Privacy Policy

Who we are

inua is developed by Lyric and its contributors as an open-source project at github.com/lyricat/inua. In this policy, “we” means the inua project. You can read every line of the code that handles your data in that repository.

inua Mail and your Google account

When you add a Gmail or Google Workspace account to inua Mail, you sign in on Google’s own page in your browser, and Google asks whether you allow inua Mail to access your account. inua Mail asks for these permissions:

• Read, compose, send and manage your mail (https://mail.google.com/), so that inua Mail can show your mailboxes and conversations, keep them in sync, send the messages you write, and carry out what you ask of it, such as archiving, deleting, starring, moving or marking messages read.
• Your contacts (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/carddav), so that while you type an address inua Mail can suggest the people in your Google Contacts by their names. inua Mail only reads them: it never adds, changes or deletes a contact.
• Your email address, name and profile picture (openid, email, profile), so that inua Mail can name the account and show its picture in the sidebar.

How the data is used

inua Mail uses your Google data only to provide the features of a mail app that you can see and use: reading, searching, writing, sending and organising your own mail. It connects directly from your computer to Google’s servers (imap.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com for mail, www.googleapis.com for contacts). Your mail never passes through a server of ours.

What is kept, and where

Everything inua Mail keeps is stored on your computer, in your own user folders:

• A copy of your messages, so they open quickly and while you are offline: in ~/.cache/inua/mail/. It is a cache of what is on Google’s servers and can be deleted at any time.
• Your profile picture, downloaded from Google: in the same cache folder.
• The names and email addresses of your contacts, for the suggestions, without their other details: in the same cache folder. It is a copy of your Google Contacts, read again each time inua Mail connects.
• Drafts you have not sent yet: in ~/.local/share/inua/mail/drafts/.
• Your account’s settings (its name, address and servers, never a password or token): in ~/.config/inua/mail.toml.
• The sign-in token Google issues to inua Mail (a refresh token), so that you do not have to sign in every time: in your desktop’s keyring (the Secret Service, such as inua-keyring or GNOME Keyring), or, when no keyring is running, in a file only your user can read.

Suggestions of people to write to come from the addresses in your own messages and from your Google Contacts. Contacts are never sent to the assistant or anywhere else.

How your data is protected

• Encrypted in transit. inua Mail reaches Google only over encrypted connections: IMAP over TLS (imap.gmail.com, port 993), SMTP over TLS (smtp.gmail.com, port 465), and HTTPS to sign in, renew its access and read your contacts. It never falls back to an unencrypted connection: if one cannot be made, nothing is sent.
• The sign-in token, encrypted at rest. The refresh token is kept in your desktop’s keyring, which encrypts it: inua-keyring with your GPG key, GNOME Keyring with your login password. It is never written to a settings file or a log. Only when no keyring is running does inua Mail keep it in a file that only your user account can read (~/.local/share/inua/mail-secrets.json, permissions 0600); that file is not encrypted, so running a keyring is recommended.
• Readable by your user account only. The folders that hold your cached mail and drafts are created so that only your user account can open them (permissions 0700, their files 0600); other users of the computer cannot read them. A file is written whole and then moved into place, so a half-written copy is never left behind.
• Encryption of the disk. The cached copy of your mail is protected by these permissions, not encrypted by inua Mail. To protect it if your computer is lost or stolen, use full-disk encryption (such as LUKS, offered by Linux installers).
• Nowhere else. There is no server of ours, no backup and no copy anywhere but your computer. inua Mail’s log records its connections and errors, not the content of your messages.
• Removed with the account. Removing an account in inua Mail deletes its cached mail, its contacts, its picture and its sign-in token from your computer; revoking access at Google stops inua Mail at once.
• Open to review. All the code that handles your data is public at github.com/lyricat/inua. Security problems can be reported at github.com/lyricat/inua/issues.

Sharing

We do not receive, sell, rent or share your Google data, and we do not use it for advertising. No person at the inua project can read it. Your Google data is not used to develop, improve or train AI or machine-learning models, by us or for us.

The one exception, under your control, is the assistant described below: when you set it up and ask it for something, the part of your mail that the request needs is sent to the AI service you chose.

Google API Services User Data Policy

inua Mail’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.

The assistant in inua Mail

inua Mail can summarise a conversation, suggest replies, draft or polish a message, search with a sentence, give a second opinion on a message that looks like phishing, summarise an attachment, and, if you turn it on, sort new mail by what it asks of you. These features use an AI service, and none of them works until you set one up:

• You choose the provider (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or a model running on your own computer) and enter your own API key in Settings. inua does not include, run or pay for an AI service, and has no access to your key or your requests.
• Requests go directly from your computer to that provider, under your agreement with them. Their privacy policy and terms apply to what they receive; check whether they keep or train on the data sent to their API. A model on your own computer keeps everything local.
• Each feature sends only what it needs, and only when you ask: for a summary, the messages of that conversation (their senders, dates and text, without quoted replies and signatures); for a draft, your instruction, the conversation and a few of your own sent messages as examples of your style; for a search, only the sentence you typed; for a phishing check, the message’s headers, links and the start of its text; for an attachment, the file’s text.
• Sorting is the only feature that runs by itself, on new mail in your inbox. It is off until you turn it on, and sends the sender, recipients, subject and the first lines of each new message.
• You can turn the assistant off for inua Mail in its settings, and remove your key at any time.

Summaries and sorting results are kept on your computer, with the rest of the cache.

Other connections inua makes

Apart from the services you connect yourself (mail accounts, an AI provider), inua contacts these services, from your computer, for the features that need them:

• Updates: release builds check GitHub (github.com/lyricat/inua) for a new release about once a day. This can be turned off in Settings.
• Remote images in mail: images that a message loads from the internet are only fetched when you allow it, as fetching them can tell the sender that you opened the message.
• Brand logos in mail (BIMI): for a message your provider found to really come from its sender’s domain (DMARC), inua Mail asks DNS whether that domain publishes a logo, and fetches it from the address the domain gives, once per domain and kept a week. This tells the domain’s server that someone received its mail, not who or which message.
• Sender icons in mail: for a message your provider found to really come from its sender’s domain (DMARC) and whose domain publishes no BIMI logo, inua Mail fetches the icon of the sender’s website (from its home page, /apple-touch-icon.png or /favicon.ico), once per site and kept a month. As with a BIMI logo, this tells the site’s server that someone received its mail, not who or which message.
• Weather: the places you search for and add are sent to Open-Meteo.
• Stocks: the symbols you follow are sent to Yahoo Finance.
• Currency conversion in the launcher: exchange rates come from Frankfurter and Coinbase.
• Web search in the launcher opens the search engine you chose in your browser.

Mobile Link and Remote Desktop connect only to devices you pair or share with, on your own network. Each of these services has its own privacy policy.

This website

inua.one has no analytics, no cookies and no tracking. It loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address as any web server does. The colourway and language you pick are remembered in your browser’s local storage and never leave it.

Your choices

• Remove an account in inua Mail’s settings: its cached mail, its picture and its sign-in token are deleted from your computer.
• Revoke inua Mail’s access to your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. inua Mail then cannot read or send your mail until you sign in again.
• Delete the cache (~/.cache/inua/mail/) whenever you like; inua Mail downloads what it needs again.
• Uninstall inua and delete the folders above to remove everything it kept.

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to export or delete on our side.

Children

inua is a general-purpose desktop for computers and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone, children included.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published on this page with a new date, and the history of every change is kept in the project’s repository. If a change affects how inua Mail uses Google data, we will say so in the release notes before it takes effect.

Contact

For questions about this policy or about your data, open an issue at github.com/lyricat/inua/issues.