1. Who this covers

The Pen & Post (“we”) runs thepenandpost.com and the account, staff and admin surfaces beneath it. This describes what we do with personal information across all of them.

2. What you give us about yourself

• Your name and email address, so we can address a kit and tell you when a card needs to go in the post.
• Your postal address, which does two jobs: kits ship to it, and it is printed as the return address on the back of every envelope inside. That means the people you write to see it.
• Your time zone, so a “post this today” email arrives in your morning rather than ours.
• How you found us — a campaign tag, a referring site, or the referral code of whoever told you about us. Recorded once, on your first visit, and only when there is something to record; a visit typed straight into the address bar writes nothing at all.

3. What you give us about other people

To address an envelope we need the recipient’s name and postal address. You can also store what you would like the envelope to say — Nana rather than Margaret — along with their relationship to you, their interests, a phone number or email, and any notes you keep to help you write. Only the name and address are needed; the rest is there because it is useful to you, and you are free to leave it empty.

These people did not agree to anything with us. So: we never contact them, we never market to them, we do not build profiles from what you write about them, and their details are used for one purpose only — putting the right words on an envelope and getting it to the right door. By adding somebody you are confirming you have their address legitimately and may reasonably use it to send them post.

If one of them asks us directly, we will tell them what we hold about them and delete it on request. You can also delete any recipient yourself, at any time, and it goes.

4. Dates, cards and the rest of the account

We store the occasions you add, the card sent for each one, and a copy of the address each card was actually sent to at the moment it shipped. That last copy is deliberate: it is the record of where a card really went, and rewriting it when somebody moves would erase it.

5. Payment

Card payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card number — it goes from your browser to Stripe and we keep only Stripe’s identifier for your customer record, what you bought, and whether it is paid. Your name and postal address are shared with Stripe, which needs them for tax and for receipts.

6. Signing in

You can sign in with a password, with a link we email you, or with Google.

If you use Google, we ask Google for three things and nothing else: that you are signed in, your email address, and your name. We get no access to your Gmail, your contacts, your calendar or your files, and we hold no Google password. We keep the account identifier Google gives us so we recognise you next time. You can disconnect us at any time from your Google account permissions page, and still sign in here by email.

We record the IP address and browser of each sign-in, so a session can be told apart from somebody else’s.

7. Cookies

Two, both ours, both necessary: one that keeps you signed in and one that carries things like a message between pages. There are no advertising cookies, and no analytics of any kind — no Google Analytics, no pixels, no third-party tracking scripts anywhere on this site. Nothing here follows you off it.

8. Who else touches it

Only companies doing a specific job for us, and only with what that job needs:

• Stripe — payments, receipts and tax.
• Lob — checking a postal address is real and deliverable before we print it on an envelope.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with it.
• MailerSend — delivering our email to you.
• Hetzner — the server the application runs on.
• DigitalOcean — encrypted off-site backups of the database.
• Cloudflare — serving the public pages of this site.

We do not sell personal information, and we never have. We do not share it for advertising, and we do not hand it to anyone else except where the law requires it.

9. Who at The Pen & Post can see it

This is a very small operation. Whoever packs your kit sees the names and addresses on the envelopes going into it, because that is the job. An administrator can open an account to help with a support question, which is recorded and shown on screen for the whole time it lasts. Nobody reads your notes for any other reason.

10. How long we keep it

Your account and its dates stay while the account exists, because the whole point is that next year happens without you re-entering anything. Ask us to close it and we delete your account, your recipients, your dates and your notes. We keep what we are legally required to keep — principally payment and tax records, held by Stripe as well as us — and the shipping record of cards already sent. Off-site backups are continuous and roll off on a short cycle, so deleted data does not sit in them for long.

11. Your choices

You can see and change everything in your account from your account pages. Beyond that, you may ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will do it. We will not treat you differently for asking. If you are in California, those are your rights under the CCPA; we honour them for everybody regardless of where they live and regardless of whether the law obliges us to.

Email we send about your own dates and shipments is part of the service and cannot be turned off while the account is open; anything else has an unsubscribe link.

12. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit, passwords are stored hashed and never in a readable form, and backups sit with a provider that encrypts them at rest. No system is perfect, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.

13. Children

This is not for children. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13, and will delete it if we discover we have.

14. Changes

If we change this in a way that matters, we will email account holders rather than quietly changing the date at the top.

15. Asking us something

Write to [email protected] and a person will answer. If you want a postal address to write to, ask and we will give you one.