This Privacy Policy explains how SortaMail, an email app for phones and computers made by Moonrise Apps, LLC ("we", "us", or "our"), handles your information. It covers the SortaMail app on iOS, iPadOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux ("the app") and this website at sortamail.app ("the website").
The short version. SortaMail has no servers, and we don't collect your personal data. Your email, your sign-ins, and your settings stay on your device. The app talks directly to your email provider. To show sender pictures and images inside emails, it also makes a few lookups that are listed in section 4. None of them include the contents of your email, and none of them go to us.
1. How SortaMail works
SortaMail is an email app that shows your email as threads grouped by the people in them. To do that, the app connects from your device directly to the email providers you add, such as Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, or any IMAP service, downloads your email to your device, and shows it to you.
- We do not run any servers that receive, store, process, or relay your email, your sign-ins, or other personal data.
- Your email travels directly between your device and your email provider over encrypted connections.
- Everything the app keeps, including messages, attachments you open, contacts it learns from your mail, settings, and sign-ins, is stored on your device.
- The app has no user accounts of its own, no analytics, no advertising, and no crash-reporting service.
Because of this design, Moonrise Apps, LLC does not collect, receive, or have access to your email or your personal data.
2. Information the app uses
To work as an email app, SortaMail uses the following information. All of it stays on your device except as described in section 4.
Email data
- Messages, including their content, subject lines, sender and recipient names and addresses, dates, flags, and folders or labels.
- Attachments. The app records each attachment's name, type, and size when it syncs, and downloads the file itself only when you open it.
- Names and addresses of people you exchange email with, which the app collects from your mail on your device to suggest recipients as you type.
The app uses this data only for the features you see in it: showing your email as threads, reading, writing, replying, forwarding, archiving, snoozing, moving, reporting spam, and deleting mail, searching, showing attachments, listing newsletters and unsubscribing when you ask, and showing new-mail notifications and badges.
Account sign-ins
- For Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, the access and refresh tokens Google issues when you sign in with Google. The app never sees your Google password.
- For Outlook.com and Microsoft 365 accounts, the access and refresh tokens Microsoft issues when you sign in with Microsoft. The app never sees your Microsoft password.
- For iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, and other IMAP accounts, the username, password or app password, and server settings you enter.
- Your account's name and email address, which the app shows to identify the account.
App settings
Your choices in the app, such as theme, account colors, signatures, aliases, snoozes, and drafts, are stored on your device. Snoozes and drafts stay on the device where you made them.
3. Where your information is stored
- Email data is stored in the app's private storage on your device so the app can show and search it, including when you are offline. On a computer, that is the SortaMail folder in your user account's application data. On a phone, it is the app's private storage, which other apps cannot read.
- Sign-ins (tokens and passwords) are encrypted before they are saved, using a key held by your operating system's secure storage: the Keychain on Apple devices, the Android Keystore on Android, Windows' built-in credential protection on Windows, and your desktop's keyring (such as GNOME Keyring or KWallet) on Linux.
- Your mail database relies on your device's own storage encryption, such as FileVault, BitLocker, or the encryption built into iOS and Android. We recommend keeping it turned on.
- On Android, the app opts out of cloud backups so its data is not copied off the device.
- Nothing is sent to Moonrise Apps, LLC or to any server we operate, because no such servers exist.
4. Every connection the app makes
This is the complete list of places the app connects to. All connections are encrypted (TLS), except plain DNS lookups on computers, which use your system's resolver.
| Connection | What is sent, and why |
|---|---|
| Your email providers | Your sign-in and the requests needed to sync, send, and organize your mail. For Gmail, this is Google's Gmail API. For Outlook, it is Microsoft's mail servers. For other accounts, it is the IMAP and SMTP servers you entered. |
| Google and Microsoft sign-in | When you connect a Gmail or Outlook account, the sign-in happens on Google's or Microsoft's own page. The app then receives tokens from them, renews those tokens, and asks for your account's name and address. When you remove a Gmail account, the app asks Google to revoke its access. |
| Gravatar (gravatar.com) | To show a sender's photo, the app sends Gravatar a hash (a scrambled, one-way form) of the sender's email address. For your own accounts, it does the same with your address, unless you turn off "Show an avatar image" for that account. |
| Senders' domains and websites | To show a company's logo, the app looks up the sender's domain for a brand logo record (called BIMI) and may download the logo it names, and it may download the small icon from the sender's website. These lookups are skipped for common personal email domains such as gmail.com. Results are saved on your device and reused for up to two weeks. |
| Google Public DNS (dns.google) | On phones, the logo lookups above are made through Google's encrypted DNS service, which receives the sender's domain name. |
| Images inside emails | When you view an email that contains pictures hosted online, the app loads them from the sender's servers, as most email apps do. This can tell the sender, or their email service, that the email was opened, when, and from what IP address. |
| Unsubscribe requests | Only when you choose to unsubscribe: the app sends the sender's one-click unsubscribe request to the address they provided, or sends an unsubscribe email from your account, or opens the sender's unsubscribe page in your browser. |
| Links you open | Links in emails open in your web browser, which handles them under its own privacy policy. |
| Spell check dictionaries | On some computers, the desktop app's built-in spell checker downloads a dictionary file for your language from Google. Nothing you type is sent. |
The lookups for sender pictures and the images inside emails reveal your device's IP address to the service being contacted, as any internet request does. They never include the contents of your email.
Your email providers, Google, Microsoft, and Gravatar handle data under their own privacy policies. Google's is at policies.google.com/privacy, Microsoft's is at privacy.microsoft.com, and Gravatar's (operated by Automattic) is at automattic.com/privacy.
5. Google user data and Gmail
When you connect a Gmail or Google Workspace account, SortaMail uses Google's sign-in (OAuth) and Google's official Gmail API. Google shows you the permissions the app asks for before you agree. They are:
- gmail.modify: to read, send, and organize your email (for example, to mark messages read, archive, move, report spam, and move to Trash). The app does not permanently delete email.
- Your email address and basic profile: to label the connected account in the app with your name and address.
Here is how SortaMail accesses, uses, stores, and shares Google user data:
- Access. The app accesses your Gmail messages, attachments, labels, and related details directly from Google's servers through the Gmail API, over encrypted connections, only after you give permission on Google's consent screen.
- Use. Google user data is used only to provide the features you see in the app, described in section 2. It is not used for anything else.
- Storage. Google user data is stored only on your device. Your Google tokens are encrypted with a key held in your device's secure storage. Nothing is stored on servers we operate, because we operate none.
- Sharing. Google user data is not sold, and it is not shared with us. To show sender pictures, the app sends Gravatar a one-way hash of a sender's address and looks up the sender's domain, as described in section 4. When you choose to unsubscribe from a newsletter, the app contacts that sender. No email content is shared with anyone.
You can remove SortaMail's access to your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Removing the account in SortaMail also deletes its saved sign-in and stored mail from your device and asks Google to revoke the app's access.
6. Google API Limited Use disclosure
SortaMail'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.
In line with those requirements:
- SortaMail uses Google user data only to provide and improve the user-facing features that are visible and prominent in the app.
- SortaMail does not transfer Google user data to others, except as necessary to provide or improve those features (such as the sender-picture lookups above), to comply with applicable law, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets with your explicit prior consent.
- SortaMail does not use or transfer Google user data for advertising, including retargeting, personalized, or interest-based advertising.
- SortaMail does not allow humans to read Google user data unless you give affirmative agreement for specific messages, it is necessary for security purposes such as investigating abuse, it is necessary to comply with applicable law, or the data has been aggregated and anonymized for internal operations. Because your data never reaches us, we have no way to read it in the first place.
- SortaMail does not use or transfer Google user data to develop, improve, or train generalized artificial intelligence or machine learning models.
7. Microsoft accounts
When you connect an Outlook.com, Hotmail, or Microsoft 365 account, you sign in on Microsoft's own page. SortaMail asks Microsoft for permission to read and send your mail over IMAP and SMTP, to see your name and email address, and to keep you signed in. The tokens Microsoft issues are encrypted and stored on your device, and are used only to connect to Microsoft's mail servers for you. Microsoft data is handled the same way as all other email data in this policy: it stays on your device and is never sent to us.
8. Other email accounts
For iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, and other IMAP accounts, you enter your username, password or app password, and server details in the app. These are encrypted and stored only on your device, and used only to connect directly to your provider's servers over encrypted connections. The app requires an encrypted connection to your mail server and will not send your password in plain text.
9. What we never do
- We never collect, receive, or store your email or sign-ins on any server.
- We never sell your data or share it with advertisers or data brokers.
- We never show ads, and we never use your data for advertising.
- We never use your email for analytics, profiling, or marketing.
- We never use your data to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models.
- The app contains no third-party advertising, analytics, or tracking code.
10. Keeping and deleting your data
All of your data lives on your device, so you are always in control of it.
- Removing an account. When you remove an account in SortaMail, its stored mail, attachments, and saved sign-in are deleted from your device.
- Uninstalling. Uninstalling SortaMail removes the app's stored data, following your operating system's usual uninstall behavior. On a computer, you can also delete the SortaMail folder in your application data.
- Revoking access. You can revoke SortaMail's access to Google at myaccount.google.com/permissions and to Microsoft at account.live.com/consent/Manage (or through your organization's administrator for work accounts).
- Your mailbox itself. Actions you take in SortaMail, such as archiving, moving, or deleting, happen on your email provider's servers, just as they would in any other email app. Your provider's own rules apply to your mailbox.
We keep nothing, because nothing is sent to us.
11. Security
- All connections to your email providers use encryption (TLS), and the app checks that it is talking to the real server.
- Gmail and Outlook use Google's and Microsoft's own sign-in, so the app never handles those passwords.
- Sign-ins are encrypted on your device with a key held in your operating system's secure storage.
- Email content is cleaned before it is shown so that scripts in an email cannot run, and attachments open in other apps only for file types that are safe to open.
- SortaMail's Gmail access completed Google's verification for restricted Gmail permissions, including an independent CASA security assessment, in September 2026.
Your stored mail is also protected by your device's own security. We recommend using a passcode or password, keeping storage encryption on, and keeping your system up to date.
12. App stores and payments
If you download SortaMail from the App Store, Google Play, or TestFlight, Apple or Google handles the download and any purchase under their own privacy policies. If you have chosen to share app analytics with developers in your device settings, Apple or Google may give us aggregated crash reports and usage statistics, which do not include your email.
If SortaMail offers paid features, such as SortaMail Pro, payments will be handled by the app store or payment provider you buy through. We will not receive your payment card details.
If you join a beta test, the platform running it (for example, Apple's TestFlight) may share with us the email address you used to join, any feedback or screenshots you choose to send, and crash reports. We use these only to run the beta and improve the app.
13. Your rights and choices
Privacy laws such as the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California give you rights over personal data that companies hold about you, including the rights to access, correct, delete, and move it, and to opt out of its sale.
Moonrise Apps, LLC does not collect or hold personal data about SortaMail users, so there is no data on our side to access, correct, delete, or move, and nothing is ever sold. Your data stays on your device and with your email providers, where you can manage it directly. If you email us, we receive what you choose to include and use it only to reply to you; ask us and we will delete your messages.
14. This website
sortamail.app is a simple informational website. It has no accounts, sets no cookies, and has no analytics, ads, or tracking. Its fonts and images are served from the site itself, so your browser doesn't contact other companies when you visit. The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which may automatically record standard technical information, such as IP addresses and the pages requested, to deliver and protect the site.
15. Children's privacy
SortaMail is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Since we collect no personal information from anyone through the app, none is collected about children. If you have a concern, contact us at support@sortamail.app.
16. Changes to this policy
If we change how SortaMail handles your data, we will update this policy and the date at the top of this page, and for important changes we will let you know in the app before they take effect. The current version is always at sortamail.app/privacy.
17. Contact us
SortaMail is made and published by Moonrise Apps, LLC, San Diego, California (moonriseapps.com).
If you have questions about this policy or about how SortaMail handles your data, email support@sortamail.app.