Personal CRM for Gmail
Relationship care alongside Gmail — without anyone reading your mail
Search for a "CRM for Gmail" and most of what you find demands full read access to your inbox as step one. Cloze, Nat, and Streak build their relationship timelines by reading every email you've ever sent or received — salary negotiations, medical mail, and tax notices included. Endearist makes the opposite call: no OAuth scope for your inbox, ever. What works instead is plenty: importing your Google Contacts via CSV or vCard, a read-only calendar overlay for your meetings, Google Drive as an end-to-end encrypted sync backend — and a journal where, after the email thread that mattered, you capture in two sentences what actually counted. If GDPR is more than a footnote to you, that separation is precisely the point.
Using Endearist with Gmail
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Export your contacts from your Google account
Open contacts.google.com, tick one contact, then choose "Selection actions → All" in the top left. Click "Export" in the top right and pick Google CSV or vCard as the format — Endearist reads both. The file lands in your downloads folder and never leaves your devices again.
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Import and clean up in one pass
On import, Endearist detects duplicates — the three versions of the same person that accumulate in every Google account over the years — and proposes merges. The result is something you may not have had in a while: an address book where each person exists exactly once, stored locally and visible only to you.
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Overlay your calendar on top
Connect your Google Calendar as a read-only overlay. Endearist shows upcoming and past events alongside your contacts, but creates nothing, changes nothing, deletes nothing — read access is the entire permission. Before a call, you see when you last spoke without bouncing between two apps.
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Journal instead of mail scanning
After the email exchange that actually mattered, open the person in Endearist and capture the essence: what you agreed on, what's on their mind, when you want to follow up. Two sentences from you beat any auto-generated timeline — because they include what was between the lines.
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Use Google Drive as your encrypted sync backend
If you run Endearist on multiple devices, you can pick your own Google Drive as the sync store. Data is end-to-end encrypted before upload — Google stores nothing but unreadable ciphertext. You get device sync over infrastructure you already have, without a new vendor ever seeing your relationship data.
What works — honestly
| Capability | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Importing Google Contacts (CSV and vCard) | Works | Both export formats from contacts.google.com are supported, including duplicate reconciliation on import. |
| Google Calendar as a read-only overlay | Works | Events appear alongside your contacts. Strictly read access — Endearist never writes to your calendar. |
| Google Drive as an E2E-encrypted sync backend | Works | Optional device sync via your own Drive. Encryption happens before upload; Google only ever sees ciphertext. |
| Capturing context from email threads | Manual | You write what mattered into the journal yourself. That's by design: curated context instead of an auto-harvested inbox. |
| Reading your inbox to build a timeline | Not supported | Privacy by design: Endearist requests no mail scope and sees zero email. Tools that want full inbox access should have to explain why — we simply don't want it. |
| Contact enrichment from signatures and mail headers | Not supported | No background enrichment from your mailbox or external sources — if it didn't come from you, it isn't on the profile. |
Frequently asked questions
- Is there a personal CRM that works with Gmail?
- Yes — the honest follow-up question is what "works with" should mean. Tools like Streak or Cloze live inside your inbox and read all of it in exchange. Endearist works alongside rather than inside: contacts import, calendar overlay, and Drive sync, but zero mail access. You lose the automatic timeline and keep an inbox that stays private.
- Why doesn't Endearist read my email like Cloze or Nat do?
- Because a relationship tool shouldn't need to read every salary negotiation, medical email, and resignation letter to be useful. Mail scanning means a vendor holds standing full access to your most intimate archive — a risk we won't take on, for you or for us. Local data plus your own journal does the essential work without that price.
- How do I get my Gmail contacts into Endearist?
- Via contacts.google.com: select all contacts, click "Export", choose Google CSV or vCard, and import the file into Endearist. The duplicate check tidies things up as part of the import.
- Is this GDPR-friendly if I manage contacts professionally?
- The architecture works in your favor: data lives locally on your device, sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted, and there's no third-party processing you'd have to account for. You remain responsible for what you record — but you start from the most data-minimal position there is.
Last updated: 2026-06-10
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