What does CloakFeed access when I connect Gmail?

Your phone signs in to Gmail directly and reads your mail there. None of it passes through us — there is no CloakFeed server, so there is nowhere for it to go.

The short version

CloakFeed connects from your device to Gmail's mail server over an encrypted connection, using the app password you generated. It looks for newsletters, parses them on the phone, and saves them into the app's own private storage — the same place your feeds live. Your addresses, subjects and message bodies never leave the device, and neither does the fact that you connected an account at all.

The app password itself is kept in your phone's keystore — the hardware-backed store the operating system uses for credentials — not in the app's database, and it is never part of Export notes.

The detail

CloakFeed also strips tracking pixels and invisible beacons out of newsletters before showing them. Opening a newsletter in CloakFeed does not tell the sender you read it, the way a normal mail client does. If you turn Load images off in Settings, the sender's image server is never contacted either.

The first scan reads the last 90 days of your inbox. After that the app checks for new mail in the background and works back through older mail a batch at a time; you confirm each batch's senders before anything is saved, and Settings › Integrations › Sync from can limit it to the newsletters you name. Your inbox is opened read-only: the app never sends, deletes, moves or marks mail as read, and it does not look outside your inbox.

Disconnecting (Settings › Integrations › Disconnect) deletes the app password rather than pausing the sync, and revoking it from Google's side cuts access instantly.