Privacy policy

Who we are

Ask by Email is operated by Hallan Labs LTD, a company registered in England and Wales. We are responsible for how your personal data is handled when you use the service.

What we receive

When you email one of our addresses, we receive the sender address, recipient address, subject, body, attachments if included, and standard email headers. We use this information to process your request and send an AI-generated reply back to you.

How we use your data

We use your email content only to provide the service you requested: summarising, answering, extracting actions or drafting a reply. We also use minimal metadata to operate the service, prevent abuse, avoid duplicate processing, manage monthly credits, monitor costs and fix errors.

What we store

We do not store the body of your email, attachments, or the AI's reply in our application database after processing. Your own inbox remains the system of record for the original email and our reply.

We do store minimal metadata for each request: your email address, the mode used, timestamp, status code, monthly credit usage, aggregate AI token usage counts, and an inbound message ID used to deduplicate retries.

We retain this metadata for as long as your email-based account exists. If you ask us to delete your account, we remove the user record and associated request metadata within 30 days.

Your first summary or ask email may be processed automatically to demonstrate the service. All subsequent emails require activation.

Lawful basis

We process your email content because it is necessary to provide the service you requested. We keep minimal request metadata based on our legitimate interest in operating, securing and improving the service, preventing abuse, avoiding duplicate processing, and monitoring usage and costs.

Service providers

To provide Ask by Email, we use trusted service providers for hosting, email processing, database storage and AI processing. These currently include Cloudflare, OpenAI, Supabase and Vercel.

We only share information with these providers where needed to operate the service. These providers may process data in accordance with their own privacy, security and data-processing terms.

International transfers

Some of our service providers may process data outside the United Kingdom. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as data processing terms, standard contractual clauses, or equivalent transfer mechanisms.

Website visits

When you visit our website, our hosting and network providers may process technical information such as your IP address, browser, device information, pages visited, request logs and error logs. We use this information to operate, secure and improve the website.

We do not currently use advertising cookies. If this changes, we will update this policy.

Sensitive content

Ask by Email is not intended for highly sensitive or confidential information. Please do not send passwords, identity documents, payment card details, medical records, safeguarding information, legal case materials, financial account details, or confidential third-party material unless you are comfortable with it being processed by our service providers to generate a reply.

The AI may surface details from your email in its reply and we cannot guarantee perfect handling of every edge case.

Your rights

You can ask us to access, correct, delete or restrict the personal data we hold about you. You can also object to certain processing where applicable.

You can request deletion of your email-based account and metadata by emailing privacy@askbyemail.com from the address you used to sign up. Because we do not store email content in our application database after processing, there is no stored message body for us to delete.

You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office if you are unhappy with how we handle your personal data.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, especially as the service develops or our providers change. The latest version will always be shown on this page.

Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@askbyemail.com. Abuse reports: abuse@askbyemail.com.

Ask by Email is operated by Hallan Labs LTD, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17207814), registered office at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom.