Security

Updated 5 September 2026

Pushferry handles other people's messages. This page states plainly what we do with them, what we keep, and what we do not — so you can check our claims rather than take them on trust.

Message text is not stored

The body of a message and the other party's number are not written to our database. They pass through memory to reach your phone and are gone afterwards. What we keep about a message is the record around it: which device sent it, when, whether it succeeded, and the error if it did not.

This is a design constraint, not a policy we could quietly relax. It is why scheduled sending hands the whole job to your phone rather than parking it on our server — holding a message until later would mean storing it. The phone keeps the job, wakes itself with an alarm and survives a reboot. The cost of that choice is honest: your phone has to be online at the moment you schedule.

Forwarding can bypass us entirely

For ntfy, Telegram, Slack, Discord, another phone number and your own webhooks, the phone dispatches directly. The message never reaches our servers in any form. Only e-mail forwarding goes through us, and only because it needs a shared mail server that we cannot safely put on every handset.

In transit and at rest

• All traffic to pushferry.com is HTTPS. HTTP is redirected, and HSTS is set.
• The connection between your phone and the cloud is an authenticated WebSocket over TLS.
• API keys are signed tokens. We store an identifier and metadata, never the key itself — which is why a lost key cannot be recovered, only replaced.
• Passwords are stored as salted hashes.
• The database and cache are not reachable from the internet; only the application can talk to them.
• Database backups run nightly and are kept for two weeks.

Where your data is

Servers are in Frankfurt, Germany. Mail for the domain is handled on the same machine.

What your phone can read

The Android app asks for SMS permissions to do its job. Notification forwarding is separate and off until you turn it on, and when you do, only the apps you tick are read — not everything in your notification shade. You can see and change that list at any time in the app.

Reporting a problem

If you find a vulnerability, write to hello@pushferry.com with enough detail to reproduce it. We will confirm receipt, keep you informed while we fix it, and credit you if you want to be credited. Please give us a reasonable chance to fix the issue before publishing it, and do not run tests that degrade the service for other people or touch accounts that are not yours.