Privacy policy

1. Who is the data controller?

The service Mailcheer is published by GAM Communication LLC (a limited liability company incorporated under the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States), 1309 Coffeen Avenue, STE 1200, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States. For any questions about your data, write to contact@gam-communication.com.

Mailcheer operates in two distinct capacities under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):

• Data controller for the data of our customers (those who create a Mailcheer account) and of website visitors — sections 2 and 4.
• Data processor for the data of our customers' subscribers (the recipients of emails our customers send) — the customer is then the data controller — section 3. One exception: to protect the service against abuse, Mailcheer alone decides on that processing, and is then its controller.

2. Our customers' data (account holders)

Data collected

• Account: name, email address, password (stored as a hash, never in plain text), organization name, and the record of your agreement to the sending commitment (accepted version, date, IP address, browser used).
• Billing: plan subscribed, invoice history, billing address. Payment data is entered directly with Stripe; Mailcheer never has access to it.
• Service usage: campaigns created, content of the emails sent, sending volumes, answers given at sign-up (your website, how you heard about us, your goals), history of your workspace's reviews, pauses and suspensions, technical logs (IP address, browser, connection timestamps) necessary for security and operation.
• Integrations: the applications you authorize to access your workspace (which one, who authorized it, when and with which permissions) and the HubSpot or Pipedrive accounts you connect to it. Section 3 gives the details.
• Exchanges: messages you send us (support).

Purposes and legal bases

• Provide the service, manage your account and your sends — performance of contract.
• Invoice and maintain our accounts — legitimate interest: meeting the tax obligations of the publisher, which is subject to US tax law and must be able to support its returns.
• Secure the service, prevent abuse and spam, including through the safety review of your sends (section 5 and anti-abuse policy) — legitimate interest.
• Keep you informed of service updates (service emails) — performance of contract; any commercial communication is sent only with your consent, which you may withdraw at any time.
• Know how our customers find us and which pages of the website are read (section 4) — legitimate interest.

An automated decision. If the safety review finds obvious phishing, it suspends your workspace's sending without human intervention. A person on our team then examines every suspension, and an automated review never bans an account. You can have a person re-examine the decision, express your point of view and contest it by writing to contact@mailcheer.com (anti-abuse policy, section 5).

Retention periods

We commit to retaining your data for no longer than:

• Account data: for the full duration of your subscription, then 12 months after account closure, before deletion.
• Invoices and accounting documents: 7 years from the end of the year of the invoice. The publisher is subject to US tax law, under which a return filed in good faith can be audited for up to six years after filing. We keep them longer only if applicable tax law, an audit or a pending dispute requires it.
• Technical connection logs: 12 months.
• Content of your sends: 30 days, then automatic deletion. For a campaign, a single copy is kept, not one per recipient. Every time our team views it, the access is recorded, and login codes contained in the emails are masked when viewed.
• Suspended or banned workspace: 5 years after the last suspension or ban decision, to establish the facts in the event of a dispute (legitimate interest). The workspace is then deleted, unless a dispute, proceeding or request from an authority is pending: it is then kept until that ends. During that time, it cannot be deleted from the application, nor can its owner's account. The content of its sends is still deleted after 30 days. A lifted suspension closes the case: the ordinary periods apply again.
• The address typed on the sign-up page, saved as soon as it is valid, even if the account is not created (with the page language, the chosen plan and the dates it was typed): 90 days, to know how many sign-ups stop along the way (legitimate interest). Nothing is sent to that address until the account is created; if it is, the record is only marked as completed. It is deleted after 90 days either way, and with the account if the account is deleted sooner.

3. Our customers' subscriber data

When you import contacts and send campaigns with Mailcheer, you are the data controller for that data, and Mailcheer acts as data processor (Article 28 of the GDPR), on your instructions. One exception: the fight against abuse, which Mailcheer decides on alone and for which it is the controller (section 1). Specifically:

• We process your subscribers' data (email address, name, custom fields, subscription status, open, click, bounce and unsubscribe events) solely to deliver your sends, provide you with the statistics and protect the service against abuse. The content of your sends, which may contain some of that data, is kept for 30 days (section 2).
• Apart from the fight against abuse described above, we never use that data for our own purposes, sell it, or share it, except with the technical providers listed in section 5.
• You warrant that you have a valid legal basis (in practice, your subscribers' consent or an existing customer relationship) for each imported contact. See our terms and conditions on acceptable use.
• Every campaign sent through Mailcheer contains an unsubscribe link; for an email sent through the API, you provide that link. Unsubscribes received by Mailcheer are applied immediately and permanently.
• We help you respond to your subscribers' requests (access, rectification, erasure) through the service's tools, and we notify you without delay in the event of a data breach affecting them.
• When your account is closed, your subscribers' data is deleted within a maximum of 90 days, unless otherwise required by law.

Integrations

The following features also process your contacts' data, on your behalf and on your instructions:

• Replies received: if you turn on reply receiving for a domain, the emails that reach its reply subdomain (reply.yourdomain.com) are received by Amazon Web Services in Ireland, then kept by Mailcheer: sender, recipients, subject, text, attachments, a few headers and the result of Amazon's checks (authentication, spam, viruses). A message that Amazon flags as carrying a virus is not kept. Replies can be read by the members of your workspace and are kept for 30 days at most. If one of your webhooks follows incoming replies, Mailcheer sends each one to your software, with a signed download link for each attachment, valid for 7 days; a copy of that call, content included, stays in the webhook's log, visible in your workspace, for 30 days at most.
• Inbound webhooks: what one of your tools sends to an inbound webhook address (a completed form, an order, a booking) is kept for 7 days at most, and only for the last 50 submissions to each address, so that you can see the fields received and replay your mapping. Attached files are not kept, only their names, and overly long texts are cut. The person concerned only joins your list according to your mapping: by default, they receive a confirmation email and are only subscribed once they click.
• HubSpot and Pipedrive: when you connect your account, Mailcheer reads your contacts according to your settings (email address, first name, last name, tags, and what your CRM says about their consent) and adds them to your list. By default, no one is treated as having consented: a contact whose consent your CRM does not record receives a confirmation email, or is not imported, as you choose. If you turn it on, Mailcheer also writes unsubscribes back to your CRM. Mailcheer keeps the connection's access tokens, encrypted, and, for each imported record, its identifier in the CRM and the address it brought in. Disconnecting deletes the tokens and those links, and revokes access with the provider when no other Mailcheer workspace uses the same account; contacts already imported stay in your list.
• SMTP relay: a message handed to the relay is processed exactly like an email sent through the API, with the same checks and the same retention of its content (section 2). The request log records it, accepted or refused, with the IP address of the software that handed it over, and keeps it for 12 months at most.
• Test mode: an email sent with a test key is not sent. Mailcheer keeps, apart from your real sends, its sender, recipients, subject, tags and simulated result, never its content, which is not submitted to the safety review either. These records are kept for 30 days at most.
• Connected applications: an application you authorize to access your workspace, such as an AI assistant, can only do there what the permissions you ticked allow. Mailcheer keeps the authorization (which application, who gave it, when, with which permissions) and only the fingerprint of its tokens: an access token is valid for one hour; a refresh token, when the application asks for one, is valid for thirty days and is replaced each time it is used. The person who gave access, or an owner or administrator of the workspace, can withdraw it at any time from “Connected applications”: the authorization and all its tokens stop working at once. Access also ends as soon as the person who gave it leaves your workspace. A withdrawn authorization stays on record, like the rest of your account data (section 2).

HubSpot, Pipedrive, the applications you connect and the software your webhooks notify are your tools, chosen by you: they are not sub-processors of Mailcheer. What Mailcheer sends to them, or receives from them, is on your instructions, and what they do with it falls under your contracts with their providers.

A data processing agreement (DPA) formalizing these commitments can be provided upon simple request to contact@gam-communication.com.

4. Website visitors: cookies, audience measurement, newsletter

This section concerns anyone who visits the website, customer or not.

Cookies and browser storage

We place no advertising cookies or third-party trackers. The website's cookies are strictly necessary for the service you ask for, or remember a choice you made. They are exempt from consent:

• Session: keeps you logged in to your workspace for 30 days, a period extended on each day of use.
• Language: remembers the language you chose for the website.
• Chosen plan: remembers for one hour the plan chosen on the Pricing page, while you get to payment.

Your browser also keeps a few items on your device: the light or dark theme, the closing of an introduction window, the address entered to unlock the demo, which then pre-fills sign-up, and the draft written by the first-newsletter tool, which only joins your account if you create one. You can erase them at any time from your browser settings.

Audience measurement

On the public pages of the website and on the sign-up page, we measure traffic with Umami, a tool we host ourselves. It places no cookie and only produces visit statistics: pages viewed, referring site, browser and device type, country. Your workspace is not measured. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing which pages are read.

Newsletter and demo

If you sign up to our newsletter, or give your address to unlock the demo, we send you a confirmation email: you are only subscribed once you click its link. We keep your address, along with the IP address and the date of your confirmation, as proof of your agreement. You can unsubscribe at any time through the link in every email; your address then stays on our exclusion list, so that we no longer write to you. Legal basis: your consent, which you may withdraw at any time.

First-newsletter tool

If you use the tool that writes a first newsletter from a website, the address of that website and the text of its public pages are sent to Anthropic (section 5) to write the draft. We store neither the website address nor the draft on our servers. Your IP address is only used, during your visit, to limit the number of requests.

Advertising campaign links

If you arrive on the website through an advertisement or a campaign link, we record with your sign-up the name of that campaign and the click identifier from the ad network, read from the page URL, in order to know which advertisements bring sign-ups. No cookie is placed for this purpose, and this data is not sent to the ad network. Legal basis: our legitimate interest.

5. Sub-processors and data location

To operate, Mailcheer relies on a limited number of technical providers, chosen for their GDPR compliance:

• Hetzner Online GmbH — application and database hosting (servers in Europe).
• Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL (Amazon SES) — email delivery, and receipt of replies if you turn it on, from the Ireland region (eu-west-1).
• Stripe, LLC — payment processing, in the United States.
• Cloudflare, Inc. — the network through which visits to the website and the application pass, as well as the tracking links in your emails (opens, clicks, unsubscribes): it therefore sees the IP address and browser of the people who use them. It also routes mail sent to our @mailcheer.com addresses.
• Google (Google Workspace) — our team's mailbox, where the emails you write to us are received and kept.
• Anthropic PBC — AI writing assistant (subject line suggestions, rephrasing, proofreading, drafting a first newsletter), reading the tone of a website and safety review of your sends, in the United States. This provider receives three things:
  • For writing help, the content you submit to it when you ask for it: the text of your campaigns and your instructions.
  • For the safety review, the subject line, sender, content and link destinations of your messages, at your first send, at certain volume thresholds and for each new content until your workspace has an established sending history, then on part of your campaigns.
  • To read the tone of a website, at the first step of sign-up or in the public first-newsletter tool, the text of that website's public pages.

  It never receives your subscriber lists. For a campaign, the message reviewed is the one a fictitious contact would have received. For an email sent through the API, email addresses, names, codes and strings of digits are masked before the review. Anthropic's commercial terms prohibit it from training its models on customer content.

Your data and that of your subscribers are stored within the European Union: the database in Germany, with Hetzner, and outgoing email in Ireland, with Amazon Web Services. Four providers are, however, US companies that process some data in the United States: Anthropic, for the three uses described above; Stripe, for payment; Cloudflare, for the passage of visits and tracking links; Google, for our mailbox. These transfers are governed by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, built into each of these providers' terms, and, for Stripe, Cloudflare and Google, by their participation in the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. Two of Anthropic's uses depend on you, the writing assistant and reading the tone of your website: if you do not want your texts to go to it for that, do not use these features, the rest of the service works without them.

The publisher itself. Your data remains stored in Europe, with Hetzner. However, the publisher is a US company: when it accesses that data to operate the service and respond to you, this access counts as a transfer to a country outside the Union under Chapter V of the GDPR. This access alone copies no data to the United States.

6. Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures: encryption of communications (HTTPS), password hashing, data isolation between accounts, restricted server access, regular backups and access logging.

7. Your rights

Under the GDPR and the loi Informatique et Libertés, you have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection and data portability, as well as the right to define instructions regarding the fate of your data after your death. Where processing is based on your consent, such as our newsletter, you may withdraw it at any time. When facing an automated decision (section 2), you can obtain human intervention, express your point of view and contest the decision.

To exercise them, write to contact@gam-communication.com. We will respond within one month. If you are a subscriber of one of our customers, contact the sender of the email first; we will assist them in processing your request.

You may also lodge a complaint with the CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés), www.cnil.fr, or with the data protection authority of the country where you live — European law leaves that choice to you.

8. Updates to this policy

This policy may be updated to keep pace with changes to the service or regulations. The date at the top of the page indicates the current version; any substantial change will be notified to you by email.