Privacy policy
Effective July 6, 2026 · Vireo for macOS
Your mail lives on your Mac. Nothing leaves your machine by default. Below is the exhaustive list of every network connection Vireo can make — most exist only because email requires talking to your mail server, and the rest are off until you turn them on.
The short version
- No Vireo servers touch your mail. There is no Vireo cloud, no sync service, no account with us. Messages are stored in a local Maildir on your Mac and indexed on-device.
- No analytics, no tracking, no ads. The app contains no analytics SDK, no advertising identifiers, and phones home nothing about how you use it.
- Credentials stay in the macOS Keychain. Passwords and OAuth refresh tokens are stored by macOS on your machine, never transmitted to us.
- We never sell, share, or monetize your data. We couldn't if we wanted to — we don't have it.
Every connection the app can make
| Connection | When | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| Your mail servers | Always (that's email) | IMAP/SMTP traffic between your Mac and the mail providers you configured (e.g. Gmail, your IMAP host), over TLS. This is your mail moving between you and your own provider — it never routes through us. |
| Google sign-in | Only when you connect a Gmail account with OAuth | The standard Google OAuth consent flow, directly between your Mac and Google. Tokens are stored in your Keychain. |
| Update check (Sparkle) | Periodically, while the app runs | A fetch of the public release feed to see if a newer version exists. No identifiers, no account, no usage data — the same request your browser would make loading the releases page. |
| Your AI endpoint (optional) | Off by default; only if you configure one | If you point Vireo at an AI endpoint you control (e.g. Ollama on your own machine), the message text being summarized or categorized is sent to that endpoint you chose. Vireo never operates an AI middleman, and no AI feature runs until you set one up. |
| Crash reporting (optional) | Off by default; only if you opt in | If you enable crash reporting (offered once during setup, or anytime under Settings ▸ Diagnostics), a crash sends a technical report — the stack trace plus your Vireo and macOS versions — to a self-hosted error-tracking service (GlitchTip) that we operate. No third party is involved. Reports are scrubbed before sending and never include message content, email addresses, subjects, account names, or credentials. Turn it off and nothing more is sent, ever. |
That's the whole list. Any future optional diagnostic will be off by default, disclosed on this page first, and will never include message content.
Google user data
When you connect a Gmail account, Vireo requests the
https://mail.google.com/ scope — the scope Google designates for
IMAP/SMTP email clients. Vireo uses it solely to send and receive your email
as the email client you installed:
- Gmail data is synced directly from Google to a local Maildir on your Mac and indexed on-device for search. It is not transmitted to, stored on, or processed by any server operated by us.
- Gmail data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train AI or machine-learning models — neither generalized nor personalized.
- No human reads your data. There is no mechanism by which we could — it is on your Mac, not ours.
- Vireo's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Deleting your data
- Remove an account in Vireo (Settings → Accounts → Delete): its local mail store, index entries, and Keychain credentials on your Mac are deleted.
- Revoke Vireo's access to Google anytime at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
- Delete the app and its local data folder, and no trace remains — there is no server-side copy to chase.
Children
Vireo is a general-audience email client and is not directed at children under 13. We collect no data from anyone, children included.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with an updated effective date, and material changes will be called out in the release notes before they ship.
Contact
Questions about privacy: [email protected].