Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 25, 2026

Contact: founder@withmarlowe.app

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Overview

Marlowe is a personal assistant that helps you manage tasks inferred from your email. It runs as a desktop application for macOS and as a companion app for iPhone. This policy explains what data Marlowe accesses, where that data goes, and what is kept.

The short version: your email is read on your Mac, analysed by AI services, and turned into tasks. Your task list syncs to Marlowe's server so your phone can show it. The text of your email is archived on your Mac only — never on Marlowe's server.

Email access

Marlowe connects to email accounts you choose:

• Gmail, using Google OAuth with the single permission gmail.readonly
• Outlook / Microsoft 365, using Microsoft OAuth with the permissions Mail.Read, User.Read, and offline_access

Both are read-only. Marlowe cannot send, modify, delete, or otherwise alter your email or your account.

Marlowe uses this access solely to identify actionable tasks and to maintain the context that makes those tasks useful to you. It is never used for advertising, profiling, resale, or training AI models.

How email content is handled

This is the most important section, and it has two parts.

Classification

When Marlowe reads an email, the sender, subject, and body are loaded into memory on your device and sent to the Anthropic API for classification — deciding whether the message implies something you need to do. Anthropic processes the content and returns a structured result.

The email archive on your device

After classification, Marlowe writes a record of the email to a local database on your Mac (marlowe-vec.db, in your application support folder). That record contains:

• The sender's or recipient's name and address
• The subject line
• Up to the first 1,500 characters of the message body
• The message's original timestamp

This archive exists so Marlowe can check its own conclusions later. Without it, a single misreading at classification time would become a permanent, unverifiable "fact" that Marlowe could never re-examine. It lets you ask questions like "when did that bid come in" and get an answer grounded in what the email actually said.

To make that archive searchable, the same text is sent to OpenAI's embeddings API (text-embedding-3-small), which converts it into a numerical vector. OpenAI receives the text; the resulting vector is stored on your Mac. The request passes through Marlowe's server, which forwards it to OpenAI and does not retain the content.

This email archive stays on your device. It is not synced, uploaded, or backed up to Marlowe's server.

What is derived and kept

From each processed email, Marlowe retains:

• The message ID, so the same email is never processed twice
• Any tasks it inferred, as short descriptions
• Context notes and conversation lines used to inform future sessions

Attachments are never downloaded, processed, or stored.

Where your data lives

On your Mac

In ~/Library/Application Support/Marlowe/:

On your iPhone

The iPhone app stores only credentials, in the iOS Keychain: a device identifier generated on first launch, a per-device access token, your licence key, and your email address. Your task list is fetched from the server as needed and is not written to long-term storage on the phone.

On Marlowe's server

Marlowe operates a server at api.withmarlowe.app, hosted on Railway, with a PostgreSQL database. It stores:

• Licence key — your Freemius-issued identifier
• Email address — collected at purchase, used for billing links, sign-in links, and security notifications
• Freemius credentials (install_id, install_api_token) — billing-provider identifiers, not Google or Microsoft credentials
• Task data (tasks.json) — the same task list held on your Mac, synced so your other devices can read it
• Device records — one per signed-in device: a device identifier, a device name such as "iPhone 17 Pro", an access token, and a last-active timestamp
• Sign-in links — single-use tokens tied to your email address, valid for 15 minutes
• Push notification tokens — issued by Apple, used to deliver reminders to your phone
• Reminder queue — upcoming reminders, including the task text to be delivered
• Pending mobile operations — actions taken on your phone that your Mac has not yet performed
• Usage records — timestamps, model names, and token counts for cost accounting. These contain no message content.

Never stored on Marlowe's server

• Raw email content — subjects, bodies, sender names
• Email attachments
• Google or Microsoft OAuth tokens
• Your contacts or address book

Contacts

Marlowe reads your macOS Contacts, with your permission, so that it can recognise the people who appear in your email — matching an address to a name and organisation. Contacts without an email address are discarded on import.

This address book is stored only on your Mac, in its own file, and is never uploaded to Marlowe's server or shared with any third party.

The iPhone app

The iPhone app shows your task list and lets you flag, schedule, and complete tasks. It does not access your email; all email processing happens on your Mac.

Signing in. You enter your email address and Marlowe sends you a single-use link, valid for 15 minutes. Opening it signs that device in and issues it a credential stored in the iOS Keychain. When a new device signs in, Marlowe emails you a notification.

Notifications. If you enable them, reminders are delivered through Apple's Push Notification service. The text of the reminder — which may include task content — passes through Apple's infrastructure in order to reach your phone.

Asking your Mac to check email. Refreshing on your phone can ask your Mac to check for new mail immediately. This sends a request to Marlowe's server, which your Mac collects. No email content is involved; your Mac does the reading.

Third-party services

None of these services receives your data for advertising purposes, and Marlowe does not sell your data to anyone.

Data protection

• In transit: all communication between Marlowe, its server, and every third-party service travels over encrypted HTTPS (TLS 1.2/1.3).
• At rest, server: the Marlowe database is encrypted at rest with AES-256, managed by Railway.
• At rest, Mac: local files are protected by macOS file-system permissions and readable only by your user account.
• At rest, iPhone: credentials are held in the iOS Keychain, protected by the device's hardware encryption and excluded from unencrypted backups.
• Server credentials: third-party API keys live only as server environment variables and are never sent to or accessible by the apps. This is why AI requests are routed through Marlowe's server rather than made directly.

Retention and deletion

Marlowe keeps data for as long as you use it. There is no scheduled purge, because the value of the assistant depends on accumulated context.

Deleting your server data. Both the Mac app and the iPhone app have a "Delete my Marlowe data" control. It immediately and permanently removes your task board, device records, usage history, pending operations, and sign-in links from Marlowe's server, and signs out every device. It does not cancel your subscription.

Deleting local data on your Mac. Quit Marlowe and delete ~/Library/Application Support/Marlowe/. This removes your tasks, your email archive, your imported contacts, and your OAuth tokens permanently.

Deleting local data on your iPhone. Sign out, which clears stored credentials, or delete the app.

Disconnecting an email account. Disconnecting Gmail or Outlook inside Marlowe deletes the stored OAuth tokens from your Mac immediately.

If you cancel your subscription, your server-side data is scheduled for deletion and removed after 30 days. Reactivating within that window restores it.

You may also write to founder@withmarlowe.app with any request regarding your data, and it will be handled within 30 days.

Data Marlowe does not collect

• Browsing history
• Location
• Device analytics or behavioural telemetry
• Any data used for advertising
• Data from anyone other than you

Children's privacy

Marlowe is not intended for anyone under 13 and does not knowingly collect data from children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, users will be notified and the effective date above will be updated.

Contact

founder@withmarlowe.app