Effective September 6, 2026
Consuls is a personal email triage tool with exactly one user: its developer, reading his own mailboxes. It is not a service, has no sign-up, and stores no other person's data. This policy describes what it does with the Google account data it is granted access to.
Erik Bethke, Austin, Texas. Contact: erik@erikbethke.com.
Consuls requests a single Google OAuth scope, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly. Under that scope it reads, for messages in the authorized account: message and thread identifiers, internal timestamps, labels, headers (including sender, recipients, subject, and delivery addresses), the message snippet, and the plain-text or HTML body.
It requests no other scope. It has no ability to send, reply to, draft, forward, delete, archive, or relabel mail, or to change account settings — those capabilities are absent from the application, not merely unused.
Solely to sort incoming mail into a ranked triage feed — to distinguish messages that need a person from receipts, notifications, and bulk mail. The result is a private list the developer reads. The data is not used for advertising, profiling, resale, or any purpose beyond this triage.
Message data is stored in a PostgreSQL database running on the developer's own computer. There is no hosted backend, no cloud database, and no public endpoint. The web interface is served on localhost and is not reachable from the internet.
OAuth tokens are stored in a local file readable only by the operating-system account that runs the application.
One third party. To classify a message, Consuls sends its sender, subject, snippet, selected headers, and a truncated portion of its body text to the Anthropic API, which returns a category and a priority. Anthropic's API terms state that inputs submitted through the API are not used to train its models.
Mail that is recognizably automated — delivery reports, DMARC reports, no-reply senders, bulk campaigns — is filed by local rule and is never sent to the classifier at all. In recent runs this avoided sending roughly half of all messages to any third party.
No data is shared with anyone else. It is not sold, licensed, disclosed to advertisers or data brokers, or used to train any model.
Consuls' use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Stored messages are kept until deleted. Because the database lives on a single personal machine, deletion is performed directly by the developer, and revoking the application's access prevents any further data from being read.
Access can be withdrawn at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Revocation takes effect immediately.
This application is not directed to children and has no users other than its developer.
If this policy changes, the effective date above will be updated. Because the application has a single user, changes are not announced elsewhere.