Privacy Policy

What Tidely does

Tidely finds newsletters and promotional email in your Gmail mailbox, groups them by sender, and unsubscribes from the ones you choose. Its Clear out page also lets you find emails already in your mailbox and archive them, move them to Trash, label them or mark them as read. It is free, and it is a personal project rather than a company.

The demo is separate from all of this: it runs entirely in your own browser on invented data, needs no account, and never contacts Google or any mailbox.

What Tidely reads, and exactly when

These are the moments Tidely reads or changes anything in your mailbox. This is all of them.

• When you run a scan: Tidely reads message headers — the sender, the subject line, the date, and the unsubscribe information senders put in the List-Unsubscribe and List-Id headers. It does not open the message.
• When you unsubscribe from a sender that published no unsubscribe header: the only remaining way to leave that list is to find a link inside the message itself, so Tidely fetches that sender’s most recent message and searches its HTML for an unsubscribe link. This happens only for that one message, only for senders with no usable header, and only because you asked to unsubscribe.
• When a sender’s only unsubscribe route is an email address: Tidely sends one message from your Gmail address to that address, with the subject “unsubscribe” and a single line asking to be removed. It sends nothing else, to nobody else, ever.
• When you use Clear out: Tidely searches your mailbox with the filters you choose and shows each matching message’s sender, recipients, subject, date, size, labels and read status, plus Gmail’s own short excerpt of it. It does not download message bodies or attachments. This is fetched while you look at the page and is not stored. Opening a preview does not mark an email as read.
• When you organise emails in Clear out, and only after you select them and ask: Tidely archives them, moves them to Gmail’s Trash, adds one of your labels, or marks them as read. It changes only the messages you selected — not the rest of their conversations — and never deletes anything permanently. Gmail empties its Trash after 30 days.

The Google permissions this needs

When you connect your inbox, Google asks you to approve these scopes:

• gmail.readonly — to read message headers during a scan, and the one message body described above.
• gmail.send — to send the unsubscribe emails described above. It is not used for anything else.
• gmail.modify — only if you choose to organise mail in Clear out. It is not requested when you first connect: Tidely asks for it separately, explains it first, and keeps everything you already allowed. It is used to archive, move to Trash, label and mark as read the emails you select. Unlike Gmail’s full-access scope, it cannot permanently delete mail, and Tidely never asks for full access.
• userinfo.email, userinfo.profile and openid — to know which mailbox is connected and to show your name in the interface.

In full: openid https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.send, and, once you allow organising, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.modify.

Without the organise permission, Tidely cannot archive, move, label or modify your messages. With it, Tidely changes messages only when you select them and confirm, and it never deletes anything permanently.

What is stored

• Your email address, your name, and the Google account you connected.
• One summary row per sender — the address, display name, how many messages were seen, when the first and last arrived, one sample subject line, and the unsubscribe details from its headers.
• Your decisions: which senders you kept and which you unsubscribed from.
• A log of every unsubscribe attempt, including the failures, with what was tried and what came back.
• The progress of your scans, so a scan can be resumed rather than restarted.
• A History of what you did in Clear out: the action, when, and how many emails it succeeded or failed for. Not which emails, and nothing about their contents.

Your Google refresh token is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is written to the database. The login cookie is a signed token holding only an internal user id — no email address and no Google tokens. Message bodies are never stored, and neither are the subjects, senders or excerpts Clear out shows you. The one message that may be fetched during an unsubscribe is searched for a link in memory and discarded; what is kept is the outcome and, where relevant, the unsubscribe URL you were handed.

Who else is involved

• Google, as the provider of your mailbox.
• Vercel (hosting) and Turso (database), which process this data only as infrastructure providers.
• The senders you unsubscribe from. An unsubscribe request necessarily reaches that sender’s own systems, and a mailto unsubscribe tells them your email address — which they already have, since they were emailing you. What they do with the request is outside Tidely’s control.

Your data is not sold, not shared with anyone else, not used for advertising, and not used to train models.

Limited Use disclosure

Tidely’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Google user data is used only to provide the features described on this page. No human reads it, except where you explicitly ask for help with something, where it is necessary to resolve a security incident, or where the law requires it.

Removing your data

There are three separate things you can do, and they differ:

• Disconnect mailbox (in Settings) revokes the token with Google and deletes every sender, scan, attempt and Clear out History entry stored for that mailbox. Your Tidely login stays, so you can connect a mailbox again without signing up twice.
• Delete account (in Settings) does all of the above and also deletes the account record itself — your email address, your name and the link to your Google account — then signs you out. Nothing of yours remains in the database.
• Revoke access at Google, at myaccount.google.com/permissions, stops Tidely reaching your mailbox immediately. It does not delete what Tidely already stored — use one of the two options above for that.

Deleted rows are removed from the live database immediately. Encrypted infrastructure backups may keep a copy for a short period before they expire. If you would rather have it handled by hand, email martin.marinov406@gmail.com.

Unsubscribes already carried out are not reversed by any of this, and emails already sent cannot be unsent. Emails you archived, labelled or moved to Trash stay that way in Gmail.

Google app verification

The Gmail permissions above are what Google classifies as restricted scopes. Before an app using them can be offered to everyone, Google requires verification and an independent security assessment that has to be renewed annually. Until that is complete for this project, Google sign-in works only for addresses added to it as test users.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects how your data is handled, the date at the top of this page changes with it and the new version is published here.

Contact

martin.marinov406@gmail.com