An email filter that doesn’t read your email
Most “smart inbox” tools work by giving a company’s servers access to your mailbox, where software reads your mail to sort it. If you’d rather nobody’s software reads your email but your own, the design has to be different, not just the privacy policy.
OpenWorthy is built that way:
- It runs on your own computer. There is no service to trust because there is no service. The connection goes from your machine straight to Gmail, Outlook or your IMAP server.
- It only asks for headers. Every request it makes to Gmail, Outlook or your mail server names the header fields it wants, and nothing else. There is no code in OpenWorthy that fetches the text of an email — and its own tests fail if any ever appears.
- It decides from facts you’d use yourself: Is this a reply to me? Have I written to this person? Am I the only recipient? Is it a mailing list?
- It marks; it doesn’t move. Nothing disappears into a folder you forget to check. The Worth Reading label shows up in your normal mail app and on your phone.