The honest version·Setup & daily use·Edge cases included
How Mailicity works.
The short version lives on our home page. This is the longer one — what you set up, what your parent actually sees, what you see, and what happens when something goes wrong. No jargon. We'll walk you through the whole thing.
§Section 1 · The idea, in one breath
It sits between their email and their iPad.
Mailicity sits between your parent's email account and the iPad they already use. Email still arrives at their real address the way it always has. But before anything reaches the iPad, Mailicity checks who it's from. If it's someone you've approved — their sister, the grandkids, their GP — it goes straight through. If it's anyone else — a stranger, a marketing list, a scammer wearing a bank's uniform — it waits quietly in a queue that only you can see.
They get a calm inbox of people they know. You get to decide what counts as "people they know." That's the whole product. Everything below is just the detail of how that actually plays out.
¶Section 2 · What you set up
About five minutes, once.
You do this part. Not your parent. You can do it from your phone on the train, or your laptop at the kitchen table — you don't need to be in the same house as them, except for the last step.
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Create your Mailicity account.
Your account, not theirs. You're the family admin. If you have siblings who'll help, they get their own logins later — more on that below.
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Connect their existing email.
Mailicity asks which email account your parent uses — Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, or any standard email provider — and connects to it securely. You'll either sign in through their provider or enter the details once. Nothing about their address changes. Their doctor and their sister keep writing to the same email they always have.
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Add the people who can reach them.
Their sister. The grandkids. Their closest friends. Their GP. The handful of people they actually want to hear from. For each one you can add a photo and a relationship label ("Your son Tom," "Your sister Margaret") so the inbox feels personal.
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Set how simple the inbox should be.
Three levels, from "they're still pretty comfortable with technology" to "they need everything big, warm, and obvious." You pick the one that fits them today; you can change it any time as things change.
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Pair their iPad.
Install the Mailicity app on the iPad they already use. It shows a six-digit code prompt; you type in the code from your admin screen, once. From that moment on, their iPad opens straight to their inbox — no login, no password, no settings they can wander into. This is the one step where it helps to have their iPad in your hands.
That's setup. Most families finish it over a cup of tea.
◐Section 3 · A day in the life
Two different things, for two different people.
This is the part worth understanding properly, because Mailicity does two different things at the same time. Here's both sides, side by side.
Their iPad, on the bedside table
They open their iPad and tap the Mailicity icon. There's their inbox — a calm list of messages from people they recognise, in big readable type, newest at the top. No folders. No spam. No settings. No "your account has been suspended." Just their people.
They tap a message from their granddaughter. It opens, full and readable, with the photo of the new baby shown right there — no "tap to download," no fuss. They tap Reply, type a few lines, and tap Send. (The Send button waits a beat and asks them to confirm, so a slip of the thumb never sends something half-written.) The iPad goes back to the inbox. They put it down. They pick it up again at lunchtime.
From their side, that's the entire experience. They never see a queue, a rejected message, a setting, or a sign that anything is being filtered. It just feels like email finally got quiet.
Your phone, on the train
Meanwhile, on your phone, things have been happening that they'll never know about.
A marketing email from a furniture company arrived. Not on the list, so it went to your review queue, not the iPad. You'll glance at it later and tap Block — they never see it.
A message arrived from "Apple Security" saying their account is suspended and they must click immediately. Same thing — straight to your queue. You recognise it for what it is and block it. They were never at risk, because the email never reached the iPad.
A message arrived from a name you don't recognise — turns out it's their old friend from the bowls club, writing from a new email address. That one's real. You tap Approve, add Joan to their contacts, and the next time they open the iPad, there's a message from Joan, exactly as if nothing unusual happened.
That's the rhythm: a few seconds of your attention, once or twice a day, in exchange for an inbox that stays calm for them. Most days there's nothing to do at all.
⌗Section 4 · The honest edge cases
The questions that actually matter.
The walkthrough above is the happy path. Here are the honest answers to the things that worry people — because a diligence buyer deserves them, and because we'd want them ourselves.
Does their email still work everywhere else?
Yes. Mailicity doesn't take over their email account — it sits alongside it. If they also read email on a phone or a computer, those still work normally (though most families remove the other email apps from the iPad so Mailicity is the calm, single way email happens there). Their actual email address is untouched.
What happens when someone genuinely new needs to reach them?
Their first message lands in your queue with a note that it's from someone new. You decide. Approve them and they're added to your parent's contacts permanently — their future emails go straight through. Block them and they never see a thing. The decision is always yours, and it takes one tap.
What if I'm away for a week and don't check the queue?
Nothing breaks. Their inbox keeps working normally for everyone already approved — their sister and the grandkids still get through untouched. The only thing that waits is mail from new or unapproved senders, which sits safely in the queue until you get to it. Nobody's mail is lost; it's just held. And if you have a sibling as a co-admin, they can cover while you're away.
Can my brother or sister help, or is it all on me?
You can add as many family co-admins as you like. Everyone gets their own login. Anyone can approve or block from the queue, and there's a clear log of who did what — so if your sister approved a new neighbour last Tuesday, you can see that. No one's acting in the dark, and no one's the sole gatekeeper.
What happens if their email provider has a problem?
Email providers occasionally have outages or change their security rules — it happens to everyone. If Mailicity can't reach the account, two things happen: their iPad keeps showing the inbox they already had (their experience doesn't suddenly break), and you get a clear heads-up in your admin app so you know to reconnect. If they write a reply during an outage, it's held safely and sent automatically once the connection is back. Nothing is lost.
Can they accidentally get into settings and break something?
No. There's no settings screen they can reach by normal tapping — it's hidden behind a deliberate long-press they'd never trigger by accident, and you can put a PIN on it. The whole iPad experience is designed so there's nothing for them to break.
Does Mailicity read their emails?
Not for our own purposes, ever. We don't sell data, we don't show ads, and we don't train anything on their messages. We don't even keep their message content sitting on our servers long-term — we fetch it from their real mailbox when they open a message, show it to them, and forget it. The full detail is on our privacy page.
What if it's not right for us?
You cancel any time, instantly. Their email account is theirs and stays exactly as it was — disconnecting Mailicity changes nothing about their actual email.
Mailicity is deliberately a small product. It does one thing — keep your parent's inbox to the people who matter — and tries to do it beautifully.
No folders to manage, no new email address, no new device, no settings for them to get lost in. If that's the thing you've been looking for, it takes about five minutes to set up.