A note —
§Section 1 · The problem showed up in her inbox
When my Mum started to slip a little, email was where it showed up first.
It wasn't dramatic. She'd always been fine with her iPad — she emailed her sister, the grandkids, her friends from the bowls club. But the inbox kept getting louder, and she got quieter about it. She'd phone me three times a week to ask if a "Google Security Alert" was real. She nearly clicked a fake parcel-delivery link. She missed an actual email from her GP because it was buried under forty marketing emails she never asked for.
The thing that got me wasn't any single scam. It was watching her lose confidence. Email had been a way she stayed in touch with the people she loved, and it was turning into a thing that made her feel foolish and anxious. That's a rotten trade.
¶Section 2 · I tried everything else first
I'm a software person by trade, so my first instinct was to fix it.
I tried all of them. I locked down her iPad with parental controls. I built filters in Gmail to send everything except a handful of senders to a folder she'd never see — which broke every few weeks and was impossible to maintain from my place, three suburbs away. I tried Apple's Assistive Access, which is genuinely well-meaning and helped with a lot of the iPad, but doesn't really do email — the Mail app inside it is the same loud, scammy inbox, just with bigger buttons.
None of it fit. Every option was either too blunt (take email away from her entirely) or too fragile (a stack of filters I had to keep rebuilding) or simply not built for the actual situation we were in: a woman who still very much wanted to hear from her grandchildren, surrounded by an internet built to fool her.
Every option was either too blunt, too fragile, or simply not built for the situation we were in.
⁂Section 3 · So I built the thing I wanted
What I wanted was simple to describe and, it turns out, quite hard to build.
An inbox on Mum's iPad that only showed the people she actually wanted to hear from, where I could be the one who dealt with everyone else — quietly, from my phone, without taking over her email or making her feel managed.
That's Mailicity. It connects to the email account she already has, shows her a calm inbox of the people I've approved, and quietly routes everyone else to me. She doesn't see a queue or a filter or a setting. She just sees her people. The scams and the noise come to me instead, and most days there's nothing for me to do at all.
It worked for my Mum. She uses it every day. She stopped phoning me about security alerts, because the security alerts stopped reaching her.
◇Section 4 · Why it's built the way it is
A few decisions in Mailicity come straight out of that experience.
I want to be upfront about them, because they explain a lot about the product.
- It uses her real email address, not a new one. Because I tried the "give her a new address" approach and watched it fall apart — her doctor, her bank, and half her friends only ever had her old address, so the new one solved nothing.
- She has no login, no settings, nothing to break. Because every setting is a thing that can go wrong, and every login is a thing she can get locked out of, usually at 9pm when I'm not there to help.
- It's allowlist-first — only approved people get through. Because trying to teach someone to spot every new scam is a losing game, and it puts the burden in exactly the wrong place. The safer design is to make the dangerous email never arrive.
- It treats her with respect. You won't find the words "elderly" or "patient" or "vulnerable" anywhere she can see. She's not a condition to be managed. She's my Mum, and the product is built like it knows that.
- It doesn't read her mail or sell anything. Because I'd never put my own mother's inbox into something that did, and I'm not going to ask you to put yours into something I wouldn't.
→Section 5 · Where it's going
Mailicity is early.
I'm building it carefully, with a small number of families using it, because this is the kind of product that has to be right before it's big — when you're sitting between someone and the people they love, you don't get to be sloppy.
It's free while it's early. When there's a price, it'll be fair and you'll get plenty of warning. I'm not interested in growth tricks or dark patterns or selling anyone's data. I'm interested in building the thing I wished existed when my Mum needed it, and making it good enough that it's the thing you'd want for yours.
If that's something you've been looking for, I'd love for you to try it.
— Steve
Founder · Mailicity