Privacy Architecture

Trust through transparency. Every claim is verifiable.

Data Flow

Box operates entirely on your machine. It connects directly to your mail servers using the standard protocols your email provider already supports. There is no intermediary.

Box ↔ Your IMAP server (incoming mail) Box ↔ Your SMTP server (outgoing mail)

No cloud processing. No proxy. No relay. Your email travels between Box and your mail server — nothing else sits in the middle. The local database is stored at ~/.config/Box/ and never leaves your machine.

Zero Telemetry Guarantee

Box does not collect:

  • Usage analytics
  • Behavior tracking
  • Email metadata
  • Performance telemetry
  • Crash reports

This is not a policy decision — it is an architectural one. There is no telemetry code in Box because none was ever written. There is no endpoint to receive it, no database to store it, and no code path that transmits it. The absence is structural, not a toggle you have to trust us to leave off.

You can verify this yourself. Run any of the following while Box is open and watch the network activity:

# Show all network connections made by Box ss -tp | grep box # Alternative using netstat netstat -tp | grep box # Deep inspection with Wireshark sudo tshark -i any -f "host not <your-mail-server>"

You will see connections only to your configured mail servers and, during activation, to the Locksmith licensing service. Nothing else.

Network Communication

Box communicates with exactly two types of external services:

  • Your mail servers — IMAP for retrieving mail, SMTP for sending mail. These are the servers you configure when you add an account.
  • Locksmith licensing service — contacted only during license activation and periodic validation. This verifies your license key and nothing more.

Box never transmits:

  • Email content or message bodies
  • Credentials or authentication tokens
  • Your IP address or geolocation
  • Hardware identifiers or fingerprints
  • Usage data or behavioral information

Credential Storage

Your email account credentials are stored in your operating system's native keyring — GNOME Keyring via libsecret. This means your passwords are encrypted by your OS using your login session, not by Box.

Credentials are never written to plaintext files, never stored in the SQLite database, and never logged. The keyring files on disk are protected with 0600 permissions, readable only by your user account.

Local Data Storage

All email data is stored in a local SQLite database at ~/.config/Box/box.db. This file is not encrypted by default — deliberately. We want you to be able to query your own data:

sqlite3 ~/.config/Box/box.db

The database is never uploaded, never synced to a cloud service, and never accessed by anything other than the Box application running on your machine. It is entirely under your control — back it up, inspect it, delete it.

For details on how the licensing system respects your privacy, see Licensing Transparency.