistant.

SECURITY

• Every connection goes directly to Google over HTTPS.
• You sign in on Google's own consent screen, using OAuth with PKCE. You type your password only into Google, and Google returns you to the tool on your own computer, either through a page it serves locally or through a link you paste back to it. Townes never sees your password or your tokens.
• The long-lived sign-in token is kept in your operating system's keychain (or, if you opt in, in a file only your user account can read), and every file the tool writes can be read only by your user account.
• Tokens, secrets, and message content are kept out of logs and error messages, and automated tests check this across the tool's commands, including their failures.

REVOKING ACCESS AND DELETING YOUR DATA

• Run mail-cli auth logout <account> --yes. It revokes Townes Mail CLI's access to that Google account at Google and deletes the sign-in token, access tokens, and account status from your computer. Every installed copy of the tool shares one Google app registration, so this signs the account out on all your computers. Add --keep-grant to remove it from this computer only.
• Or remove Townes Mail CLI's access in your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions. That also stops it on every computer.
• To remove everything else the tool stored, delete these folders: ~/.config/mail-cli, ~/.local/state/mail-cli, ~/.cache/mail-cli, the temporary folder $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/mail-cli (on macOS, $TMPDIR/mail-cli-<uid>), and, if you opted into file storage, ~/.local/share/mail-cli; and delete any attachments you saved to a location you named with -o. Deleting the program does not remove any of these.
• Townes holds no copy of your Google data, so there is nothing for us to delete on our side. Mail and events the tool created or changed are in your Google account, where you manage them as usual.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

When this policy changes, we will update this page and the effective date at the top.