Privacy Notice

Last updated 3 November 2026

Ham Email is published by Andrei Ivanoff (KO4ZHL), an individual, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. This notice describes the desktop application and this website. It is written to be checked against the program rather than to sound reassuring, so it names every service the app contacts.

What is never collected

• Your mail. No message, subject, address or attachment is sent to us, stored by us or passes through any server of ours. The application connects from your computer to your mail provider and nowhere in between.
• Your password. It is encrypted on your computer and sent only to your mail provider.
• Usage. The application contains no analytics, no telemetry and no usage reporting.

There is no setting to turn this off because there is nothing to turn off.

What stays on your computer

• Your messages, in a database file on your disk. This is what makes search instant and the inbox readable offline. Delete the application’s data folder and it is gone.
• Your account password, encrypted on disk with a key held on the same computer.
• Your AI provider key, if you add one.
• Your preferences, including whether sender photos are on.

What the app fetches by itself

Automatically, without you asking:

• Your mail provider, over TLS, as often as it takes to keep your inbox current. This is the whole point of a mail client.
• An update check against hamemail.com shortly after launch, and periodically after that. It sends nothing but the request.
• Sender photos from Gravatar, if that setting is on. Gravatar learns a hash of the sender’s address, not the sender’s mail and not yours. Turn the setting off and Gravatar is never contacted. Where a sender’s callsign is recognized, the operator’s photo is asked of QSL World instead, by callsign.

Images hosted elsewhere inside a message are not fetched until you ask, message by message. That is what stops a sender learning when you opened their mail.

When you ask for something

• A callsign lookup, when you click a recognized callsign, is a request for that operator’s page on QSL World.
• The writing assistant, when you press the button, sends the text you hand it. With your own key it goes from your computer to the provider you chose and the key stays on your computer. Without a key, and signed in with a QSL World profile, the request is relayed through qslworld.com to reach a provider under a daily allowance; the text is not kept for any other purpose. If you would rather nothing was relayed, add your own key or leave the assistant alone.
• Search all mail sends your search words to your own mail provider, which is where the rest of your mail is.

If you sign in with a QSL World profile

Ham Email opens with a QSL World sign-in, the same profile Ham Browser uses, and it is a QSL World account: it holds your email address, your name, your callsign and a hashed password, under QSL World’s own terms. Ham Email uses it to know who you are, to put your callsign on what you write, for the free tier of the writing assistant and for a callsign address, and for nothing else. Your mail itself never passes through it.

Callsign email

A name@CALLSIGN.com mailbox is provided by QSL World as part of QSL World Pro Max. Mail sent to it is held by that mail service, as with any provider, and Ham Email treats it exactly like any other account: it connects to it over TLS and keeps your copy on your computer.

This website

hamemail.com serves pages and files. It sets no advertising or tracking cookies and currently runs no analytics. Standard web server logs (IP address, page, time) are kept by the host for operational purposes. If analytics are ever added to this site, this notice will say so first.

Children

Ham Email is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Changes, and how to reach us

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. Questions, or a request concerning a QSL World profile: privacy@hamemail.com.