How Dottie keeps your family’s email private

Letting any app read your email is a real decision. A family inbox holds school notices, but also bank alerts, medical reminders and messages you’d never want shared. This page explains exactly what Dottie does with it, in plain words, and gives you a checklist you can use on any app that asks for the same access.

The full detail is in Dottie’s privacy policy. Everything below comes from it.

Why Dottie reads email at all

Most of a family’s schedule arrives by email: the school newsletter, the coach’s “practice moved” note, the field trip form, the dentist’s confirmation. A calendar only knows what someone typed into it. To keep the calendar honest, something has to read the email.

Dottie reads the email you connect for three reasons, and only these:

• You asked it something (“When is the book fair?”).
• It is checking for urgent messages to alert you about, like a closure or a schedule change.
• It is looking through school and activity email for dates and to-dos.

What it keeps, and what it lets go

This is the part that matters most. The email itself, its pictures and its attachments are read and then let go, not stored. What Dottie keeps is what it found: the dates, events and to-dos from school, team and activity email, and a note that it already read (or alerted you about) a message, so it doesn’t do it twice.

If you ask “where did you hear that?”, Dottie can tell you, because it keeps a short note on each reply of what it looked at: an email’s sender, subject and date. Never the email itself. That note is encrypted and deleted with the message.

Your inbox is yours, even inside your family

Families share a lot, but not everything. In Dottie, each grown-up connects their own accounts, and your email is yours alone. Other people in your family can never ask Dottie about your inbox. Not even your partner.

What is shared is what you choose to share:

• Only you: your email, any calendar you mark “Private to me”, your reminders, things you asked it to remember just for you, and your own conversation with Dottie.
• Your family: calendars you share with the family, what it remembers for the family, shared lists, and the family group chat.

In a family group chat, Dottie shares only what the whole family can see. It never brings up anyone’s email there. And being invited to a family shares nothing: someone who adds you learns nothing about you until you join and choose what to connect.

It reads; it doesn’t send

Dottie never sends email on its own. It can write a draft for you to look over and send yourself, and with Gmail it saves that draft in your Drafts folder. It never sends, deletes or changes your email.

iCloud and Outlook are read-only. Dottie reads the calendars and inbox you connect there, but never adds, changes, deletes or sends anything, and doesn’t even mark an email as read.

One more safeguard: text in emails, events and web pages is treated as information, never as instructions. An email can’t tell Dottie to do something. It asks you before it adds or changes anything.

How it’s locked up

• Your Google, iCloud and Outlook access keys and passwords are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) before they are stored.
• For iCloud you use an app-specific password, a separate password Apple lets you make for one app, never your Apple Account password.
• What Dottie remembers for your family, your shared lists, and the source notes on its replies are encrypted too.
• Every request is checked against your family on the server, so nobody can reach another family’s data by changing a link.
• Logs record that something happened, not what your messages or emails said.

Who else touches your data

A few companies process data on Dottie’s behalf, only to run the service: the database host, the texting provider, and Anthropic, whose AI (Claude) reads your message and the details Dottie fetched to answer it. Anthropic does not train on this data. Dottie doesn’t sell your data, show ads, or use your data to train AI models.

For Gmail, Dottie follows Google’s API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. The privacy policy lists every service by name.

How to switch it off

You can stop any part of it, any time:

• Text STOP and Dottie sends nothing more until you text START.
• Disconnect Google, iCloud or Outlook, or delete your account, from your Dottie home page.
• From Google’s side, open your Google Account’s linked apps page and choose Remove access for Dottie.
• From Apple’s side, revoke the app-specific password under Sign-In and Security at account.apple.com.

Disconnecting iCloud or Outlook deletes the stored password or keys, along with that account’s calendars and the private dates and to-dos found in its email. Deleting your account removes your profile, conversation, reminders and connections, and revokes Dottie’s access at Google.

Questions to ask any app that wants your email

Whether you choose Dottie or something else, these are fair questions for any service that asks to read your inbox. A good one answers them in its privacy policy, in plain words.