How we file the mail you forward
This page is the detail behind "Email you forward or copy to us" in our privacy policy (§2). A reference such as §4 is to a section of that policy.
Email you forward or copy to us. Your family gives Throughball a private inbound address, and mail reaches us that way when your family sends it there, or when someone replies to a message your family copied it on (the drafts we prepare copy it). (The one other way mail reaches us is the single connected Gmail account described in our privacy policy (§2), which no other family has.)
Mail you forward. When your family forwards its mail to that address, we receive every message it forwards. For coach mail we decide what to keep by who sent it, which school it is from and which conversation it belongs to — not by what it says; we read a message's text only to recognise a SportsRecruits notification or a forwarded coach thread. Until your family has at least one address you send from on record, we file none of the coach mail you forward; the SportsRecruits notifications described below are filed either way. An address gets on record in two ways: you add it in Settings, Your inbox, under the addresses you send from; or, at most once for your inbound address, when Gmail's confirmation of a forward to that address arrives signed by Google while no message carrying Gmail's forwarding marks has yet reached it, we record the mailbox the confirmation says is forwarding, labelled as the forwarding source. The first such confirmation to arrive is the one we record, whoever turned the forward on — so if Settings shows a forwarding source you do not recognise, remove it there and add your own address. After that, if a message passes at least one of the sender's signature checks (SPF or DKIM), we keep it, including the sender's name and email address, the subject, the date and the message content (which may show who else it went to), when any of these is true:
it comes from the email address of a coach in our catalog;
it comes from the email domain of a school on your family's list, whatever it is about and however it was sent — unless it is a mass mailing rather than a reply (it carries a mailing-list header and at least one other mark of bulk mail, and is not a reply). A school your family has set aside ("benched") does not count as on your list for these rules;
it comes from another email domain we hold for a school — a catalog school's domain, or a domain a coach in our catalog uses for email (not a free webmail provider's) — unless it carries two or more technical marks of bulk or mailing-list mail (a message from such a domain that carries them is discarded even when it is a reply in a conversation we keep);
it is a reply in a conversation we are already keeping for your family (unless the rule just above discards it);
it is any other message — in practice a notice a recruiting platform or a school's mail system sends on a coach's behalf — that carries no mailing-list header, carries a valid digital signature (DKIM) from the domain it was sent from, which is not a free webmail provider's, and whose only reply address is a coach in our catalog or a school on your list.
Apart from the SportsRecruits notifications, which we keep, and what we keep from Gmail's forwarding confirmation, both described next, every other message is discarded without being stored. Six things can be recorded about a message we do not keep:
the time the first message reached your address, and the time the most recent one did, kept or not: timestamps only, written on the address itself, so we can tell that mail has reached it and whether it still does. The first-message time is written once and never changes, so a message we discarded can be the one that set it;
the time the most recent message carrying the forwarding marks Gmail adds reached your address, kept or not: also a timestamp only. We tell such a message by whether those marks are present, never by what they say. This is what Settings means when it shows your address as verified;
diagnostic lines in our server logs — the time, an internal code for your family, the size of the message and the length of its subject, whether it passed the sender's signature checks, whether it carried Gmail's forwarding marks, a masked form of your own inbound address, and why the message was dropped (for a forwarding confirmation, whether a link or code was found in it) and, when we could not file it, which of our reads failed, the error's code and kind, and the length of the error's text, and, for an email of attached messages (below), kept or not, counts only: how many attached messages it carried and how many of them we could not read, set aside, discarded or kept; how many messages they held, how many were past a limit and how many we already held; your family's running total for the day; and the limits in force — never the message's sender, subject or content, and never an attached message's name or identifier — which our hosting provider deletes after 30 days; and, for a message too large for us to receive, a line in the logs of the function that receives mail for us (its size and which check refused it, never the message), which that provider deletes after 7 days;
if we could not file a message at the moment it arrived. For most such failures — we could not read the addresses your family sends from; could not read our catalog, your school list or the conversations we already hold, to tell whether a forwarded message is a coach's; could not read your school list, or a school's coach roster, to place a SportsRecruits notification or a copy of your own message; could not store a message we had decided to keep; or our software failed partway through filing — we hand the message back to our mail provider to retry for up to 72 hours rather than lose it, and we record on your address the time and the kind of the failure and how many times filing has failed, so our team can see a forward that is not being filed. A message still unfiled when the retries end is not stored;
the time a forwarding confirmation recorded the mailbox it named as an address you send from (above): a timestamp only, written once on your address, so that no later confirmation records another;
if a message was too large for us to receive, we record in our own database when it arrived, its size, which of our two size checks refused it, how its addressing was resolved and, when it was for one of your family's addresses, which one — times and counts only, never the message's sender, subject or content, and never an address written out — so that we can see that it happened. The message itself is not stored. We keep that record for 30 days, and it is deleted with your account; a message our mail provider delivers to us more than once can leave more than one such record.
A coach thread you forward or paste. If you forward an older exchange that includes a coach's message, from an address you have listed as yours and signed by that address's domain, or paste one into the Import a thread screen in Settings, we file every message in it; a message we cannot place waits on your unmatched list.
Mail you forward as attachments. To bring in older coach mail at once, your family can attach whole messages to one email (in Gmail, "Forward as attachment") and send it to your Throughball address from an address your family has on record as one you send from, signed by that address's domain; an email from any other address adds nothing. We read an attached message's text only as we read a forwarded thread's: to recognise a SportsRecruits notification and to find the messages it quotes. We keep an attached message, with every message it quotes, when a message in it was written from the email address of a coach in our catalog or from an email domain we hold for a school — a catalog school's, a domain a coach in our catalog uses, or the domain of a school on your family's list (not a free webmail provider's) — or when it is a reply in a conversation we are already keeping for your family. On this route a message from such a domain is kept whatever it is about and however it was sent: a mass mailing to many families is kept here, where the rules above would discard it, because your family chose it when it ticked the message to send. An attached message with no such message in it is discarded without being stored, whoever else wrote in it, and so is a SportsRecruits notification sent this way, which we do not file from attachments yet. A kept message is filed on its school, dated as it was written, or waits on your unmatched list; a message we already hold is not stored twice. A message you deleted is not stored again when it reaches us as an attachment of its own; a copy of it that reaches us only quoted inside another message may be filed again, and you can delete it again. The import page states how many messages one email may carry and how many a day; an email past either limit, or one too large to reach us, adds nothing, and the only sign of it is that the page's count does not move. A message brought in this way is read for its school's conversation summary like other mail; our software does not pick camp dates out of it, and sorts what the coach asked for only in a later weekly pass that reaches back about eight weeks, so an older message may never be sorted. It creates no reminder or to-do: a promise in an older message of yours is history, not a task we create.
SportsRecruits notifications you forward. When a coach writes to your athlete on SportsRecruits, SportsRecruits emails a notification, and when your family forwards it to us on its own we keep it (one attached to an email of attached messages, above, is not filed). If we cannot tell which school it is from, it waits on your list of unmatched messages for you to attach or dismiss. If it names a school that is not on your family's list and we can confirm the notification is genuine, our software may add that school to your list; adding a school makes our software read that school's public staff pages to find its coaches, as it does when you add a school yourself.
Your forwarding confirmation. When you set up forwarding in Gmail, Gmail sends a confirmation to your Throughball address. We do not store that message. We keep the confirmation link it contains (or, from an older Gmail confirmation, the code), and when it arrived, with your Throughball address, so that you can see it in Settings and finish setting up. Once forwarding works, we clear the link or code on the first message that reaches your address after the link is more than a day old; if forwarding never starts working, we clear it after 14 days; the time it arrived stays on your address after the link or code is cleared. The confirmation can also record the mailbox it names as an address you send from, at most once, as described above. If we cannot find a link or code in the confirmation, we may keep its text instead, up to 2,000 characters; if we do, we show it to you there with its links removed so you can read the code yourself, and we clear it the same way, after 14 days in any case, or as soon as a link or code arrives.
Mail you send and copy to us. When your family writes to a coach from its own email and adds the inbound address in BCC, or forwards its own sent message to that address, we file it as a message you sent: the school and coach it went to, the subject, the date and the message content. We store it only when both of these are true: it is addressed to a school your family tracks (one of its coaches, or an address at its email domain), and it carries a valid digital signature (DKIM) from the email domain of the address it was sent from, which must be one your family has on record as an address you send from (listed by you in Settings, or recorded from your forwarding confirmation). Anything else copied to us, such as a personal email or a message we cannot confirm came from your family's own account, is not stored. Messages you do not copy to us never reach us.
SportsRecruits messages you copy to us. When your family sends a message on SportsRecruits with the inbound address in CC, SportsRecruits emails us a notification of it, and we file it as a message you sent. If we cannot tell which school it went to, it is kept on your list of unmatched messages for you to attach or dismiss.
All of this mail, once stored, is handled like the rest of your family's recruiting correspondence. Our software reads it to sort what a coach is asking for, pick out camp dates, keep each school's conversation summary current, notice when a coach seems to be answering a message of yours we never saw, notice when you sent a highlight video, move a school's stage forward, and track what you have told each coach; that processing sends the message content to our AI model provider (§3, §4). We do not read any mailbox you have not connected.