Your AI never sees your mailbox. Only what you send it.
Email anything to your AI. Forward an article, a note you dictated, a receipt — and your next Claude session opens knowing it arrived.
We'll run it for you.
- Sign in with Google. One approval, one folder — never your mailbox.
- You get your own address. Forward anything to it, from any device.
- Paste one line into Claude Code. That is the whole install.
Two more questions on the next page — they decide what gets built first. Karl writes once, when it opens. No other mail.
Prefer to run it yourself? It works today.
The whole pipe runs on your own accounts — free, unlimited, forever. No server of ours sits in the path, so there is nothing of ours to trust. You need a domain on Cloudflare (about $10 a year), a GitHub account, and about fifteen minutes with Claude Code.
Self-host it free →How it works
Four steps. You do the first three once, then it runs.
Sign in with Google
One approval. Karl makes a folder in your Drive and can see that folder and nothing else — not the rest of your Drive, and never your mailbox.
Karl hands you an address
Something like
claude-x7k2m9@in.dearkarl.com. It is yours and it is secret. Only mail from addresses you have named gets through; everything else bounces.Paste one line into Claude Code
It tells Claude Code where to find your folder. Nothing is downloaded, and no token is ever shown to you or pasted by you.
Forward anything, from anywhere
An article on your phone, a note you dictated walking home, a receipt. It becomes a text file in your Drive folder within seconds, and your next Claude session opens knowing it arrived.
Questions
What is dearkarl?
dearkarl is an email-to-AI pipe: forward any email to your own secret address and it lands as a plain markdown file your next Claude Code session can read. It never asks for your mailbox.
It is open source and you can run it yourself today, free, on your own Cloudflare account. A hosted version is opening soon.
Isn't this just the Gmail connector?
No, and the difference is the whole point. The Gmail connector needs access to your entire mailbox, and it searches — it pulls whatever it thinks is relevant.
Karl only ever sees what you deliberately forwarded. It is a curated channel, not a search over your private mail, and it works with any provider, not just Gmail.
What can Karl actually see?
One folder in your Drive — the one he created. He cannot see the rest of your
Drive, cannot list it, and cannot open a file he did not write. The permission is
Google's drive.file scope; you can look it up.
He never asks for your mailbox, and no permission we request could read one.
Where does my mail actually live?
In your own Google Drive, as plain markdown files. Our server receives the message, turns it into a text file, and writes it straight into the folder it made for you — holding it in memory for a few seconds on the way and never writing it to a disk of ours.
If your Drive is unreachable the message bounces back to the sender rather than sitting in a queue on our side. There is no queue: that is the trade for us keeping nothing.
What happens if I leave?
You keep everything. The notes are plain text files in your own Drive — no format of ours, no account of ours needed to read them. Turn off forwarding and it stops; nothing reaches back into what was already written.
Does this page track me?
Only if you say yes. The first time you visit, we ask whether we may count your visit with PostHog's analytics. Say no and nothing is sent and nothing is stored. Say yes and we see which pages you read and where you came from, and a cookie lets us recognise your browser next time.
We keep your country, never your IP address or city. No session recording, no heatmaps, no ad networks, and nothing loaded from anyone else, not even the fonts. The privacy notice has the details, and Cookie settings in the footer changes your answer.
Why "Karl"?
Because it tells you how to use it: just email it to Karl.
Karl is the mailman. He always delivers — and he never reads your post, never keeps a copy, and never writes back.
That is not a personality we gave him. It is the architecture.
Join the waiting list
Get told when the hosted version opens. No other mail, and the list is not shared with anyone.