Pastyghost

Copy from ChatGPT into Gmail or Outlook and the formatting comes with it. A grey box behind the text. A font your email has never used. Bullets that don’t match. The email looks copied, because it was.

Then the reply arrives: “Did ChatGPT write this?”

What it takes out

• Fonts, sizes, colours and highlighting
• The grey background block
• Invisible characters that make text wrap and search strangely
• Tracking tags on the end of links
• Markdown marks, like the stray ** around a word

What it never touches

Your words. Pastyghost strips styling and nothing else. It does not fix your quotes, swap your dashes or join your lines. Paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and line breaks all survive.

After each paste it tells you what it did — Removed 3 fonts, 2 colors, 12 hidden characters — as counts only. It never shows or stores what you copied.

Four clipboards

Press ⌥⌘C, then 2, 3 or 4, to keep a copy. Press ⌥⌘2, 3 or 4 to paste it back. They live in memory and are wiped when you quit.

The privacy claim, tested

“Sends nothing anywhere” is easy to write, so I checked it. It turned out that Apple’s own text importer quietly fetches any images in what you copied, which means a paste could phone a stranger’s server. Pastyghost now strips those out first, and an automated test proves the app makes zero connections.

It asks for no permissions. One optional extra, off by default, lets it press ⌘V for you. That needs macOS’s Accessibility permission, and all it ever does with it is press that one key when you ask.

Installing it

Open the download and drag Pastyghost to Applications. It is not yet registered with Apple, so macOS will ask you to confirm the first time. If it refuses outright, open System Settings → Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway.