For clients
How we handle your data
This page is for clients whose mail is sensitive, or who share an industry with other clients of ours. It says plainly what Backline Agency Inbox Organizer can see, what leaves your inbox and where it goes, who runs it, and what we keep. The privacy policy is the formal version; nothing here changes it.
1. Who runs it, and on what
Backline Agency LLC is one person, Jackson Reed. He is the only person with access to the servers, the database, and the keys. There is no support team, no contractor, and no one else who can sign in to the back end.
The app is one application with one database, hosted by Render in Virginia, shared by every client. Each client's configuration and processing records are separated by the workspace they belong to, and every query the app makes must name a workspace before the database will answer it. There is no feature that compares, pools, or reports across clients.
The administrative view Jackson uses shows ids, counts, and settings. It has no path to the contents of anyone's mail; the app refuses an administrator session on every route that touches mail, and that refusal is tested. If we ever need to see an email to help you, you send it to us.
2. What leaves your mailbox, and where it goes
- For every new email: the sender, subject, and a short snippet go to Anthropic's API so a model can pick a category. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days and does not train on them.
- For a category with urgent alerts on: the first 4,000 characters of each new email's body go to Anthropic with the rule you wrote, so the model can decide whether it is urgent and write the one- or two-sentence summary that is texted to you.
- When you ask a question on the Ask page: your question, then the sender, subject, and snippet of matching threads, then the full text of at most 6 threads go to Anthropic. Attachments are never read. Nothing is sent until you ask.
- Summaries and urgent alerts by text: the wording goes to Twilio for delivery. Twilio logs it until we erase it, which we do within about an hour; a copy can sit in Twilio's backups for up to 30 days after that.
- Every page you load: passes through Cloudflare, which decrypts it, checks it, and re-encrypts it on the way to our servers. Cloudflare stores no page content.
Nothing else leaves. Summary emails are sent from your own Gmail account to you. Gmail data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train anything.
3. What the Gmail permission allows, and what the app does with it
The app asks Google for two permissions, and it is worth knowing the gap between what they allow and what the app does.
gmail.modifyallows reading mail, creating and applying labels, marking mail read, and moving mail to Trash. The app reads incoming mail, applies labels, and marks mail read only if you turn that on. It never trashes, archives, or moves anything.gmail.sendallows sending mail as you. The app sends your summary emails from your address to your address. It never replies, forwards, or sends to anyone else.
If Backline Agency itself were ever compromised, an attacker holding our keys could do what the permission allows, not only what the app does. That is why we keep the token encrypted with a key held outside the database, and why your kill switch does not depend on us: remove the app at any time from your Google account's third-party access page. If we ever notify you of an incident, check your Trash and Sent folders and your Google account activity.
4. What we keep, and for how long
- Never: email bodies, subjects, senders, snippets, or attachments, and neither your questions nor the answers. When the dashboard shows you a sender or subject, it is fetched from Gmail for that page view and discarded.
- For the engagement: your encrypted Gmail token, your categories and settings, your confirmed mobile number and consent record, and the record of any question packs you bought.
- 90 days: Gmail message ids with the category assigned and the time, which is what your chart and activity feed draw on; run and audit logs; the text of any automation request you send us.
- About an hour: the wording of a text at Twilio.
- Up to 14 days: server logs at Render, which hold ids, counts, and error text, never mail content or addresses.
- Up to 7 days after deletion: a deleted row in Render's database backups, which exist only to restore after a failure.
When you delete your inbox in settings, you type its name to confirm and everything above, including your sign-in, is deleted at that moment. There is no undo. Nothing of yours remains in the app. Our own invoices and accounting records for the engagement live outside the app and are kept as business records.
5. Clients with competing interests
We expect to serve clients who compete with one another. Your data is used only to run the app for you. It is never shown to, compared with, or combined with another client's. The AI model sees your mail only to do the job you asked for, keeps none of it, and learns nothing from it. The categories, rules, and descriptions you write are yours and stay inside your workspace.
6. Things worth knowing before you connect
- Until Google's verification of the app completes, Google shows an "unverified app" screen when you connect. Your invite explains what to expect.
- There is no uptime guarantee. Labeling runs every 15 minutes and summaries run on your schedule; either can be delayed.
- Categories, summaries, and alerts are written by an AI model. They can be wrong, and a carefully worded incoming email can slip misleading wording into a summary. Treat them as pointers back to your inbox, not as instructions.
7. If something goes wrong
If we suspect that our keys, our database, or our Google credentials have been exposed, the first step is to revoke every stored Gmail token at Google, so that nothing can read or send mail with it, and then to rotate our own keys. We notify affected clients by email and phone without undue delay and within 72 hours of confirming an incident, with what happened and what to check. Reconnecting Gmail afterwards takes one click.
8. Questions
Ask before you connect, or at any point after. Backline Agency LLC, [email protected].