Application Desk privacy notice
How the personal mail-monitoring feature reads messages, keeps evidence locally, and gives its owner control over application updates.
Purpose and scope
Application Desk is a privately operated job tracker for its individual owner. Its mail feature looks for application receipts, employer replies, interview invitations, and related updates in accounts the owner connects. Selected messages can support the owner’s local application history.
The app has no public sign-up. This notice covers the mail feature and its local records.
Mailbox access
Gmail: the owner authorizes Google’s Gmail read-only scope,
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly. The service uses the Gmail
API to read message content and metadata for application tracking. It does not request
Gmail mail-write or mail-send permissions.
Yahoo: the owner supplies a generated Yahoo app password. The IMAP client opens mailboxes in read-only mode and reads messages without marking them as read. A Yahoo app password can grant broader provider access than the operations this client uses.
The initial import scans recent mail from the previous 90 days. The service then checks for new mail and saves checkpoints so it can resume after sleep, interruption, or a temporary connection failure.
Information kept on the Mac
Credentials, including provider tokens and the Yahoo app password, are saved in macOS Keychain. The local SQLite database holds the account’s provider and email address, connection status, and synchronization metadata. Application Desk does not encrypt the SQLite database.
For selected relevant messages, the database can retain:
- Sender and recipient addresses, sender name, subject, and received date.
- Provider message and thread identifiers, message links, and available sender-authentication metadata.
- Selected message text of up to 12,000 characters per retained message, with a record when content is truncated.
- Suggested application matches, classification and review state, recorded outcomes, and audit history.
The service reads messages to determine relevance; it does not retain the owner’s entire mailbox as a local mail archive. Attachments are not stored. Selected text and headers may contain personal information already present in the original message.
Processing and external communication
Application Desk complies with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements, for all Google data it handles.
Matching and classification use local rules. Mail content is not sent to an external AI service. The mail service communicates directly with Google or Yahoo over encrypted provider connections to read the connected account.
Google data is not sold or used for advertising or generalized AI model training. This public information website does not receive mailbox content.
The mail feature has no SMTP sending function. It does not send messages externally, move or delete mail, or write mailbox changes. The app’s read-only Yahoo client enforces this behavior even though the Yahoo app password itself can permit broader access.
Review, corrections, and disconnection
The owner can inspect the sender, date, selected text, proposed match, and reason for an update. Uncertain matches require review. The owner can apply or ignore a message and undo an applied update; the correction remains in the application audit history.
Pausing an account stops its automatic checks. Disconnecting an account stops checking it and removes that account’s stored credential from macOS Keychain. Existing message evidence, application outcomes, and audit records remain in the local database.
Ignore, Undo, and Disconnect preserve saved evidence. The current interface has no individual-message erasure control or automatic deletion timer. Retained evidence remains until the owner removes the local Application Desk data store and any backup copies. The owner can also revoke Application Desk’s access in the provider’s account settings.
Practical limits
Automatic matching and classification can miss relevant messages or identify a message incorrectly. A recorded outcome should be checked against its evidence when a decision depends on it. Local storage and Keychain use do not remove the need for the owner to protect access to the Mac and any backups they create.
The background service can check with the browser tab closed. It needs the Mac to be awake, the service to be running, and a working provider connection.