Gmail discovery: your inbox, not your bank feed
Oyster is a class action settlement app for the U.S. and Canada: automated discovery and breach watch, queue every claim you qualify for, autofill official administrator forms in the app (finish on the real site in about 30 seconds), and store reusable details in a local on-device vault—with optional on-device Gmail discovery for notices, receipts, and proof—no subscription, no cut of your settlement, no bank account required for that path. This page explains the Gmail path: on-device metadata parsing for notices, receipts, and breach signals—without bank linking and without bulk-uploading your inbox to Oyster servers.
Your inbox is the master key to money you are owed—breach notices, receipts, and claim IDs usually show up there long before a bank statement would help.
By parsing that metadata on your hardware, Oyster can recover claim IDs and itemized receipts without bank passwords, cloud copies of your mail, or your raw inbox leaving the device.
Quick answer
Why does Oyster use Gmail discovery instead of bank linking?
Settlement notices, receipts, claim credentials, and many privacy-class signals show up in email metadata. Bank feeds only see money movement, so they miss non-transactional and notice-driven claims. Oyster runs on-device email metadata parsing so those identifiers can be found without your bank password and without sending your inbox to our servers for bulk storage.
Purchase-only tools stop at what you paid for; on-device email parsing can still surface breach, privacy, and price-fixing programs that never left a card footprint.
How does Oyster find class action money without a bank account?
Oyster looks for legal and settlement signals in local email metadata and e-receipts, then stores reusable claim details in a device vault. That surface includes privacy- and breach-related programs that may never appear as card charges, so discovery is not limited to purchase history. Your data stays in a local AES-256 vault so you can move from discovery toward official forms without trading privacy for speed.
Beyond the transaction
Metadata is a better legal map than banking data because notices, receipts, claim credentials, and breach alerts live there first.
Banks see the price. Gmail sees the proof.
The non-transactional payout
Many large privacy settlements have no purchase to show on a card. For example, the court-approved Facebook user-privacy class program included a consumer fund on the order of $725 million (claim amounts vary; see the official program and court filings). Since no purchase was required to participate, a bank feed alone cannot surface that class of claim. Oyster looks for those signals in email metadata instead.
Itemized SKU evidence
A bank statement only shows "Amazon - $112." A Gmail e-receipt can prove you bought the exact recalled component or overcharged item required for a higher or maximum payout tier.
Legacy data recovery
Banks often compress or purge transaction detail after a few years. Gmail archives preserve the legal trail longer, which helps Oyster recover money from long-tail lawsuits that statement-based apps simply cannot see.
Example fund: the court-supervised Facebook user privacy class settlement site documents the consumer fund and claim process: facebookuserprivacysettlement.com.
How on-device discovery works
Step 1
Read-only scan in memory
Oyster requests a temporary, read-only view of your inbox through secure OAuth, then searches that stream in your device's RAM for settlement and notice patterns. No raw email batch is written to Oyster servers or copied to permanent local storage for central processing.
Step 2
Local ID extraction
The on-device flow finds claim IDs, PINs, and useful metadata, then saves only those outputs in an AES-256 Secrets Vault. After extraction, the session ends and the transient stream is flushed from memory.
Step 3
Adaptive WebView filing
When you open an official form, Oyster's Adaptive WebView maps vault data to the form fields so you can file with the settlement administrator in a short, privacy-preserving flow.
Your bank knows what you spent; your inbox knows what you're owed. Oyster goes beyond the transaction to surface money tied to corporate overreach and privacy leaks—without bank linking, and with parsing done on your device.
Set it and forget it. Automated. Private. Free.
Automated class action filing—official forms in-app, set it and forget it, open source, $0.
Claims tied to your email
Check what Oyster can already match and what may be worth watching.