The short version
- We store the email you forward or connect to us, and the calendar events, todos, chores and lists you build from it.
- We use it to run household.email for you. That's the whole purpose.
- There are no ads. We don't sell your data or share it with data brokers.
- We send email content to an AI provider to pull dates and tasks out of it. The terms we use them under do not allow them to train their models on it, and we don't train models on it either.
- You can disconnect a mailbox at any time, and you can delete your household and everything in it yourself, from your account page.
Who we are
household.email is the service at household.email. If you want to talk to a person about anything on this page, email hello@household.email. We're small, so that address reaches us directly.
What we collect
Account details
Your email address, your name, your timezone, and optionally a date of birth. We sign you in with emailed codes and magic links rather than passwords.
Household members
The names and, if you enter them, dates of birth of the adults and children in your household. Dates of birth are used for birthdays and for showing age-appropriate task views. Only adults in your household can see or change this.
Your household gets its own email address. Anything sent or forwarded to it is stored: the subject, the sender and recipients, the message body in full, and any attachments. If you connect Gmail, iCloud or another IMAP mailbox, we fetch and store the messages that match what you've asked us to watch, on the same terms. We also store replies and forwards you send from household.email, and a short AI-generated summary of each message.
Household content
Calendar events, todos, chores and who completed them, shopping lists, tags and labels — both what you type in yourself and what we suggest from your email.
Connected accounts
If you connect Google (Gmail, Calendar or Tasks), Apple iCloud, or a plain IMAP mailbox, we store the access credentials needed to keep syncing — OAuth tokens for Google, and the username and app-specific password you give us for IMAP accounts. We use them only to sync the mail and calendars you've connected.
Payments
When paid plans are switched on, payments are handled by Stripe. Card details go to Stripe and never touch our servers — we keep only the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, and its status and renewal date.
Technical data
Ordinary server logs, and error reports when something breaks. Error reports go to monitoring software we run on our own infrastructure, configured not to include personal data.
Waitlist
If you join the waitlist we store your email address so we can tell you when your invite is ready. We also note which of our pages you signed up on and, if another site sent you to us, that site's address (never its search terms or anything after a "?"), so we know which pages are worth writing more of. Nothing else. Ask us and we'll take it off the list.
How AI is used on your email
Reading a school newsletter and spotting the one date that matters is the job household.email does for you, and it uses a large language model to do it. When an email arrives, we send its subject and the beginning of its body to our AI provider and ask for the events, deadlines and tasks hiding in it. The suggestions come back to you to accept or reject — nothing is added to your calendar without you seeing it. Our AI assistant, when you use it, sends short extracts of your household's email, calendar, todos and lists so it can answer your question.
We use OpenAI for this today. Their API terms do not permit training on data sent through it, and we have not opted into any programme that would change that. If we ever move to a different provider, it will be one whose terms carry the same prohibition, and we'll update this page. We do not train any model of our own on your data.
Who else your data reaches
These are the companies involved in running the service, and why:
- OpenAI — reads email content to extract events and tasks, and powers the household assistant.
- Migadu — hosts the mailbox behind your household's email address.
- Mailgun — delivers the email we send you, such as sign-in codes and reminders.
- Komoot — suggests addresses as you type an event's location. It sees only what you type in that field, not who you are.
- Stripe — processes payments, once paid plans are switched on.
- Google and Apple — only if you connect their accounts, and only to sync what you've connected.
Everything else — the database, your attachments, error monitoring — runs on infrastructure we operate ourselves. We will also hand over data if the law genuinely requires it, and we'll tell you unless we're forbidden from doing so.
Our pages load a webfont from Google Fonts and two small stylesheets from the jsDelivr CDN, so those services see your IP address when a page loads. They set no cookies and get nothing else.
What we never do
- No advertising, anywhere in the product, on any plan.
- No selling your data, and no sharing it with data brokers or ad networks.
- No profiling you for anyone else's benefit.
- No AI provider training its models on your household's data.
- No reading your household's email by hand, except in the rare case where you ask us to look at something to help fix a problem.
Cookies
We set a cookie to keep you signed in. Before you sign in, it also remembers which site sent you to us, for the waitlist note above, and your invite code if you arrived on one. Signing in sets one more, in a browser as much as in the iOS and Android apps, which the apps read to tell a live session from a stale one; an admin gets a second cookie saying so. They are all ours: there are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers, so there's no consent banner to click through.
Security
Traffic to household.email is encrypted over HTTPS. Your household's data is walled off from every other household, and access to the servers is limited to the people who run the service. Passwords and tokens are kept out of our logs.
Being straight with you: the credentials for mailboxes you connect are held in our database so that syncing can continue, protected by the access controls around that database rather than by per-field encryption. Encrypting them at rest is on our list. Your calendar feed URL contains a long random token and anyone who has the URL can read that calendar, so treat it like a password — you can regenerate it from your integrations page at any time.
Keeping and deleting your data
We keep your household's data for as long as the household is using household.email. You can disconnect Gmail, iCloud or an IMAP mailbox yourself at any time, from the integrations page, and we immediately stop fetching from it.
To delete your data, use the delete button on your account page. If yours is the only sign-in account in the household, it deletes the household and everything in it: email, attachments, calendar, todos, chores, lists and the household's mailbox, and cancels any subscription. If other people in your household have their own accounts, it deletes your account and leaves the household's shared data with them — the last account to leave takes the household with it. Deletion is immediate and permanent.
Prefer to ask a person, or want something more specific deleted? Email hello@household.email and we'll do it within 30 days and confirm when it's done.
If you want a copy of your data before you go, ask in the same email and we'll get it to you.
Your rights
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask for a copy, or ask us to delete it. Depending on where you live you may have these rights by law; we'll honour the requests either way. One email is enough — we won't make you fill in a form.
Children
household.email is set up by adults. An adult in the household can add a child's name and date of birth so chores and birthdays work, and a child may use the household's account to see their own tasks. We don't advertise to anyone, and children's information is used only inside the household that entered it.
Changes to this policy
If we change something that matters, we'll update the date at the top of this page and tell household admins by email. We won't quietly start doing something this page says we don't do.