Skip to main content

Sending crash reports

If Purrchiver has an unexpected exit, you can send a sanitized report about it — entirely on your terms. This page explains exactly what gets sent and what doesn’t, so you can decide.

Off by default, and always opt-in

Crash reporting is opt-in: it only does anything if you’ve turned on Settings → General → Error reporting. Out of the box it’s off. Even with it on, nothing is sent automatically — after a crash, Purrchiver offers the report sheet automatically on the next launch, where you review the exact sanitized text and send it yourself. No crash data leaves your Mac unless you both opt in AND click Send via Mail. (Settings → Advanced’s “Send sanitized log to developer” is for diagnostic logs, not crash reports — that’s a separate flow.)

What gets sent

When you go through the error-report flow and click Send via Mail, your default mail client opens a new message addressed to corey@purrchiver.app. The body includes:

  • The Purrchiver version that crashed (e.g. 1.0 (1))
  • The time of the crash
  • A summary of the macOS exception type/signal/subtype
  • A short “signature” — an 8-character hash of the top non-system crash frame. Helps me group reports by the same underlying bug without reading every one.
  • The top ~8 frames of the crashing thread, with all home-directory paths replaced with <redacted> and your macOS username replaced wherever it appears.

What does NOT get sent

  • No filenames. Paths in stack traces get scrubbed.
  • No file contents. The report is metadata only.
  • No username. Replaced with <redacted>.
  • No silent uploads. Everything goes via your default mail client. You can read it, edit it, or delete it before sending.
  • No analytics SDK. There’s no third-party crash framework in Purrchiver. The report is a plain email.

Sending without Mail (webmail users)

If your default mail client is webmail or otherwise can’t be opened via mailto:, click Copy to Clipboard in the sheet. The same sanitized report is dropped onto your clipboard so you can paste it into your webmail compose window.

One thing to know: macOS’s clipboard is a shared, global resource. Once Purrchiver copies the report onto it, any other app you have running can read it until you copy something else. The body is already sanitized — no paths, no username, no file contents — so the exposure is bounded, but if that bothers you, use Send via Mail instead, which hands the report directly to your mail client without touching the clipboard.

Turning error reporting off entirely

Settings → General → Error reporting → uncheck the toggle. Purrchiver won’t offer the error-report flow at all after that, even if a crash happens. The standard macOS crash log still gets written to ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ — you can inspect it there manually if you want.

What about Apple’s “Send to Apple”?

That’s a separate macOS-level system. When macOS catches a Purrchiver crash, it shows you Apple’s own “Send to Apple” dialog independent of Purrchiver. Whether you accept that is between you and Apple — it’s their telemetry pipeline, not Purrchiver’s, and the data goes to Apple (not to me). Purrchiver doesn’t see Apple’s crash submissions and can’t act on them.

If you want me to see a crash, use Purrchiver’s own dialog (with Settings → General → Error reporting enabled) — or send the DiagnosticReports .crash file manually via email.