Mailicity / An email allowlist for an elderly parent

For the adult child who's tried to build this in Gmail

An email allowlist for your Mum — without the Gmail filter fight.

You've already worked out the answer: only let approved people reach them. Mailicity is that, built properly, for the iPad they already use.

Start your free trial → See how it works

Free during early access · No card needed · Works with Gmail, iCloud, Outlook

admin.mailicity.com/queue · Mum

Mailicity · review queue 3 waiting · 1 approved today

"Your Apple ID has been suspended" Scam

Click here to verify your identity within 24 hours…

from security-notice@apple-id-verify.com

Bunnings Warehouse Marketing

Saturday sale — power tools 30% off, in store and online

from noreply@bunnings.com.au

Dr Sarah Patel, Bayside Surgery New contact

Hello Margaret, I've taken over from Dr Wilson…

from spatel@baysidesurgery.com.au

Sarah (daughter) Approved

Photos from the canal walk — Olive picked up about twelve…

approved by you · 9:14 AM · sent through

audit log: Tom approved "Dr Patel" · 8:47 AM

· · ·

§Section 1 · You're right about the allowlist

The right instinct, before we get to the build.

If you've ended up on this page, you've already done the thinking most adult children eventually do.

You've watched hundreds of marketing emails arrive every week. You've seen the "your Apple account has been suspended" scam. You've watched them almost click on a fake parcel-delivery link.

And you've worked out that the standard answer — teach them to spot scams, mark them as junk, set up better spam filters — doesn't really work. The threats keep getting more sophisticated, their attention is going in other directions, and a strict allowlist (only the people you've approved can reach them) is the only protection that actually scales.

That's the right instinct. It's the instinct we built Mailicity around. The question is just how to build it.

¶Section 2 · Why Gmail filters aren't quite enough

Three things you've probably found out.

If you've tried building this in Gmail itself, the same three problems come up.

It's their account, not yours.

Gmail filters are configured per account, by the person who owns it. Their account, their settings. You can sit next to them and walk them through it, but you can't reliably maintain them remotely when they hit "show all mail" and turn the whole thing off.

"Send everything to spam except…" is fragile.

Gmail's spam folder still notifies. Senders fall off the contact list. Imports from an old phone book mysteriously add 400 names. Marketing emails dressed as "your account" messages still get through. Within a few months, you're back to checking the inbox three times a week.

iii

The decision should be family-shared.

When their old GP retires and a new one needs to email them, you want to be the one approving that new contact. You want your sister to be able to do the same. Gmail isn't built for that — it's built for one person managing their own inbox.

✶Section 3 · The same thing, properly

How Mailicity does it.

What you'd have built if you'd had six months and an engineering team.

A real allowlist.

You add the people who can reach them. The list lives in your admin web app — phone, laptop, wherever — and updates instantly. No fiddling with Gmail.

A queue for everyone else.

Anyone not on the allowlist lands in your review queue. You see them, you decide. Approve and they're added; reject and they're never seen.

iii

A calmer inbox on their iPad.

They don't see the queue, the rejections, the filtering. They just open their iPad to the messages from the people they actually want to hear from.

Wraps their existing email account.

Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, IMAP. Their email address stays the same. Their doctor and their sister keep writing to it.

Multiple admins.

Your sister can be a co-admin. You can both approve, with an audit log so you can see who did what.

A single, clean, family-managed allowlist that survives OS updates, doesn't depend on your parent maintaining their own filters, and doesn't require you to fight Gmail's UI every six months.

⌗Section 4 · The technical bit, briefly

Under the bonnet, in plain terms.

For the buyers who want to know what they're paying for. The protocol-level summary.

How Mailicity works under the hood →

IMAP or OAuth. Mailicity connects to your parent's existing email — Gmail and Outlook via OAuth, anything else via IMAP. We don't migrate anything. We don't change their address.
Match-then-route. Inbound mail is matched against the allowlist before it reaches the iPad. Matches go through. Non-matches go into your queue.
Per-family-member scope. The protection is per family member, not global. Their allowlist is theirs. If they have a sibling with dementia who also uses Mailicity, each has their own.
No content reads. We don't read message content for our own purposes, ever. We don't keep message bodies long-term — we fetch from the real mailbox when they open a message, and forget.

⁂Section 5 · Three signals

You've probably outgrown the DIY approach if…

Quick self-check

You've outgrown DIY filters when…

The DIY filter approach scales up to a point. Past that point, you're effectively maintaining a moderation product yourself — badly, with Gmail as the back-end.

You've rebuilt their spam filters more than twice this year.
You're checking their inbox more than once a week.
You're worried about what's getting through when you're not checking.
Your siblings have asked how they can help and you don't have a clean way to delegate.

Most adult children we talk to arrive at Mailicity from exactly that spot.

The allowlist they need — the one you've been trying to build.

Set up Mailicity in five minutes. Free during early access.

Start your free trial →

Works with Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, and standard IMAP · Designed in Australia · Built by a son for his Mum

?Questions, answered

A few that come up.

How is this different from Gmail's filters?

Gmail's filters are configured in your parent's account, by them (or by you on their behalf). They're fragile, hard to maintain remotely, and they don't help you delegate to a sibling. Mailicity is a separate admin layer that you maintain from your own device, with a clear review queue and an audit log.

Does it work with my parent's existing email?

Yes. Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, any standard IMAP provider. We don't change their address.

What stops them from just opening Gmail in a browser?

Most families set Mailicity up on the iPad and remove the Gmail app and Apple Mail from the home screen. Combined with Apple's Assistive Access (free, built into iPadOS) you can make Mailicity the only mail experience available on that iPad. If they have other devices, the protection only applies where Mailicity is installed.

What if I'm not the only admin?

Add your sister, your brother, the carer. Multiple admins can all approve from the allowlist. The audit log shows who did what.

Can I see what's been blocked?

Yes — your queue shows everything that's been held back. You can review it, approve, reject, or send a "this is from a stranger, can you check?" message to a co-admin.

What happens if my parent's email account has an outage?

We retry. If the underlying provider (Gmail, etc.) is having trouble, we surface that to you in the admin app so you know. Their experience on the iPad shows the most recent cached inbox.