Usage reporting

Once a day, your team's Jelly sends us, the people who make Jelly, a short report about how it's being used: how much mail there is, what the team has set up, and which parts of Jelly people use. For example: the team has 5 people and 3 labels, 212 messages arrived since yesterday, and people searched 14 times. We use these figures to decide what to build next and what to leave alone.

This page starts with what is never in the report, then covers where it goes, what else we keep about a team we host, and how a team that runs its own Jelly turns it off. The complete list of what's sent is at the end.

What is never sent

• No message, sent or received, and no subject line.
• No name: not a person's or a contact's. The team's name isn't sent either, but your Jelly's web address is, and on Jelly's own hosting that usually contains it (acme.letsjelly.com).
• No email address.
• No note, draft, search, label name or rule.
• Nothing anyone typed, and nothing that arrived in the mail.

If Jelly hosts your team, we also keep a short record of who the team is: see a team Jelly hosts. That record stays with us. It never goes to PostHog.

Where it goes

The report goes to PostHog, a service for counting how software is used, on its servers in the EU.

If your Jelly is connected to our service, it sends us the same report as well, so we can read it beside your team's plan. Every team Jelly hosts is connected. So is a self-hosted Jelly that has been connected for Google accounts, iPhone and Mac notifications, or support.

A team Jelly hosts

When Jelly hosts your team, the daily report is part of the service, and there's no switch for it. Settings → Housekeeping says so, in the place where a self-hosted team has its switch.

We also keep a short record of who your team is. We need it to run the team, and to help when you ask. It holds:

• the team's name;
• each member's name, email address and role, when they joined, and when they last used Jelly (see below);
• each address the team sends and receives as, the kind of account that sends it (Gmail, your own mail server, or ours), and whether it's verified;
• whether Google sign-in is switched on for the team (in the record, google_signin), so that the sign-in page at join.letsjelly.com knows whether to offer it.

The record is updated once a day, with the report. It's also updated whenever the team's membership changes (someone accepts an invitation, or is removed, restored or given another role) and whenever someone signs in. That update carries the record alone, and none of the report's figures.

"Last used Jelly" means the last time someone opened Jelly in a browser or in Jelly's phone app. Claude, the Jelly CLI and other apps your team connects don't count, because those are programs acting for the person. Jelly keeps this time on its own, so it doesn't reset when someone signs out. The record stays with us and never goes to PostHog. It holds nothing from the mail itself: no message, no subject, no contact and no note.

Each person's answer to Email from Jelly goes to our service too, with their address and when they gave it. That way one answer holds for every team they're on, and every email Jelly sends is checked against it. Our service keeps Jelly's newsletter list, at Buttondown, in step with it. None of it goes to PostHog.

When you choose a plan, cancel it, or your trial ends, our service notes the change of plan, with no names attached. If you cancel and choose a reason when Stripe asks, the reason goes with it. Anything you type in the box beside it is read by the people who make Jelly, and goes nowhere else.

Turning it off

A team that runs its own Jelly can turn the report off. A team Jelly hosts can't (see above).

Only Admins and the Owner can do this. Go to Settings → Housekeeping and, under Usage reporting, turn off Send usage figures once a day. It saves as you flip the switch, and Jelly says Usage reporting is off. Nothing more will be sent.

When you turn it off, your Jelly sends one last message saying so, so that we know the silence is on purpose. After that it sends nothing, to PostHog or to our service, connected or not. If you turn it back on, the daily report starts again.

If Housekeeping says This instance has nowhere to report usage to, your Jelly sends nothing, and there's no switch. A sandbox team is always one of these, wherever it runs.

What is sent

Almost every figure in the report is one of three kinds:

• a count, such as how many labels the team has;
• yes or no, such as whether an automatic BCC is set;
• a word from a fixed list, such as person_address for the from-name format.

Many counts cover the time since the last report, usually a day.

Three values are ordinary text rather than a word from a fixed list:

• origin_host: your Jelly's web address, without the https://. On Jelly's own hosting this is often your team's name followed by .letsjelly.com, so it can show your team's name.
• release: the version of Jelly you're running.
• environment: normally production. Whoever runs your server can set it to any word.

The report also carries your Jelly's instance id: a random code made when it was set up, so that one Jelly's reports can be told from another's. It's shown at the bottom of Settings → Housekeeping.

Every figure is listed below, in groups. The right-hand column gives each figure's name in the report itself, for anyone who wants to match them up.

About your Jelly

Which features are switched on

How many people are on the team

Which preferences people chose

How much mail there is

What the team has set up

When the team first did things

Each of these is a number of whole days after your Jelly was set up: 0 is the first day. A figure is left out until the thing has happened. None of them is a date or a time.

Mail, notes and assignments imported from the older Jelly don't count here. Rules, saved replies and addresses that came with an import count as day 0.

What people did since the last report

Each of these is a count of how many times it happened, from the activity record. Every name starts with did_.

Which parts of Jelly people used since the last report

Each of these counts how many times something was used. Every name starts with used_. Each one is sent as 0 when nobody used it, except the lists in the last row, which are left out instead.

When reporting is turned off

The last message, sent once when an Admin turns reporting off, is called usage reporting. It carries the instance id, $lib, the version and environment described above, and on: false. Nothing else.

Advanced: for whoever runs the server

These settings in the server's environment change what your Jelly reports:

• JAM_USAGE_REPORTING=off stops all reporting, whatever the switch on Housekeeping says.
• JAM_POSTHOG_KEY replaces the PostHog key built into a release.
• JAM_POSTHOG_HOST sends the report to a different address, such as your own domain in front of PostHog. It must be an http or https address, or Jelly won't start.
• JAM_SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT sets the environment word.

A copy of Jelly built from source without a PostHog key reports nothing.

Connecting a self-hosted Jelly