Privacy policy

1Who is responsible

mello is run by Jérémie Amstutz, Switzerland, who is responsible for your data (the “controller”) under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, for people in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For anything about your data, write to hello@mello.mx.

2What we collect

• Your account: your address, your password (stored only as a hash), your name, your plan, and the settings you choose, such as language, country and filters.
• Your mail and what goes with it: the messages you send and receive, with their attachments and folders, and your calendars, contacts, tasks, private addresses and drafts.
• Billing (paid plans): what you bought, when, and the payment status. Your card or account details go to our payment provider, not to us.
• Technical data: IP addresses, times and protocol details of connections to our servers, kept in logs to run the service, stop abuse and fix problems.
• Devices you allow: if you turn on notifications, the push subscription your browser gives us; if you connect an app (for example an AI assistant), which app it is and what you allowed it to do.

3How we use it

• To provide the service: receive, store, sort, search and send your mail, and sync it with your apps.
• To protect you and others: check senders (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), filter spam and malware, limit failed sign-ins, and stop accounts that send spam.
• To bill paid plans and keep the accounting records the law requires.
• To write to you about your account: security notices, changes to these documents or your plan. We don’t send marketing without your consent.

We rely on our contract with you (providing the service), our legitimate interest (security, abuse prevention, improving reliability), legal obligations (accounting) and, where we ask for it, your consent.

We don’t sell your data, show ads, or read your mail ourselves. A person looks at a message only when you ask us to (for example in a support request), or when the law requires it.

4The assistant and other AI features

Some features use an AI model: the assistant (follow-ups, reply reminders, suggested tasks, drafts), search by meaning, and a second opinion on possible spam. For these, the relevant message text is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic or OpenAI, which processes it and returns a result. We use their business API services, which by their terms don’t use what we send to train their models.

The assistant only works while it’s on, and you can turn it off in Settings. Nothing is sent on your behalf without you.

5Who else sees your data

• The people you write to. A message you send goes to the recipients’ mail servers, which are outside our control.
• Service providers working for us: our hosting provider, our payment provider for paid plans, and the AI providers named above. They process data only on our instructions.
• Notification services. Notifications go through your browser’s push service (for example Apple, Google or Mozilla). They see that a notification was sent, not your mail.
• Spam blocklists. To check incoming mail, we look up the sending server’s IP address in public blocklists.
• Anyone with a link you share. A shared conversation, file or booking page can be read by anyone who has its link, until you stop sharing it.
• Apps you connect. An app you connect to your mailbox gets the access you granted, under its own privacy policy.
• Authorities, when Swiss law requires us to disclose data. We disclose only what we must.

6Where your data is processed

Your mailbox is stored on servers we run at our hosting provider. Some providers above, such as the AI providers, are based in the United States. When data goes to a country without an adequate level of protection, we rely on recognised safeguards such as the Swiss–US Data Privacy Framework or the standard contractual clauses.

7How long we keep it

• Your mail, calendars, contacts and settings: for as long as you keep them in your account. What you delete is removed, and Trash is emptied as you or your settings decide.
• When your account is closed, we delete its data. Copies in our backups disappear as the backups are replaced, within 12 weeks.
• Connection logs: only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting.
• Billing records: 10 years, as Swiss accounting law requires.

8Cookies

mello uses only the cookies it needs: one that keeps you signed in (encrypted, for at most 12 hours) and a few that remember choices such as your language. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, and this website uses no analytics. Fonts are served from our own servers.

9Security

Connections are encrypted with TLS, and we use MTA-STS to protect mail between servers. Your password is stored as a hash. Messages are cleaned on the server and shown in a sandbox, and remote images stay blocked until you allow them. No system is perfectly secure: if a breach puts your data at risk, we’ll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

10Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, or to hand it over in a common format, and you can object to processing based on our legitimate interest or withdraw a consent. Much of this you can do yourself: your mail is always reachable over IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, so you can take it with you at any time.

Write to hello@mello.mx; we answer within 30 days. If you think we handle your data wrongly, you can complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, in the EU, to your local data protection authority.

11Children

mello is for people aged 16 and over. We don’t knowingly create accounts for younger children.

12Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we update the date at the top. For significant changes, we tell you by email at least 30 days before they apply.