Last updated: 3 November 2026 · Effective: 3 November 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how mwoyo collects, uses, shares and protects your personal information. We process personal information in line with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) and, for users in Zimbabwe, the Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07]. Where the EU or UK General Data Protection Regulation applies to you, we honour the rights it gives you as well.
Responsible party (data controller): Kalulus Investment (Pty) Ltd
Registration number 2015/052417/07, South Africa
35 Ruimsig Palms, Dalene Street, Willowbrook Ext 18, Roodepoort, Gauteng, 1724
Telephone: +27 71 230 3237
Email: support@mwoyo.me
Kalulus Investment owns and operates mwoyo and all of its software. It decides why and how your personal information is processed, and it is responsible to you for that processing wherever you live. It is the only responsible party (data controller) for mwoyo. No partner or service provider decides how your information is used, and all mwoyo data is stored in South Africa.
Information Officer: contact our Information Officer at support@mwoyo.me with the subject line "POPIA".
All mwoyo databases and uploaded files are hosted in South Africa, in Amazon Web Services' Cape Town region (af-south-1). The main database is operated by MongoDB Atlas in that same region. If you are in Zimbabwe, using mwoyo means your personal information is transferred to and stored in South Africa. Section 7 explains how we protect cross-border transfers. Kalulus Investment is responsible for mwoyo's data residency, legal compliance and taxation in South Africa, including for users in Zimbabwe.
We do not use advertising trackers or third-party analytics, and we do not build advertising profiles. The only exception is the optional Data & rewards programme (section 4A), and only for what you switch on there. Interactive content in messages is displayed by mwoyo itself, so a sender cannot use a message to see when you opened it or learn your IP address.
| Purpose | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Create and run your account, and deliver email, mwoyo messages, WhatsApp and SMS messages, and notifications | Performance of our contract with you |
| Sign-in, 2FA, account recovery, and preventing spam, fraud, abuse and security incidents | Contract; our legitimate interest in keeping mwoyo and its users safe |
| Process Plus payments | Contract |
| AI features you use (section 5) | Contract, for features you choose to use |
| Sort likely junk into a separate folder | Legitimate interest. Nothing is deleted automatically, and you can always open the junk folder and move messages back. |
| Keep a do-not-send list of addresses that bounce or complain | Legitimate interest in not mailing people who cannot or do not want to receive our email, and in keeping mwoyo's email deliverable |
| Service messages about your account, security and changes to these terms | Contract; legal obligation |
| Keep billing and tax records, and respond to lawful requests | Legal obligation |
| The optional Data & rewards programme and mwoyo Alerts (section 4A) | Your consent, given per kind of information, which you can withdraw at any time |
| Rules you write, and the shelves they file onto (section 4B) | Performance of our contract with you — you set the rule and it runs on your own mail |
| Drafted replies and the writing measurements behind them (section 5) | Contract, for a feature you choose to use; switchable off in Settings |
| Telling you when nobody has replied to something you sent | Contract; we use only when messages were sent and received, never what they say |
We do not send you marketing messages. If that ever changes, we will ask for your consent first, as POPIA requires, and you will be able to withdraw it at any time.
You can choose to share some general information about yourself with mwoyo's data programme, and earn mwoyo Plus credits for it. It is off unless you switch it on, one kind at a time, in Settings → Data & rewards, which shows you the exact values each kind would share before you decide.
We keep a record of each choice you make, with the date and the version of this section you made it under, so that we can show your consent.
You can write rules in your own words — "anything from the bank, label Finance and summarise" — and mwoyo will file matching mail onto a shelf, summarise it, mute it, send it to junk, keep it out of junk, or raise a to-do. A shelf is a way of viewing your mail, not a folder it moves into.
Your rule is read by an AI provider once, when you write it, to turn the sentence into conditions; after that, matching happens on our servers with no AI and nothing sent anywhere. mwoyo shows you what the rule means, and what it would have done to mail you already have, before you save it. Rules and what they file are yours alone, and are deleted with your account (section 8).
Some mwoyo features use artificial intelligence. When they run, the relevant text is sent to our AI providers, OpenAI and Google (Gemini), which process it outside South Africa (section 7):
We send only the text the feature needs, and only through the providers' paid business services, whose terms do not allow them to use your content to train their models. What is sent is used to answer that one request and is not kept by mwoyo afterwards. If no AI provider is available, mwoyo uses simple built-in rules instead, and nothing is sent.
These features run only when you ask for them, or when you have set up a rule that asks for them. AI is never used to read your mail for advertising, for the Data & rewards programme, or to build a profile of you.
Your own AI (mwoyo Plus). If you add your own API key from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google (Settings → Assistant → Your own AI), the writing you ask for — drafted replies, rewrites, the assistant's answers and documents, and polishing or reading in a CV — is sent to that provider on your account, under your agreement with them rather than ours. Their terms decide what they keep and whether they may use it; for example, Google's free Gemini tier may use what it is sent to improve Google's products, so use a key from a paid project. You agree to this when you add the key. What mwoyo does on its own — sorting your mail, checking for scams, rules and their summaries, and subject lines — still uses our providers above. mwoyo stores your key encrypted, never shows it again, uses it only for what you ask, and deletes it when you remove it or delete your account.
All connections to mwoyo are encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS). Messages between mwoyo users are encrypted where they are stored: each account has its own private key, and that key is sealed with a key made from your password.
The sealing and unsealing happen on your device, not on our servers. Your password never reaches us — your device turns it into two separate values, sends us one that only proves it is you, and keeps the other, which is the one that opens your key. We hold your key only in a form we cannot open. So a stored message between mwoyo users is one we cannot read: not for support, not after a break-in, and not if we are ordered to hand it over. We would have nothing to hand over but the sealed version.
What that does not mean. It does not mean we never see the message. When you send one, your app sends us the text, because that is what lets mwoyo write the subject, run the rules you set up, warn you about a missing attachment, check for a scam, and put it in an email when it is going to somebody outside mwoyo. We seal it after that. So the honest description is: mwoyo reads a message once, as it passes through, to do the things you asked it to do — and cannot read it afterwards. If a feature you have turned on needs to look at your mail later, such as a drafted reply, we say so where that feature is.
Emails exchanged with people outside mwoyo travel over the ordinary email system, which nobody can encrypt end to end, so this protection applies to mwoyo-to-mwoyo messages only.
What this costs you. Because we cannot open your key, we cannot get your messages back if you forget your password. A recovery key — offered when you make your account, and in Settings → Security at any time — is a second, separate way to open it, made on your device and shown to you once. We store only a sealed copy and never the key itself, which is also why we will not email or message it to you: it would then sit in the same inbox your password-reset codes go to. Without it, resetting your password means your older mwoyo-to-mwoyo messages stay locked for good, for us as much as for you.
We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with the following providers, each of which processes it on our behalf under a contract:
| Provider | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Servers, file storage, sending email | South Africa (Cape Town) |
| MongoDB Atlas | Database | South Africa (on AWS Cape Town) |
| Paystack | Payments | South Africa / Nigeria |
| Infobip (and Meta, for WhatsApp) | WhatsApp and SMS messages, and 2FA codes | International |
| Google Firebase Cloud Messaging | Push notifications to your phone (a device token and the notification text, such as the sender's name) | International |
| OpenAI, Google Gemini | The AI features in section 5 | United States / international |
| GIPHY | GIF search. Only the search words you type are sent. | United States |
| Local support partners | Help with support and sales questions in some countries. They see only what you choose to share with them, work under a written contract with us and only on our instructions, and have no access to mwoyo's systems or your data. Who provides this may change. | Your country |
Voice dictation uses your own browser's built-in speech recognition. mwoyo never receives your audio, but your browser may send it to its own provider (for example, Google in Chrome), under that provider's terms.
Cross-border transfers. Where personal information leaves South Africa, or, for Zimbabwean users, leaves Zimbabwe, we transfer it only as POPIA section 72 and the Cyber and Data Protection Act allow: to recipients bound by law, binding corporate rules or contract to protect it to a standard substantially similar to POPIA, or where the transfer is necessary to perform our contract with you.
We may also disclose information when the law requires it, to protect the rights and safety of our users or the public, or as part of a sale or restructuring of the business. In a sale or restructuring, this Policy continues to protect your information.
Under POPIA, and the Cyber and Data Protection Act if you are in Zimbabwe, you may:
You can change most of your information yourself in Settings. For anything else, email support@mwoyo.me. We may ask you to prove your identity first, and we will respond within a reasonable time, and within 30 days wherever we can. Our manual under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) is available on request.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, please tell us first. You also have the right to complain to a regulator:
We protect personal information with encryption in transit and at rest, hashed passwords, optional two-factor authentication, access controls that limit staff access to what their role needs, and hosting in a hardened, access-controlled environment. No system is perfectly secure. If a security compromise affects your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as POPIA section 22, and the Cyber and Data Protection Act, require.
mwoyo is for people aged 18 and over. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect children's personal information. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.
We will post any update here with a new date. If a change materially affects how we use your personal information, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.
Privacy questions and requests: support@mwoyo.me · +27 71 230 3237
Post: Kalulus Investment (Pty) Ltd, 35 Ruimsig Palms, Dalene Street, Willowbrook Ext 18, Roodepoort, Gauteng, 1724, South Africa