Terms

Blotter is run by one person, a sole trader based in California, in the United States. There is no company behind it. These terms are an agreement between you and him, and he is referred to here as “Blotter”, “we” and “us”. You can reach us at blotterib@gmail.com.

By copying the Blotter spreadsheet, giving it permission in your Google account, or using this website, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, do not install it.

Blotter is a Google Sheet with code inside it. You make your own copy of it in your own Google account, and you grant that copy permission to read your Gmail and Calendar. It reads the conversations that involve the contacts you have put in the sheet, and writes each contact’s status, timing and scheduled calls back into the same sheet.

It reads the outside of your emails: who wrote, who it went to, when, and the subject line. It cannot read the text of an email you or anyone else wrote. The one exception is an automated delivery-failure notice from Google’s mail system, which it opens inside your account to find which address bounced; only that address travels. Those details go to a server we run, which works out where each conversation stands and sends the answer back. The full list of what crosses that connection is in our privacy policy.

Blotter is not affiliated with Google, and Google has not reviewed or verified it. On a personal Gmail account Google says so on the way in, and the developer it names will be you, because the copy is yours. A university account does not see that screen.

The copy you make belongs to you. It is an ordinary file in your own Google Drive, we have no access to it, and nothing in it is copied anywhere else. Keep it, change it, share it or delete it as you like. You do not need to tell us.

What you type into it is yours as well. Your contacts, your notes and anything else you put in the sheet stay yours, and we claim no rights over them.

You can remove Blotter’s access at any time from your Google account’s own security settings, without asking us and without notice. It stops immediately.

Use Blotter with a Google account you are entitled to use, and for your own recruiting. Do not use it to read somebody else’s mail.

Do not try to disrupt or overload our server, work around limits we set, or use Blotter to break the law or anyone else’s rights. Do not resell Blotter or pass it off as your own product.

You must be 18 or older to use Blotter.

Blotter cannot send an email, reply to one, or change or delete anything in your mailbox, and it cannot create, change or cancel a calendar event. It never asked Google for permission to do any of that.

It does not tell you who to contact or when to follow up. It does not teach interview material or give recruiting advice, and it makes no assessment of how a conversation is going. It reports what has happened and how long ago. Every judgment about what to do next is yours.

This is worth saying plainly rather than burying in a disclaimer, because it is a real limit rather than a legal one.

Blotter can only see email and calendar events. A conversation that happened by phone, by text, over LinkedIn or in person is invisible to it, and the row will not reflect it. It cannot tell whether a call went well. It cannot always tell an out-of-office reply from a real one. If an email address in your sheet is wrong, the row for that person will be wrong too.

Do not rely on Blotter as the only record of your recruiting. It is a convenience for keeping a sheet current, not a system of record, and a missed follow-up remains your responsibility.

Blotter is early software. It may be unavailable, it may change, and parts of it may be withdrawn. We may change how it works, and we will update the relevant pages when we do.

If we stop running the server, your spreadsheet does not disappear. It stays in your Drive with everything in it, and the Blotter columns stop updating.

If we materially change these terms, we will change the date at the top of this page before the change takes effect, and we will tell people who have given us an email address.

Blotter is free. No payment has been taken from anyone, and no card details are collected anywhere on this site.

Blotter will not always be free. When that changes, your sheet will say so before anything is owed. Blotter writes a notice across the top of your Contacts tab, and a price is exactly the kind of thing it is there for.

You will never be charged for the time Blotter was free, and nothing you have already done will be billed for afterwards. If you do not want to pay, stop using it. Your spreadsheet stays yours either way, with everything in it.

Blotter is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, free of errors, or that what it reports will always be accurate. Section 6 sets out several situations in which it will not be.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of data, or for lost opportunities, arising from your use of Blotter or from anything it did or failed to report.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the previous six months and 50 US dollars. Blotter is free, so today that figure is 50 US dollars.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

You end this agreement by removing Blotter’s access in your Google account and, if you want, deleting the spreadsheet. There is nothing to cancel and nobody to tell.

We may stop providing the service, or stop providing it to a particular installation, if it is being used in a way that breaks section 4.

These terms are governed by the law of the State of California and of the United States. Disputes about them are heard in the state or federal courts of California, and you and we both agree to that.

Nothing here takes away rights you have under consumer law that a contract cannot remove.

Questions about these terms can be sent to blotterib@gmail.com, or through the contact form.