Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy
Elma ia, operated by MSTL LLC · Last updated: October 23, 2026 · Lire en français
1Who we are
MSTL LLC, a Delaware limited liability company doing business as Elma ia (“Elma ia”, “Elma”, “we”, “us”), provides AI automation services to businesses, including the Elma app (https://app.elmai.io): a customer-service agent that reads the emails arriving in the mailbox an online shop connects, drafts replies and submits them to a person of the shop, who sends, edits or rejects them. This policy explains what personal information we collect on the elmai.io website and in the app, how we use and share it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have.
For questions, contact us at info@elmai.io or 8 The Green, Suite A, Dover, Delaware 19901, United States. This policy is published in English and in French; if the two versions differ, the English version prevails.
2Information we collect
Account and contact information: your name and email address and, if you provide them, your business name and phone number; for each member of a team, their address, name and role. The app has no password: you sign in with Google or with a link sent by email.
Welcome questionnaire: if you answer it, your website link, your shop platform, your mailbox and your customer service tool, the number of emails received per month, the size of the team, your sector and how you heard about us. These answers are used to show you the right connections and to prefill the guided interview; how you heard about us is read by the Elma team only as numbers, to know which channels bring people to us.
Billing information: your plan, invoices and payment status, and what you enter for the invoice (company name, legal form, address, VAT number). Card details are collected and stored by our payment processor, Stripe: we never see a card number.
Customer Data: what a shop entrusts to Elma or submits through it: the emails arriving in the mailbox it connects and the text of their attachments, the conversations of its website chat, the drafted and sent replies, its shop profile, documents, instructions and settings, and what Elma reads at its request in its online store (orders, parcel tracking, customers), in its email marketing tool, in its Google Sheets shared by link and on the public pages of its website. This data includes personal information about the shop’s customers: “Customer Data and our role” explains who is responsible for it.
On the elmai.io website: what you write in the contact form, the application form and the demo on the home page, listed in the website register.
Technical information: for each app session, an encrypted fingerprint of your IP address (never the address itself) and the name of your browser; for the website forms and demo, the same fingerprint, used to limit automated submissions. Our host, Vercel, also keeps technical logs (IP address, page requested, browser) for a short time, for security and troubleshooting. We do not infer your location from your IP address, and we use no analytics tool.
Communications: messages you send us and your support requests, including help requests and ideas sent from the portal assistant.
Cookies: those of the app, listed in “Cookies and analytics”; the website sets none.
3How we use information
We use personal information to provide, operate, and secure the Services; to process payments and manage subscriptions; to provide support; to communicate with you about your account, changes, and updates; to improve and develop the Services using aggregated or de-identified data; to detect fraud and abuse; and to comply with legal obligations.
In the app, Customer Data is used to:
- sort each incoming email: a customer request, or a newsletter or automatic notification to set aside;
- draft a reply grounded in the shop’s profile, its documents and, if it connects them, its orders, its email marketing tool and its sheets;
- show the shop’s team each message, its thread and its attachments, and send what the team approves;
- prepare the shop’s profile from its documents, its website and the guided interview, and suggest the tone of its replies from the ones it has already written in its mailbox;
- keep the shop’s statistics (emails received, replies, time saved) and the count of its plan.
Nothing else: no advertising, no resale, no profiling, no credit scoring. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for advertising. We send prospecting emails only to professionals, as described in “If you receive an email from us”, and anyone can opt out at any time.
4On the elmai.io website
The elmai.io website sets no cookies, uses no analytics or advertising trackers, and makes no request to a third-party service: its fonts are hosted on our own server. The only data it collects is what you write yourself:
| Purpose | Data | Legal basis | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answering a meeting request | Name, email, company, phone, industry, free description | Pre-contractual steps taken at your request | 12 monthsafter the last exchange |
| Handling a sales-agent application | Name, email, phone, industry | Pre-contractual steps taken at your request | 12 monthsafter the last exchange |
| Having the home-page demo agent reply | The messages written in the demo and the earlier turns of the conversation, sent to Groq, Inc. to answer them and, if it does not respond, to OpenRouter, Inc. and a zero-retention host it picks, in the United States | Legitimate interest in showing you the service you are trying | NoneElma does not keep them; Groq only in temporary logs, for 30 days at most, in case of an incident or suspected abuse |
| Limiting automated submissions | IP address fingerprint, declared browser | Legitimate interest in protecting the form and the demo | 12 months |
The demo is a fictitious shop: its page asks you not to write any personal data in it.
5The Elma app and your mailbox
Signing in
Sign-in with Google only requests your name, email address and public profile (the openid, email and profile scopes): Elma keeps your address and name to recognize you, and nothing else from your Google account. The sign-in link sent by email, reserved for team members and invited people, is valid for fifteen minutes, once, on the device that requested it.
What Elma reads in the connected mailbox
The shop connects the mailbox where its customers write to it: Gmail through Google authorization (the gmail.readonly scope, to read, and gmail.send, to send), or any mailbox through IMAP and SMTP, Gmail included with an app password. Elma reads:
- incoming emails: the sender, recipients, subject, date, body, and earlier messages of the same thread, to know whom to answer and about what;
- the text of PDF, Word or text attachments, three at most per email, read when the mailbox is checked and sent with the message to the language model; the files themselves are not copied to Elma: they stay in the mailbox, and open from the portal only when a person of the shop clicks on them;
- for an email set aside before reading (newsletter, automatic notification), Elma keeps what it needs to recognize it and show it in the Activity page, but not its body: the subject, the sender and their reply-to address, the date, the headers that link it to its thread, the order numbers found in its text, the reason it was set aside, and the name, type and size of its attachments.
What is sent from the mailbox
Replies drafted by the agent are sent only after a person of the shop approves them; messages written in the “New message” page are sent when that person sends them. Elma never deletes, moves or modifies messages; it only adds what it sends to the sent folder when the server does not do so itself.
One exception, if the shop displays the Elma chat on its website: when a visitor asks about an order, a six-digit verification code is sent automatically, without human approval, from the connected mailbox to the email address of that order. Three codes at most per conversation and three per address per day; each code is valid for fifteen minutes.
6Language models
To sort an email and draft its reply, its text, with excerpts of the thread, the attachments read and the order mentioned, is sent to a language-model provider, which returns the proposed reply; the same applies to preparing the shop’s profile from its documents, its website and the guided interview, and to suggesting the tone of its replies from the ones it has already written. The text of an email is treated as data, never as an instruction.
The portal assistant (the bubble at the bottom right) works the same way: what you write to it, with the current conversation and your shop’s setup status (connections, profile sections, uploaded documents), is sent to the same language-model provider while its answer is prepared. Elma does not keep this conversation: it stays in your browser tab and disappears when you close it. It is kept only if you send us a help request (the request and the conversation, 90 days) or an idea (its text, for as long as the account exists). A password or key pasted by mistake is masked before anything is sent.
- OpenRouter, Inc. (United States), first. Elma only allows it to route the call to zero-data-retention model hosts that do not collect data for training: for the Claude models Elma uses, Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock) and Google (Vertex AI), in the United States or the European Union; Anthropic, which designs these models, receives nothing. The host that answers is recorded only in the service’s technical log, kept for a short time, not in the agent’s traces.
- Groq, Inc. (United States), as a fallback when OpenRouter does not respond. Its contract bars it from using these texts to train a model; it does not keep them, except in temporary logs, for 30 days at most, in case of a reliability problem or suspected abuse.
7No training, and nobody reads your emails
Neither Elma nor its providers use a shop’s emails, replies or documents to train an artificial-intelligence model, whether ours or a third party’s. What the agent learns from a shop’s corrections serves that shop only: its latest corrections are shown to the model when it drafts its next replies.
Nobody at Elma reads your emails, except: at your explicit request, to help you, and only the messages you point to; when needed for the security of the service (investigating abuse or an incident); or to comply with the law.
8Customer Data and our role
For the shop’s account (the people who use it, their addresses and roles, the settings, the profile, the uploaded documents, the plan), MSTL LLC is the controller, on the basis of the contract with the shop.
For the emails of the shop’s customers, the conversations of its website chat and their order data, the shop decides why and how this data is used: it is responsible for it, and we process it on its behalf, under its instructions and only for the service described here, as a processor within the meaning of Article 28 of the GDPR. The shop is responsible for having a lawful basis for that data and for telling its customers, in its own privacy policy, that their messages are processed by a service provider.
A shop that needs a data processing agreement can ask us at info@elmai.io.
9Who we share information with
We share information only as needed, with:
- Vercel Inc. (United States), which hosts the website and the app;
- Supabase Inc. (United States), which hosts the app’s database;
- OpenRouter, Inc. and Groq, Inc. (United States), which provide the language models, with the zero-retention hosts OpenRouter picks (Amazon Web Services and Google for the Claude models), as described in “Language models”;
- Google LLC (United States), which provides sign-in with Google and the sending of Elma’s own emails (sign-in links, invitations, alerts) through Google Workspace; a shop’s Gmail mailbox stays with Google, its own provider;
- Stripe, Inc. (United States), which processes online payment for plans; Elma never sees a card number;
- the shop’s own services, which Elma queries at its request: its email host, its online store (PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Shopify), its email marketing tool (Klaviyo, Brevo);
- our professional advisers, bound by confidentiality;
- authorities, when required by law or to protect rights and safety;
- a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
These providers may use the information only to perform services for us, under their own confidentiality and security terms, and none receives more than it needs to do so.
10Where information is stored
Elma is operated from the United States: the website, the app and its database are hosted there, with Vercel and Supabase, and information is processed and stored there. If you access the Services from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have different data protection laws than your country. Language models may also run in the European Union, and a shop’s Gmail mailbox stays with Google.
For people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, these transfers must rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses and their UK and Swiss equivalents or, for a provider that participates in it, on the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The data processing agreements that put them in place with our providers are being concluded; this page will say when they are signed. The data processing agreement a shop concludes with us includes them.
11How long we keep it
We keep personal information for as long as the account exists and as needed to provide the Services, meet legal, tax, and accounting obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. In the app:
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Emails read by the agent, conversations, drafted and sent replies, rejection reasons | As long as the account existsdeleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Attachments | Never copiedtheir text is read only while the reply is drafted |
| Agent execution traces (request type, decision, cost, duration) | 12 monthsthen deleted, daily |
| Copies of earlier messages in a thread, fetched from the mailbox (replies written by hand, messages from before the first check), 4,000 characters at most each | 180 daysafter they are fetched, or deleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Website chat conversations on the shop’s site | 90 daysafter the last message, or deleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Conversations with the portal assistant | Never keptthey stay in the browser tab |
| Help requests sent from the assistant (summary, conversation) | 90 daysthen deleted, daily, or deleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Ideas suggested from the assistant | As long as the account existsdeleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Welcome questionnaire answers | As long as the account existsdeleted by “Disconnect everything” |
| Technical processing jobs (the text being processed passes through them) | 15 days at most |
| Google authorization, passwords, the shop’s keys | Until disconnectionthen deleted; the Google authorization is also revoked at Google |
| Address, name and role of the account’s people | As long as the account existsthen kept so the free trial is granted only once per shop |
| Fingerprint of the connected mailboxes’ addresses and domain names (never the address itself) | As long as the account existsthen kept, so the same mailbox serves only one account at a time and opens only one trial |
| Sign-in sessions (encrypted IP fingerprint, browser) | 30 daysthe length of a session, then deleted one week after they expire |
| Audit log (who did what and when: codes, identifiers, fingerprints) | No limitit is sealed and serves as evidence |
| Payments and invoices | Legal periodthe one accounting law requires |
Cancelling a plan does not close the account: the agent pauses and the data stays, so the shop can resume. It is deleted by “Disconnect everything” (Remove and delete everything), or on request at info@elmai.io: we then delete it within 30 days, except what the law requires us to keep. Retention on the elmai.io website is in its register.
12Remove and delete everything
- “Disconnect the mailbox” (Settings → Connections): Elma deletes the access, revokes it at Google for a Gmail mailbox, and stops reading the mailbox. The history already read stays visible in the Activity page until “Disconnect everything”.
- “Disconnect everything” (Settings → Connections, reserved for the account owner): all access is revoked and deleted; emails, conversations, replies, traces, the profile, documents, settings and the website chat (its settings and the visitors’ conversations) are deleted, the chat stops answering, and the account is closed. What remains are payments, the audit log, the address of the account’s people and the fingerprint of its mailboxes, as the retention table says.
- From your Google account, at any time: myaccount.google.com/permissions removes Elma’s access to Gmail; an app password is deleted at myaccount.google.com/apppasswords. Elma then stops reading the mailbox.
- By email, at info@elmai.io: any request for access, correction, deletion or portability. We respond within one month.
13Security
- Traffic is encrypted (HTTPS), and each shop is isolated from the others in the database by rules applied to every row.
- Google authorizations, passwords and keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key specific to each shop, itself encrypted by a master key kept outside the database; they are decrypted only for the duration of a call to the service concerned, and are never displayed.
- The agent cannot execute anything: it proposes a reply, and the action gateway refuses anything the shop’s policy does not allow.
We use reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards, but no system is completely secure.
15Limited use of Google user data
Elma’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs complies with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In Google’s words:
Elma's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
In practice: Gmail data is used only for the features described here, visible in the app; it is never sold, never used for advertising and never used to train artificial-intelligence models; it is transferred only to the processors named above, to provide this service, or when the law requires it; no human reads it outside the cases described above.
16Your rights and choices
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, to object to or restrict certain uses, and to withdraw consent. This includes rights under US state privacy laws such as California’s, and, for people in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, rights under the GDPR and equivalent laws, including the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority of your country.
To exercise a right, one address: info@elmai.io. We may need to verify your identity, and we respond within one month. We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.
If your data was entrusted to us by a shop (you wrote to it, or talked to its website chat), the shop is responsible for it: we forward your request to it without delay, and help it respond.
Legal bases (European Economic Area, United Kingdom, Switzerland)
- performance of the contract with the shop: its account, its team, the service described here, billing;
- pre-contractual steps taken at your request: meeting requests and applications sent from the website;
- our legal obligations: invoices and payments, which accounting law requires us to keep;
- our legitimate interest: security of the service, prevention of fraud and abuse, limiting automated submissions, improving the service using aggregated data, the website demo and prospecting professionals; you can object to this processing.
17If you receive an email from us
Our prospecting is aimed at professionals, in their professional capacity. Each message says who sends it and lets you opt out with a single reply. An opt-out is applied immediately to all our campaigns, and the address concerned is kept only to make sure it is never contacted again.
We do not buy lists of personal addresses and never prospect an address that has already opted out.
18Children
The Services are for businesses and are not directed to children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe we have, contact us and we will delete it.
19Third-party links
The Services may link to third-party sites and services. We are not responsible for their privacy practices.
20Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. For material changes we will notify you by email or in the Services before they take effect. The date at the top shows when it was last updated.
21Contact
MSTL LLC, doing business as Elma ia · 8 The Green, Suite A, Dover, Delaware 19901, United States · info@elmai.io