Evomail’s Privacy Policy

As I switched over from Gmail to Fastmail.fm, I was looking for a mail client to replace my beloved Mailbox on iOS. I would have loved to continued using it, but it only supports Gmail, and not regular IMAP, so I needed a new client. Since I now have come to rely on the snooze and reminder features that Mailbox offers, I wanted to find an app that best matched that experience.

My reasons for switching from Gmail to Fastmail are similar to most, the whole privacy/advertisement debate that most in the tech industry pretend to care about most of the time, and some few paranoid folks like me actually think of. As a result, before deciding on which mail app to switch over to, I carefully read through the privacy policies of each application. I understood that in all likelihood my data would now be stored on someone other than Fastmail’s servers, and wanted to see if anyone had any alternatives.

I came to one that struck me as reasonable enough to trust, and that was Evomail. From their terms of use, I found two sections titled Caching and Deleting Data.

Caching:

We do store metadata and on occasion full encrypted contents of your emails on our servers. This isn’t permanent storage, but rather cached contents to deliver a better user experience to you, our customer.

Deleting Data:

We do delete your account and all cached email contents from our servers when you delete your account in Evomail.

Unfortunately, it seems they are not true to their word.

Like most modern mail clients, Evomail offers push notifications when you receive a new email. I set up multiple email accounts on the device. A few days later, after getting many happy pushes (ok, it’s email, I hated them) I went over to the Settings application and found Evomail, and a toggle called Reset Local Database. I flipped it, went back to the app, and saw that all my accounts had been reset. Too lazy to enter my credentials in again, I used iOS’s default mail app for a few hours. But I noticed I was still getting push notifications from Evomail, telling me that I had new emails.

If they delete my account and all cached contents from their servers, how was I still getting push notifications? I’m willing to hear them out before striking down my proverbial gavel, but I’m not really sure what technical reason they could give for this.