Stow privacy policy

Effective date: 24 October 2026
Last updated: 24 October 2026

Stow is a Mac app that keeps a private, encrypted, searchable copy of your email on your own Mac. This policy explains what Stow reads, where it keeps it, and what never leaves your Mac.

The short version: your mail goes from Google or Microsoft straight to your Mac, and stays there. Stow has no servers that receive, store or process your mail. We cannot see it, and we cannot recover it for you.

Who we are

Stow is made by T1G OÜ, a company registered in Estonia, registry code 16972248, registered at Sakala tn 7-2, Kesklinna linnaosa, Tallinn, Harju maakond, 10141, Estonia ("Stow", "we", "us").

Contact for anything in this policy: privacy@getstow.ee

What this policy covers

This policy covers the Stow app for macOS, the free open-source Stow engine and its stowmail command-line tool when built from our official releases, and the website getstow.ee.

The accounts Stow connects to

Stow connects to:

• Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, through Google's IMAP service, signed in with Google OAuth.
• Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com accounts, through Microsoft's IMAP service, signed in with Microsoft OAuth.

You sign in in your web browser, on Google's or Microsoft's own page. Stow never sees or stores your password.

What Stow asks Google for

• https://mail.google.com/: Google's permission for IMAP access to Gmail. Google describes it as "Read, compose, send, and permanently delete all your email from Gmail". It is the only permission that lets an app download mail over IMAP. Stow only reads. Its code can send only read-only commands to the mail server, and it has no way to send, change, move, label, flag or delete anything in your mailbox.
• openid and email: your Google account's email address, so Stow knows which account it has signed in to.

What Stow asks Microsoft for

• IMAP.AccessAsUser.All: IMAP access to your mailbox. As with Google, Stow only reads.
• offline_access: lets Stow keep syncing without asking you to sign in every hour.
• openid and email: your account's email address.

What Stow reads from your mailbox

When you add an account, Stow downloads:

• Your email messages in full: headers (sender, recipients, subject, date and other technical headers), message text, and attachments.
• Folder and label names, and each message's folders or labels.
• Message state: read or unread, starred or flagged.
• Identifiers and sizes: the server's message and thread identifiers, message sizes and arrival dates, used to sync correctly and avoid duplicates.

What Stow does not download:

• Gmail Spam and Bin, and Microsoft Junk Email, unless you choose to include them. To notice when you have moved an already archived message to Spam, Bin or Junk, Stow compares identifiers only: Gmail's message IDs in Spam and Bin, and the Message-ID line of each message in Microsoft's Junk Email. It downloads nothing else from those folders.
• Microsoft calendars, contacts, tasks, notes and journal, which are not mail.
• Anything outside your mailbox, such as Google Drive files. If an email contains a Drive link, Stow keeps the link, not the file.

Stow reads your mail without changing it. It opens folders read-only and fetches messages in a way that does not even mark them as read.

What Stow does with it

Stow uses your mail only to provide the features you see in the app:

• keep an archive of your mail on your Mac;
• let you search it, including text inside attachments (text in scanned documents is recognised on your Mac using Apple's on-device text recognition);
• show you, using rules you can see and change, which messages look like newsletters or other bulk mail, so you can decide what to keep;
• tell you which old mail is safely archived, and how you could delete it from your mailbox yourself if you want to. Stow never deletes it for you.

We do not use your mail for advertising, we do not sell it, we do not use it to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models, and no person at Stow ever reads it.

Where your mail is stored

Only on your Mac, or on a local disk attached to it that you choose.

• By default the archive is in your user folder on your Mac (~/Library/Application Support/Stow/). You can choose another local disk, including an external one.
• Stow refuses to keep the archive in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or any other cloud-synced folder, or on a network drive. Those would put your mail back on someone else's servers or risk damaging it.
• Everything is encrypted. The database, including the search index, is encrypted with SQLCipher (AES-256). Each message and attachment file is encrypted separately with AES-256-GCM. File names are derived with a secret key so they reveal nothing about the contents.
• The keys stay in your Mac's Keychain and are marked so they never sync to iCloud Keychain or leave the Mac.
• Your sign-in tokens (which let Stow keep syncing without your password) are also kept only in your Mac's Keychain.

Your recovery key

When you set up Stow, it shows you a recovery key once. With your recovery key and a copy of your archive (for example from a backup), you can open the archive on another Mac. Without it, nobody can, including us. We never receive or store your recovery key. Keep it safe, like a password: anyone with your recovery key and a copy of your archive could read your mail.

Backups

Stow allows macOS Time Machine to back up the archive, because it is encrypted and the keys are not in the archive folder. Backups are made by your Mac, to a disk you control; they do not go to us. Restoring an archive onto a new Mac needs your recovery key.

Once you delete old mail from Gmail or Outlook, Stow may hold the only copy. Stow reminds you of this; keeping your Mac backed up is up to you.

What never leaves your Mac

• Your mail, attachments and search index. Stow has no servers for mail. Your mail travels only between Google's or Microsoft's servers and your Mac, over an encrypted connection.
• Your tokens and encryption keys.
• Usage data. The Stow app does not send telemetry, usage analytics or crash reports containing your mail to us or anyone else.

Stow keeps its own logs on your Mac (~/Library/Logs/Stow/) to help diagnose sync problems. They never contain message content, subject lines, passwords or tokens. Email addresses appear in logs only in a scrambled form that cannot be turned back into the address. Logs stay on your Mac unless you choose to send one to us.

Network connections Stow makes

• To Google and Microsoft, to sign in, refresh access, and download your mail.
• To getstow.ee, to check for updates. Stow uses Sparkle to ask getstow.ee whether a newer version exists. The request carries the app's version number and, like any web request, your IP address; no system profile is sent. You can turn automatic update checks off in Stow's settings.
• To Polar, for purchases and licensing. When you buy Stow, Polar (polar.sh) sells it to you as merchant of record and sees your payment details; we never do. To check your licence, Stow sends your licence key and a generic device name to Polar when you activate it and at most once a week after that. Nothing about your mail is ever sent.

Stow makes no other connections.

Using Stow with an AI assistant (optional)

The Stow engine includes an optional local connector (an "MCP server") that lets an AI assistant you use, such as Claude, search your archive. It is off by default and you turn it on for each account separately. It runs on your Mac and talks only to the assistant app on your Mac.

When it is on and you ask your assistant a question, the assistant may ask Stow for matching messages, and Stow passes those results to it. Those results then leave your Mac with your request and are handled by your assistant's provider under that provider's privacy policy, not ours. Stow keeps a local record of each request (the search and how many results were returned, never the content). Turn the connector off at any time to stop this.

Google user data: Limited Use

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

In particular, Stow:

• uses Google user data only to provide and improve the user-facing features described in this policy;
• does not transfer it to anyone, except at your request as described under "Using Stow with an AI assistant", or where required by law;
• does not use it for advertising, and does not sell it;
• does not use it to develop, improve or train generalised artificial intelligence or machine learning models;
• does not allow any person to read it. Because Stow has no servers holding your mail, no one at Stow is able to.

We apply the same rules to mail from Microsoft accounts.

Removing your data and revoking access

Everything Stow holds is on your Mac, so you are in control of it.

• Remove mail from the archive: you can remove individual messages, senders or whole groups of mail from Stow at any time. This never touches your mailbox.
• Remove an account: removing an account from Stow deletes its sign-in tokens from your Keychain. Mail already downloaded stays in your archive until you delete it.
• Delete everything: delete the archive folder and remove the Stow items from your Keychain. Copies in your own backups remain until you delete those too. Removing the Stow app keeps your archive, because it is your data; to delete it, use "Delete archive" in Stow's settings.
• Revoke Stow's access at Google: Google Account > Security > "Your connections to third-party apps and services" (https://myaccount.google.com/connections), then remove Stow.
• Revoke Stow's access at Microsoft: for a personal account, https://account.live.com/consent/Manage; for a work or school account, https://myapps.microsoft.com or ask your administrator.

After you revoke access, Stow can no longer download mail from that account. It does not delete the archive.

Because we never hold your mail, we cannot access, export or delete it for you, and a request to us for a copy of your mail would find nothing. Stow can export your archive in standard formats so you are never locked in.

What we keep about you

We do not keep a customer database or any personal data about you. When you buy Stow, Polar (polar.sh) sells it to you as merchant of record and holds your purchase and payment details under its own privacy policy.

We do not send marketing email. If we ever do, it will only be to people who have asked for it, on the basis of their consent, and you will be able to withdraw that consent at any time.

Information you send us

If you email us (for example support@getstow.ee or privacy@getstow.ee), we receive your email address and whatever you write. We use it only to reply and to deal with your request, which is our legitimate interest in answering you, and we do not keep it longer than that needs. Please do not send us your mail, recovery key or anything from your archive. If you choose to send a log file, it contains no message content.

The website

getstow.ee is a static website hosted by Cloudflare. Cloudflare processes basic technical information such as IP addresses to deliver and protect the site. The website uses no analytics and sets no cookies.

Children

Stow is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Your rights

You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct or delete it, by writing to privacy@getstow.ee. In practice we hold only emails you have sent us. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to Estonia's Data Protection Inspectorate (Andmekaitse Inspektsioon, www.aki.ee).

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will publish the new version here with a new "last updated" date. If a change affects what Stow does with your mail, for example if any of it would ever leave your Mac in a new way, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect.

Contact

T1G OÜ
Sakala tn 7-2, Kesklinna linnaosa
Tallinn, Harju maakond, 10141
Estonia
privacy@getstow.ee